10 September 2024

It’s more than 70 years since Dawn Scott was nursing at Wimmera Base Hospital but her memories of those days are vivid.

Caring for returned Second World War soldiers, tuberculosis sufferers, and patients of all ages and backgrounds was all in a day’s work for Dawn. While the rudiments of nursing are still about devotion to caring for the unwell, the practices and ethics have changed considerably with time and technology.

In 1946 a teenage Dawn Robinson had been working as a proof reader at the Horsham Times when she decided she wanted to train as a nurse.

Dawn said she joined her sister Nancy, who was training at the Horsham Base Hospital, just two weeks before Dawn's 17th birthday and finished two weeks before she turned 20.

“In those days you had to be 21 to register so for the first year, I had to work as a staff nurse, tutor and theatre assistant, and I ended up tutoring a lot of the girls I had trained with,” Dawn said.

During her training Dawn met a handsome and intelligent senior clerk named Max Scott, who worked in the hospital office where her brother Bill worked. They soon started dating and eventually married in 1949. In 1952, when Max was appointed CEO at Ouyen Hospital, Dawn moved with him.

But that wouldn’t be where her connection with WBH ended because in the next century, the youngest of their three sons, Chris Scott would become CEO of Wimmera Health Group, a position he would maintain for 14 years.

Before Dawn was registered as a nurse, she was basically the right hand of the legendary Matron Gil Arthur whose name graces one of the Wimmera Nursing Home wings.

"I’d sit in the office with Matron Arthur for about an hour and a half every morning while she did her clerical work and I used to be a runner and helper for her,” Dawn said.

“She was a fantastic lady. She was quite small and her cap tails were very limp and she’d sail along the corridors with her cap tails floating behind her.

“When you were junior nursing in the female ward, every lunchtime you had to make Matron Arthur’s coffee and she liked the coffee beans ground in gauze and then dunked in the milk.

“The multi-storey hospital was relatively new then and Matron Arthur’s lodgings were on one end of the fourth floor and the resident doctors lived at the other end. If you were on night duty on the third floor you were responsible for making Matron Arthur’s supper and she always liked having toast with finely sliced onion.”

Dawn had many other memories from those early days.

“When working on night duty in the old building, we had to nurse using kerosene lamps after 'lights out'. There was no heating and we had short-sleeved shirts so the only thing to keep us warm was our cape. We used to warm ourselves by the kerosene lamp.

“As a junior nurse you were in charge of the pan room. You had to wash the bed pans by hand under a tap and you had to sterilise them in the old autoclaves every morning or the afternoon staff cleaned them before they went off duty.

“Shifts were 6am to 3pm. Afternoon shift started at 12noon and worked to 9pm. Night duty was 9pm to 6am. We delivered the afternoon teas and washed all the teacups and saucers and before you went off duty you had to mop the floor.

“We had to wash any muck off the linen. You couldn’t send it to the laundry with faeces on it. At 17 years old, I’m cleaning muck off the linen. It wasn’t exactly glamorous work.

“At lunchtime the patients’ meals came on a trolley. The Sister in charge would delegate the meals and nurses would do the serving.

“The TB chalet was built while I was training. After I was registered I was sister in charge there. The local barbers refused to go in there because they feared catching tuberculosis, so I would cut their hair instead.

“Most of the TB patients were returned soldiers and you couldn’t really do that much for them accept making them as comfortable as possible and serve them healthy food.

“The nice part about working in the chalet was it was 8am-4.30pm with weekends off which suited a newly married nurse like me.”

Dawn said there was one thing that has stuck with her from her very early nursing days that she will never forget.

“There was a little boy brought in one day and he was probably about 8 or 9. He was suffering from petechial bleeding and the doctor was treating him as best he could.

“The boy just kept saying, ‘I’m not going to die am I?’

“He would repeat it over and over until he eventually passed away.

"There were a lot of tragic incidents like that.”

Tragedy in Horsham

Through the support of her colleagues and family, Dawn has managed to leave behind much of the trauma of hospital work but there is one particular time she will never forget. It was the day Horsham witnessed its biggest disaster.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in February 1951 a bus with 22 passengers travelling from Adelaide to Melbourne, collided with a freight train at the crossing on Dimboola Road. 11 people died at the scene and the other 12 including the driver were rushed to Wimmera Base Hospital with varying injuries. There was only one ambulance available to transfer the injured so taxis and private cars were also used.

All nurses were called in for duty and a radio station put out an urgent call for blood donors and 100 people responded. Dawn remembers the day vividly.

“There was a callout on the radio that all trained nursing staff in Horsham were recalled to help,” she said.

“Max and I were living in a flat and getting ready to go out to friends for dinner. I’d been really looking forward to it and then we got the call and I went straight to the hospital.

“When I got there, trolleys were lined all along the corridor and it was just a terrible sight.

“In those days, penicillin was delivered dry and you made it into a solution but we were just using dry penicillin and just tipping it in. It was chaotic and remained that way well into the night.

“That was a terrible time and I have blocked most of it from memory and remember we had no professional counselling in those days to help us after such an horrific event.

“When you went off duty, you just talked among yourselves. Matron Arthur was always good to talk to and she was very protective of her nurses.”

Ailments of the era

Dawn can remember incidents of cancer from her time but nothing as regular as it is today. The most regular ailments involved the heart.

“The evening meal for the elderly patients in the medical ward was a bowl with bread cut in squares and warm milk poured into it. There was no pureed food then.

These old patients were out on verandahs and if there was a death in the middle of the night you would have to take the corpse over to the mortuary in the dark.

“In theatre, general anaesthetics were often given by Matron Arthur. Ether was the main choice then.

“After any operation, you had to wash your gloves then powder them and they were autoclaved and used again for the next operation.

“There was a lot of general surgery and it was mainly gall bladders, hernias, tonsils and appendices and we also performed mastectomies and bowel cancer operations We didn’t do many Caesareans.

Personalities

“We had all types working at the hospital. Visiting honourities were doctors Felsted, Forsyth, Hutton-Jones, Henderson and Wolpolle.

“There was one resident doctor that became a little infamous. His name was Howard Whittaker and his girlfriend or fiancee at the time was sister Elizabeth Black and she worked as a nurse.

“Later on in the 60s and 70s, Howard and Elizabeth became involved in a cult called The Family in Olinda. I saw a documentary on it on Netflix and they would bleach the children’s hair.”

The cult ended after the compound was raided by Victoria Police in 1987. The Family’s leader Ann Hamilton-Byrne was investigated along with the Whittakers and others.

Return to Horsham 

While the Scotts were living in Warracknabeal, Dawn nursed there in the 1960s and she returned to Wimmera Base Hospital to train as a radiographer.

“I came over to Horsham and I did a crash course at taking X-rays and then I become the radiographer at Warracknabeal on call 24/7 while I worked in theatre there,” Dawn said.

“That would never happen now.”

After living in Bateman’s Bay in her later years, Dawn returned to Horsham in 2006. Her time these days is consumed with family, brain games, reading books and catching up with friends.

Dawn Scott with her certificate of nursing.