INTERVIEW WITH PAT MILES. VOLUNTEER AMBULANCE DRIVER BETWEEN 1956 and 1965.
INTERVIEW DATE: November 19th, 1998

Pat Miles gives an interesting account of travelling to Towamba as a volunteer ambulance driver between 1956 and 1965. She tells of the people she met and the one hundred mile round trip from Eden to Pambula hospital via Towamba and Burragate to attend emergencies and transport patients to hospital.

PAT. We came here in 1953 and we went to Boyd Town for two and a half years then we moved into town. (Eden) I joined the ambulance service as a voluntary ambulance driver and
it was a new world for me to go out there. (Towamba)
KATE. CAN YOU DESCRIBE ANY PARTICULAR INCIDENTS?
PAT. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Dickie.....because Mrs.Dickie's hats always amused me because she had that farm bonnet, you know the one with the flap at the back and the hood out the front, a real sun bonnet tied under the chin. I never saw her without it. So I never knew whether she had hair or not. We took her to hospital from Towamba and she took half a dozen of these
hats with her, clean ones, because she wore one to bed too. So I still never saw whether she had hair or not. But Mr. Dickie had enough hair for two. He had a white beard right down to his belt buckle. Full white beard. They weren't very big people. I suppose they may have been big in their time but they were pretty old by then. But they later had a granddaughter who was
blind, who had the first guide dog. If you left Eden in the ambulance and you went down the Towamba Road which is opposite Shadracks Creek and you went down that way.....it was a shocking track....I don't think anybody did anything to it........and then by the time you picked up whoever you went to pick up, and on through Wolumla and back to the hospital (Pambula) and back to where you lived, you'd done a hundred miles. It was an enormous mileage and we had to jot it down, the time we left and the mileage. And the times you went out there, you'd have to say...alright, I'm going to lose a whole morning or a whole afternoon, or perhaps a whole day.
KATE. DO YOU REMEMBER WHERE THE DICKIE'S LIVED?
PAT. The Dickie's lived across the river up on your left as you went to Pericoe. There were lots of floods then. There was a bad flood there where two people were washed off a tractor and their bodies weren't found till years after. We went to get an old lady once...there used to be a track up there and there was this little recreation ground and there was this old lady who
fell, she lived just past that little recreation ground and she fell and broke her hip. And her son who was with her sat her up in a cane chair instead of leaving her lay flat and by the time we got there her hip had set in the wrong angle and we couldn't lift her out of the chair. Kitch Lister was with me because I was a new chum and I said 'How are we going to get her down,'
because we didn't have morphine or anything like that. And he said, 'Oh, I'll just carry her chair and all,' and he did. We strapped the chair to the inside of the ambulance and got her to hospital. But as I say, it was a hundred mile trip.
KATE. DO YOU REMEMBER WHO THIS OLD LADY WAS?
PAT. I think she was Mrs. Harris. Further around that track there were Harris'...there was Mrs. Hazel Harris and Mrs.Lizzie Harris and old Mrs. Harris who was the mother-in-law was the one we were taking to hospital. She didn't want to go and she cried and carried on.
KATE. WITH THE BROKEN HIP...
PAT. No this was another one. I don't know who the lady was with the broken hip. I didn't know them well enough to say anything....but lots of funny things would happened. You'd go to pick someone up and they'd say, 'Go away, Kitch, go outside.' 'What for?' 'I want Pat in here.' 'Why?' And when he went outside, I'd say, 'What do you want?' and they'd say, 'I haven't got any pants on!' They used to hate to go in the ambulance with no bloomers on. And they had those neck to knee bloomers! Well the lady with the broken hip, she had no bloomers on
either, but we didn't have any hope of getting them on her. I said, 'Oh, I'll just put them in this little bag for you.' I think she died later. It was a little cottage hospital.
KATE. WHAT HAPPENED TO MRS. DICKIE? WHY WAS SHE TAKEN TO HOSPITAL?
PAT. Well, she had fallen and cut her head somewhere, but I never saw it, it was under the bonnet. She was old, and kept having turns. And I don't think there was anyone there to look after her, only the old man. But Mrs. Lizzie and Mrs. 'Azel, as they used to call one another....yes, I knew them quite well eventually. But their mother-in-law was a very thin
lady with close, sort of dark hair, not a lot of grey for an old lady. She didn't want to go, she said, 'I'll die if I go to hospital.' 'No you won't, because, you know, they'll make you
better and then I'll bring you home.' And we did. We took her home again. I think she died some time after that, but these were pretty old people, in their eighties, perhaps.
KATE. HOW LONG WOULD THEY STAY IN HOSPITAL? WAS THERE SOMEWHERE THEY COULD PUT THEM IN TOWN HERE (EDEN). AN OLD PEOPLE'S HOME?
PAT. No. There was nothing like that.
KATE. WHAT ARRANGEMENTS DID THEY MAKE?
PAT. Well usually, the hospital kept them there. I can remember two old ladies that sat either side of the hospital fireplace. If you took flowers to one, you had to take flowers to both because they were horrible to one another if one got flowers and the other one didn't. They were there for a long time. There was nowhere else for them and they died there. But
nowadays they wouldn't be allowed to stay such a long time.
KATE. DID YOU SEE ANYTHING OF THE WOMEN'S HEALTH SIDE OF THINGS? PAT. No, they were all pretty wiry. I think they lived all their lives on farm produce. They were more or less self supporting out there. Ronny McDonald's people who lived on the Eden side of the Towamba bridge, I think they both died in bed. They were very healthy till they were in their eighties and then they just died. But I was amazed talking to neighbours that came in while we were getting somebody ready to go off to hospital. Some of them had never been out of the valley, you know! Some had never been further than Bega. They were quite content where they were. It was no hardship. They just didn't want to go. The men sometimes took cattle to sell. Just odd times, I think, the women went.
KATE. THE HIGHWAY WASN'T SEALED THEN....
PAT. Oh, no! It wasn't sealed from Lake's Entrance.
KATE. WAS IT SEALED ABOUT 1968?
PAT. Bit by bit.
KATE. I BELIEVE THE ELECTRICITY DIDN'T COME THROUGH HERE (EDEN) UNTIL ABOUT 1947?
PAT. I think it was even later. The water came through about 1955-56, water was put on to the town. Until then they had tanks.
KATE. SO YOU HAD NO SEALED ROAD WHEN YOU WENT TO TOWAMBA TO PICK SOMEBODY UP.
PAT. No sealed roads anywhere. That hundred miles was completely unsealed.
KATE. WAS THE ROAD ROUGH AFTER YOU GOT OFF THE TOWAMBA ROAD AND ON TO THE PAMBULA ROAD?
PAT. It was all rough. It was corrugated on the way to Pambula. Even if you had somebody gravely ill on board you couldn't go any faster. Oh, we had all sorts of things happen. Babies born on the top of hills..... because we also went to Mallacoota to pick people up. The fact that they were just over the border didn't matter, they were still your neighbours. And its still very friendly between the two places.
KATE. ARE THERE ANY OTHER INCIDENTS YOU CAN REMEMBER FROM OUT THERE AT TOWAMBA?
PAT. There was one old lady, she'd had a stroke. She was quite unconscious. But some of those houses had been built on to several times and she was in a room and there was a big chest of drawers that had big hat drawers in them, well she had two of those and two beds in the room and the room wasn't very big. By the time we got her on the stretcher, and she was
pretty thick through, you know? They said, 'Look, we're not going to get her over the chest of drawers.' Kitch said, 'We'll take her through the window. You go outside the window and
steady the stretcher till one of the men comes around.' There were no wheels on the stretchers then, you did it all bullock. I went around the other side to.....but she was pretty thick through and the windows weren't very big and you could only get half up at a time, you see. So there we were, going backwards and forwards but we had to give that up and push her back through again. Thank God she was unconscious. We got inside and there were about four men standing there saying, 'What will we do next?' I said, 'There's four of you, can't you lift her over the top of that chest of drawers?' So they had to shift the chest of drawers and lift her over the top of it and then get through the passage way. But she wouldn't go through the passage way! They finished up carrying her out separately. Putting the stretcher out in the kitchen, lifting her out and then putting her back on the stretcher and getting her out that way. But she didn't know anything about it. That was the way it was then, you know?
KATE. WHAT WAS THE AMBULANCE LIKE? WAS IT A TRUCK?
PAT. It was a Bedford truck with a body specially built. It went over plenty of rough roads, it had to be strong.
KATE. SO THESE YEARS WOULD BE BETWEEN 1950 WHAT?
PAT. Between 1956 and 1965.
KATE. ANYTHING ELSE YOU CAN REMEMBER?
PAT. Mrs. Hazel and Mrs. Lizzie I knew pretty well. Their husbands died within time of one another and they moved into Eden. But they still used to have things going on the farm because when I had a shop in the main street I used to buy potatoes off them. They had an old blue ute and these two old ladies used to come in and Mrs.Hazel was very tall and Mrs. Lizzie was short and bandy legged and she used to carry a bag of potatoes across the front of her on her two arms and standing on these bandy legs and me thinking that these legs couldn't bow much further. They were Taskers, I think. I used to think that place was the back of beyond then. The ladies all looked the same with their hair parted in the middle and tied back in a bun.

AND THAT'S THE WAY IT WAS.