by Judy Steel
Allan had grown up in Adelaide as the middle child of Nell and John Steel. Before we met he had been a cabinet-maker and worked for a period in petrol stations servicing cars and later selling tyres and farm machinery. After joining the South Australia Police Department, as it was then called, he served for thirty-four years before retiring with the rank of chief superintendent. In 1986 he was one of the first recipients of the Australian Police Medal and in later years he was also awarded the Police Service Medal.
At the end of three fabulous, tiring, hardworking and memorable years at the Royal Adelaide Hospital I became a registered nurse. Allan and I married as soon as we could after my training finished in January 1965. It was another of those awfully hot Adelaide days, and our friends and relatives had travelled from around South Australia to share it with us. Our honeymoon was spent in a borrowed caravan touring South Australia and Victoria. When we returned we were off again, moving about three hours north of Adelaide to Port Augusta, where Allan had been posted.
Port Augusta is often referred to as the crossroads of Australia because it is where the railway intersects north–south from Alice Springs to Adelaide and east–west from Sydney to Perth. The town had plenty of heavy industry with the railways, the port and a coal-fired power station that generated much of the state’s electricity. Despite sitting on the Spencer Gulf, it can be unbearably hot in summer, with furnace-hot northerly winds sweeping off the inland deserts bringing clouds of stinging dust. Once when my parents came to visit, a horrific dust storm blew up while I collected them from the railway station. I had set the table for lunch and, on our return, had to empty the sand out of the spoons on the table.
The forty-plus temperatures coupled with a lack of trees didn’t make a great impression on me; neither Allan nor I had ever experienced this kind of heat before. I remember there were oleanders everywhere and I have never liked them since. The good news was that our little house was on the front street of the suburb of Willsden, which overlooked the Gulf, so we were always first to get the cool change.
In no time at all I was working at the hospital and about one week later was pregnant. David was born in December 1965, Peter came along two years later and Fiona was born in July 1970.
I learnt to be very resourceful after the babies arrived. We couldn’t afford to buy a fan so I would soak bath towels in water and clip them over open windows so any breeze would evaporate the water and, in doing so, cool the house. We also draped wet towels over the clothes horse and then placed the baby near it. It was my early version of air conditioning.
In between having babies I worked part-time at the hospital, mostly on night duty where I used all my training in casualty and theatre. There were frequent road crashes, assaults and general emergency situations. In those days there was no flying doctor staff, so once I flew up to the opal-mining town of Andamooka to do a retrieval. Sometimes we would have to do a dash to Adelaide with a critically sick person and we all had enduring friendships with the ambulance staff in Port Augusta. Allan continued his volunteer ambulance work at night when I was home with the children.
It wasn’t always easy living in Port Augusta, particularly being married to a policeman, but we were young and strong and we coped. We didn’t have a phone or a second car, so to get David to kindergarten I would walk a mile and back twice a day while pushing a pram and carrying a toddler.
After seven years living in the ‘Iron Triangle’, as the area is commonly known, we moved to Salisbury in Adelaide’s northern suburbs where Allan was the police prosecutor at the Elizabeth Magistrates Court. A year later he was moved to the city and we found ourselves living in an old police station on South Road at Edwardstown. This is the main south–north corridor through Adelaide, so trucks, semi-trailers and emergency vehicles thundered past day and night. The sirens especially seemed to be non-stop.
Even our three-year-old, Fiona, said we were suffering from noise pollution. In addition to the din, it was dangerous crossing to catch the school bus with two little boys. Although I had spent many holidays on farms, Allan’s relatives were all in the city and he had long wanted to live on the land. So we took the plunge and bought a twenty-hectare farm in the Adelaide Hills near Nairne, about an hour’s drive out of the city. Allan continued working in town, commuting each day.
This was the beginning of five years of hard work and a love affair with country life. One of my loveliest memories is of milking our house cow before the children woke up, watching the Murray River light up like a silver streak with the light of dawn before the first planes took off from Adelaide and flew overhead. The farm already had an intensive piggery and we were on a vertical learning curve as far as breeding them went, plus we had a small herd of cows bred for beef. Allan and I spent many a night dozing on a bale of hay in the piggery when we had a sow due to farrow.
Once Allan spent a week in hospital having his appendix removed and, as luck would have it, one of the sows farrowed at the same time. Twelve-year-old David learnt very quickly how to hold the piglets by one leg while I injected them with iron, while Allan’s job of removing their needle teeth with electrician’s side cutters (so they wouldn’t bite each other and mum) also fell to me. In addition to the farm work, Allan continued fulltime with the police while I worked as a weekend supervisor at Adelaide’s Memorial Hospital.
As he grew older, David decided he wanted a career in the air force while Peter was seriously thinking of enlisting in the army. We decided to sell the farm and move back to Belair in the Adelaide Hills closer to the city, so they could join the air and army cadets to gauge if this was the life they wanted. It wasn’t a tough decision because we wanted to do the best for them, but Allan still yearns for his Ferguson TEA 20 tractor and a few hectares of land to drive it on.
Both boys joined up the minute they finished their schooling, David into the RAAF and Peter into the Australian Army. David became a pilot and flew Hercules aircraft until eventually joining Qantas. Peter also became a pilot flying Blackhawk helicopters. Not to be outdone, Fiona followed her brother into the air force a few years later. I have always felt we missed out on something with the children choosing the careers they did. Of course, many of my friends also said we were spared the worry of them staying out all night, but I felt their absence greatly and had to learn how to say goodbye without making a complete ass of myself. Over the years I have continued to feel jealous of friends whose children and grandchildren are nearby. I think I always will.
We had not been back in Adelaide long when my father died. After watching Dad suffer and fight his transverse myelitis for so many years, including in the latter stages when his legs became gangrenous, I found I’d had enough of hospitals and doctors and needed some time away from nursing. I helped out waitressing for my aunt and uncle who ran a catering business.
But before long I found myself working at the Kalyra Hospital in the foothills south of Adelaide where I spent five years in the rehabilitation and hospice wards before there was a major turning point in my life. With the encouragement of the director of nursing, Jill Ashby, I applied to study part-time at university and was accepted, a remarkable turn of events to me seeing as I had not even completed year 10 at high school. I was terrified for about two weeks and kept asking myself what I was doing there when everyone else seemed to know so much more than me. However, as I’ve always done, I hung in there – and studied, studied, studied. My family were understanding and would often suggest I go to our holiday shack at Port Elliot for the weekend to finish a paper. In two years I earned a diploma in applied science/nursing management.
With new qualifications, I successfully applied for the position of matron at the Mitcham Resthaven Home for the Aged in 1985. A not-for-profit community service of the Uniting Church, Resthaven was one of the largest aged care organisations in South Australia with nine sites and over a thousand residents. At the time, the Mitcham site had over a hundred residents in nursing home and hostel accommodation.
I felt that
my new role as a matron would be best served if I added to my university education, so enrolled for a Bachelor of Nursing, which I completed in 1987. Resthaven gave me permission to attend lectures twice a week and I fulfilled any extra management duties with Resthaven after hours. It was a huge year, but worth it. My secretary, Anne Joyce, had been at Resthaven Mitcham for years and knew all the residents and their relatives. She protected me when I needed protecting and taught me about the intricacies of the place – we became lifelong friends.
During this time the Federal government introduced badly needed standards to improve the quality of life in nursing homes, and I had not been at Resthaven long when the nursing home was rebuilt. Everyone, including the residents, was involved in the planning, and I really enjoyed the interaction with builders, interior designers and Resthaven executive management. During construction there were peepholes in the temporary walls so residents could watch the men at work (and tell them where they were going wrong). At the end we had a fabulous party to celebrate.
After eight years at Mitcham I felt the need for a fresh challenge and found it in a newly created position at head office as director of care. It was a challenge to be in charge of people who had been my peers but also a great opportunity to develop what became a successful continence management policy.
For some time, financial reports and budgets had suggested too much money was being spent on laundry because of an inadequate approach to urinary incontinence in the frail aged. I felt very strongly that people had the right to a better quality of life and not to suffer such an anti-social and dehumanising condition. Historically, people in nursing homes with incontinence were simply changed out of their wet clothes at certain times. In consultation with others, I developed a program of care that enabled the sufferer to be toileted at a time convenient to them (instead of the staff) and as a result many of them then became dry. Changing the behaviour of nurses also improved the outlook for many residents: some renewed relationships with their families and went on outings because they were no longer embarrassed.
Resthaven became known for this new way of caring and I was asked to present papers and write articles for national and international publications. I have always been proud of this accomplishment; it didn’t come naturally to me but, in my mind, the girl who did not complete year 10 kept returning to remind me that if you want to do something badly enough and you work hard enough, you can achieve it.
In 1997 Allan and I fulfilled some travel dreams. We flew to England via Africa as one of our aims was to see Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and it was while we stood at the top of the falls that I remarked that you couldn’t look at this and not believe in God. On reflection, it was a surprising thing to say because I was not overly religious. I had been brought up in a Christian home, given a Christian education and wonderful examples of Christian life from my parents, but I was not a frequent churchgoer.
After travelling through Europe, we headed home via India. Allan’s mother had lived in Jabalpur until she was seventeen while her father was employed by Indian Railways. She had often spoken about her life there and, in particular, the Taj Mahal. We spent five days travelling in a car with a guide, seeing just a small part of the magic, mystique and wretchedness that is India. But it was while we were driving from Agra to Jaipur that something happened which I believe was the starting point of the rest of my life.
Stopped at a state border to pay a tax, Allan and I were alone in the car when a little girl, about ten years old, came up to my window. She carried her baby brother, perhaps ten months old, who was naked except for a piece of string around his waist. The girl’s yellow and brown dress was clean, but the fastener was broken. In all of my life the people I knew could afford clothes, food and shelter. I was shattered that this baby boy was naked and the girl had only her dress on and they both were hungry.
The girl knocked on my car window and then put her fingers into her mouth, indicating food. We had been warned not to give beggars anything as it could start a riot, but a refusal felt beyond me here and tears welled up in my eyes. I said to Allan that I just had to give this child something. Our hotel had packed us a picnic breakfast because we had left very early, so Allan suggested we give her some food. I rolled down the window and handed her some food, which was wrapped in foil and was still warm. She very gently set her little brother down and, unwrapping the parcel, fed him three tiny morsels, taking nothing for herself. She then wrapped up the parcel, picked up her little brother and slowly walked away, presumably taking it home to share with her family. My last memory is of her looking back at me and smiling. I remember saying to Allan, ‘I think that I have just been taught a very important lesson.’ Here I was on the three-month trip of a lifetime wanting for nothing and yet a tiny beggar was so gracious, giving only to her brother and going without herself.
Sometimes I wish I had taken her photo, and yet that would have been an intrusion. I don’t really need the printed image because, all these years later, I still see her vividly in my mind.
Chapter Two
I RETURNED TO WORK feeling restless and humbled. The only thing I was sure of was that, after thirty-seven years of nursing, I would be retiring sooner rather than later. With Allan already retired, I was being spoiled with my live-in housekeeper taking care of me, doing the shopping and generally making life easy. But whenever I least expected it, a little voice inside my head was repeating, ‘You’ve had a wonderful life – it’s time to give something back.’ But, after working in an aged care organisation for so many years, I felt that I didn’t want to become involved in volunteering in that sort of environment. I remember saying to friends that when I retired I was definitely not going to be a volunteer. I wanted to learn smocking, read books, play with my grandchildren and cook.
In April 1997, Allan and I set off to visit our son Peter and daughter-in-law Katrina in Townsville. We drove through the outback in our four-wheel-drive, off-road camper trailer in tow, following a stock route about a hundred kilometres north-east of Innamincka close to the South Australia–Queensland border. Having checked that the weather forecast was good, we made camp for the night. The next morning, it started pouring just after seven and forty-five minutes later we’d had fifty millimetres of rain. By the end of the day we’d had three times that and were marooned. Although we had a phone, UHF radio and car radio, we couldn’t receive anything.
We spent four days and nights mostly in our car. Allan read every page of the Pajero manual and played patience balancing cards on the back of a satchel. I knitted a jumper for my grandson. We slept the first two nights in the front of the car and it was freezing. It was impossible to get the trailer open because it was covered in mud which had set like a rock. Every time Allan got out to check the creek level he would grow several centimetres taller with the thick, tenacious mud on his boots. If we tried to drive the car we slipped around with no traction at all; it was terrifying. We had plenty of food and water but couldn’t heat anything for the first two days. On the third day we were able to prise open the trailer and cook food on the gas stove but were still unable to move. I could almost hear the radio station reports: ‘Fears are held for the safety of a middleaged couple travelling in the outback …’ I imagined our two sons, both pilots, beside themselves searching for their parents.
There was nothing we could do but wait. Then something strange happened, which I later came to call ‘The Challenge’. At 4.45 pm on the second day, the sky became pitch black while the baked red earth of the outback turned a brilliant gold. I was alone as Allan was out walking about half a kilometre away, checking a stock tank to see if we could replenish our water supplies. I was so overawed by this landscape that I snapped a photograph, which I have since called my postcard from heaven. Over the years I had never stopped loving God but had stopped going to church. But in the past few months we had started going to Westbourne Park Uniting Church because I wanted a spiritual life similar to the example of my parents. Sitting alone in the car amid bre
athtaking scenery my emotions turned from awe to anger. I felt marooned, isolated and very frightened. This was supposed to be a holiday to see our son and family and I didn’t want to be stuck in the mud. Inexplicably I suddenly started sobbing, crying out to God, ‘What do you want from me?’
I had been terrified that we would be inundated with more rain and be marooned for weeks, but not one more drop of rain fell. The next day I was sitting in the car looking around at the drenched landscape when I had a strange vision of myself holding a black baby and surrounded by black children. I had no idea where these children were from, apart from a strong feeling that it was somewhere in Africa.
After three days we were finally able to get the camper trailer opened and things started drying out. By the end of the week we were travelling north in the hope of getting closer to civilisation. We had gone about fifteen kilometres when we came to a very long patch of mud and became bogged up to our axles. After inspecting the problem, Allan declared it could not be worse and we couldn’t get out. With this I just cried and asked Allan, ‘Haven’t I been tested enough?’ Allan told me everything would work out okay and, no surprises, it did. Although the nearest town was still hundreds of kilometres away, we were close enough to be heard on our UHF radio and, within half an hour of our emergency call, we had news we would be rescued the next morning and that our son Peter in Townsville had been informed we were alive and well. We travelled on without further incident, the car and trailer caked in dried mud. We had a wonderful time with our family and returned home on the bitumen via Alice Springs.