Under Her
Skin

Under Her Skin is the astonishing biography of Professor Fiona Wood AM, one of Australia’s most innovative and respected surgeons and a world-leading burns specialist, whose ground-breaking research and technology development has changed patients’ lives.

Incredibly private, Fiona has for years resisted all attempts to tell her story but Sue Williams finally wore her down, writing to her for over ten years, asking her for permission. Finally, Fiona agreed, and told a story that took everyone aback.

When three bombs tore out the heart of Bali on 12 October 2002 and killed and seriously injured so many Australians, Fiona and her team were there to help. A pioneer in the field of burns and reconstructive surgery, she made world headlines with the use of her revolutionary invention of ‘spray-on skin’ to help minimise her patients’ horrific scarring.

Fiona was later made Australian of the Year, was voted Australia’s Most Trusted Person for an unprecedented six years’ running in the annual Reader’s Digest poll, and acclaimed as an ‘Australian Living Treasure’. And, astonishingly, she has achieved all this while raising six children.

This is the story of her extraordinary life where, against all the odds, the daughter of a fifth-generation coalminer in the north of England, became of a world-beater. In the book, she talks candidly of the moving valour of her burns patients, and the heartbreak, triumph, tears, and controversies that have stalked her stellar career.

Sue says of her, ‘I’ve been fascinated by Fiona Wood ever since I first saw her in the media in the aftermath of the Bali bombings, working around the clock to save the survivors. She always struck me as a person of great depth, down-to-earth yet incredibly gifted, modest but obviously high-achieving and with a dogged determination to achieve the best results for her patients that just shone through.

‘I really wanted to find out more about her – where she came from, what had given her such an iron resolve and devotion, what she was doing in her research – and I wrote to her every year for at least 10 years, asking if I could write her biography. Every time, her answer was the same: Thanks but no thanks; she was too private; she was too busy; she still had too much to do.

‘Finally, in a break between COVID lockdowns, I went over to Perth and put my case once more, and she at last agreed. And what a revelation it was!”

Later, in the last years of Fiona’s surgical training, she married a fellow student – an Australian – and ended up coming here in 1987, and her life has been a rollercoaster ever since, from being refused jobs because she was a mother, to helping run a major disaster response exercise that was put into practice when the Bali bombings happened.

Wood is co-founder of the Fiona Wood Foundation, which conducts vital research into all aspects of the survival of burns victims, with findings and breakthroughs that have had an impact on treatment around the globe. She is also director of the Burns Service of Western Australia, a consultant plastic surgeon at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth Children’s Hospital, and Winthrop professor in the School of Surgery at The University of Western Australia.

Under Her Skin was released in October 2022 by Allen & Unwin as a print book, e-book and audio book.