If you saw the horror of disease in '40s you'd vaccinate too
WE WHO lived through the 1930s and '40s will remember how we coped with infectious diseases.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
WE WHO lived through the 1930s and '40s will remember how we coped with infectious diseases.
When diphtheria came to our school, carriers were found and the school was closed. If it had not been for my Grandma winning a battle with my parents, my two younger brothers might have contracted it.
A lot of people took kerosene on sugar to try and kill it.
Not my Grandma, she recognised the symptoms and rushed me off to the Bundaberg Hospital. One day, a nice couple who really liked me, came to visit me in hospital. The nurses said I was better and waiting for someone to collect me.
The couple said they would take me home and made a bed for me on the back seat of their car and it was the first time I didn't get car sick.
I really wanted to get home but I was scared Dad would belt me for coming with them.
So, I said, "thank you for bringing me home, but I can walk from here".
They laughed and said "Betty, we haven't reached Avondale yet".
I have never forgotten that.
I shouldn't have worried, Dad just thanked them for saving him a trip. I didn't hang about! The measles struck Mum and I after we entered a carriage on "Cocky's train" where a man was infected.
Mum went to hospital and poor Grandma had four kids from one to 10 years old, all with measles to care for at home. She coped in her usual, kind, calm manner.
Oh those chicken pox! Every day Mum would round us up, take the scabs off and pour metho into the holes.
That made us all hop about for quite a while.
Dad didn't believe in immunisation.
He hated it because of the tragedy of all those children dying in Bundaberg dying from contaminated diphtheria injections in the late 1920s.
It was injections though that saved my second youngest brother's life.
He was three weeks old when Mum brought him home from the hospital, into a house full of whooping cough.
I had it too, but I was 13 and old enough to be able to look after my sick brothers and sister while Dad went to work.
I wish Mum would have taken my baby brother to Grandma's farm where he would have been safe.
At four weeks he caught whooping cough and went to hospital where they saved his life.
Dad never knew about the injections.
When Bob and I had our family, we had them immunised.
Originally published as If you saw the horror of disease in '40s you'd vaccinate too
Penbo: Remember when the Greens used to be likeable?
Fast forward to 2024 and those triangular stickers now stand for something quite different from hugging trees, writes David Penberthy.
Maiden: Cashed-up Albo is rubbing young voters’ noses in it
It’s one thing to be loaded after decades in parliament but it’s another to flaunt it so close to an election, writes Samantha Maiden.
Downer: Don’t like Australia’s values? Australia’s not for you
Tolerance is a core Australian value and the pro-Islamic terrorism demonstrations show none whatsoever if you disagree with them, writes Alexander Downer.
Penbo: We now have photographic proof of a very stupid problem
This week revealed about 68,000 reasons Australia has problem with people who simply cannot help themselves, writes David Penberthy.
Maiden: Poll guru returns for yet another Voice
If you thought something sounded familiar when the ex-Labor Senator unveiled her new party, you weren’t alone, writes Samantha Maiden.
Penbo: Jew-hating halfwits have just taken their masks off
If you think you’re progressive holding up a Hezbollah flag, you need to go back to left-winger school and brush up on the tenets of socialism, writes David Penberthy.