Reunion for Fullarton's Julia Farr Centre workers

THERE were rumours of a prowler in the grounds of Fullarton's Home for the Incurables in the late-1940s.

THERE were rumours of a prowler in the grounds of Fullarton's Home for the Incurables in the late-1940s.

Teenage nurse Mavis Rudolph was walking through the garden at about 2am, while balancing four full bedpans to empty in the outside toilet block.

Suddenly, a silent, top-hatted man stepped out of the shadows and blocked her path.

"I screamed, threw the bedpans over him and took off I was gone," Mrs Rudolph says. "I ran straight over to the night sister and she said I was as white as a ghost."

From then on Mrs Rudolph, now 82, seldom heard mention of the prowler when she lived and worked in the Fisher St home.

Mrs Rudolph will join staff past and present at a reunion at Edwardstown's Maid of Auckland hotel this Friday night (January 25).

During her nursing stint between 1946 and 1949, Mrs Rudolph lifted patients from bed to bed in sweltering conditions, watched cows graze in the paddock next door, and pushed wheelchair-bound patients to Unley Oval to cheer on the Double Blues.

"It was an interesting place," Mrs Rudolph says. "I liked working here and that's why I'm interested in it."

The Home for the Incurables was the brainchild of Julia Farr, the wife of an early St Peter's College headmaster, and opened on Fisher St in 1879.

It was renamed in Mrs Farr's honour in 1981.

The Julia Farr Centre became Julia Farr Services in 1995 and the site became part of Disability SA in 2006.

Mrs Rudolph looks forward to joining others who have worked at the site to share stories and memories.

Reunion organisers Margaret Costin and Sue Llewellyn say staff and patients became like a family.

"The residents made it special," Ms Costin says.

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