THE daughter of a Yorkshire coalminer who emigrated 18 years ago has been named Australian of the Year, beating the actress Nicole Kidman to the honour.

Fiona Wood, the head of the burns unit at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia, received the country’s top award for her medical research and work with burns victims.

Dr Wood, 44, a mother of six, pioneered a revolutionary “spray-on skin” treatment and worked around the clock to treat casualties after the Bali bombing in October 2002.

The accolade, awarded by a committee of prominent Australians, was announced at a ceremony in Canberra attended by John Howard, the Prime Minister.

Dr Wood was raised in Pontefract. Her father vowed that his three children would never work down the mines. She studied medicine in England before emigrating to Australia after meeting her Perth-born husband. “I feel very much Australian, although I’m still a Yorkshire lass,” she said.

The energetic Dr Wood’s days often begin at dawn in the gym. Apart from being the only plastic surgeon in Western Australia and director of the Royal Perth Hospital burns unit, she runs a cell culture company employing more than twenty people and is bringing up her children, aged ten to eighteen.

Even before the award her life was a matter “of juggling balls in the air”, she said, but over the next 12 months she will also be serving as a de facto ambassador for Australia.

“People have supported me and they’ve put me in this position, so it’s important that I give back,” she said.

Dr Wood won international recognition for developing a way of spraying skin cells cultured from the patient’s own skin directly on to a burn. The technique reduces the culture time for new skin from several weeks to five days. If a burn is treated that way within ten days it greatly reduces scarring.

After the Bali bombing Dr Wood headed a special medical team in Perth to treat casualties evacuated from Indonesia, co-ordinating a staff that grew to 150, with 12 surgeons working in four operating theatres.

“When the patients arrived from Bali the thing that overwhelmed me was the look of relief on their faces,” she told an interviewer. “Then we started to take down the dressings, remove the sheets, and then my second impression was, ‘I’ve got a little bit of work to do’. There were times I’d walk away from the operating theatre and . . . you’d be a hard man not to shed a tear.”

Others in the running for this year’s award included Ms Kidman, the human rights campaigner Rodney Cocks, the Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, a champion woodchopper named David Foster and the only woman to achieve a starred rank in the Australian Defence Forces, Julie Hammer.

Previous Australians of the Year include Ian Thorpe, the swimmer, Steve Waugh, the cricketer, and Cathy Freeman, the runner. Dr Wood called it an “incredible honour”.

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