In the lead-up to the open day, Jamberoo resident Graham Pike, whose family lived 100 metres from the hospital for more than 50 years, has written the following personal account. 

I’ll visit her for the last time on Saturday. Then, very sadly and I hope, painlessly, she’ll pass away at the hands of what we’re told is civic progress.

Life will be much emptier without her.

The only consolation is that I’ll still have my many memories of the huge part this long-time, caring friend played in my formative years and in my life.

Mine are five decades of memories not only of her nurturing and of the countless times she gave freely of carefree fun and laughter, but also of her condoning of the childhood terror still indelibly imprinted on my mind.

She was ever-present; she was always there, front and centre; you couldn’t miss her.

Her front door only a hundred metres or so right opposite my bedroom. The old Kiama District Hospital in Bonaira Street was undoubtedly the most influential building for us in the half-century or more my family owned the house opposite.

My very first memory, at the age of two, is of my father driving the old soft-top Vauxhall the hundred or so metres to her side door to pick up my mother carrying something very small and rolled in a blanket and crocheted shawl.

The little bundle later turned out to be my sister, who would also come to enjoy the benefits of having our caring friend close by.

Three years later it was my Mum who walked me those same hundred metres across the grounds not only for me to visit our friend but to actually stay with her, for five days I was told.

The first hour of my stay was fine. I had a bed and Mum was there holding my hand.

But it all changed so horribly quickly. They rolled the bed into this big room with the big, bright light and my Mum disappeared from sight. The torture started immediately.

They held me down and strapped me hard onto the bed with this big wide belt so I couldn’t get up and run out to Mum.

Then this huge hand, as big as my head, lowered a large wire tea-strainer, with strips of white cloth between the wire, over my nose and mouth and held it there.

I thought that was to stop me yelling for Mum. But it got worse. Even now, I still regularly see the image of the brown bottle being upended over the tea strainer and remember choking on the bottle’s ghastly fumes as I gasped desperately for breath.

Fortunately, Mum was right there when I woke up but my throat was very sore where the tonsils had been.

But I never forgave Dr Stevenson for his act of terrorism with tea strainer and ether.

Her front yard afforded my sister and I and the brothers next door an un-excelled playground into our mid-teens.

It got even better when the huge grassed area was dug up here and there and planted with roses and other shrubs and small trees.

It was behind these bushes that we hid when her secretary or her Matron or Dr Stevenson or Dr Cranna came out and yelled at us to buzz off.

It was behind these bushes, too, that we hid and fooled passing motorists, including our church’s local minister, with a package on the side of the road attached to a piece of string, with us hidden at the other end.

It was the first and only time I ever heard a man of the cloth utter a swear word.

He stopped his car to retrieve the package but it disappeared into the hospital garden before he could catch it.

Her grounds played regular host for 15 or so years to sword fights, hide and seek, cricket, football, elastic-powered model plane flights and lots of youthful, vigorous fun and laughter.

Sometimes we might have overdone it a bit.

I remember my sister had to visit our friend once when I broke -accidentally, I still maintain – my sister’s arm during a game loosely called ‘throw your sister into the air again’.

I also ruefully recall that I once did our old friend, the hospital, a gross disservice and seriously alarmed the usually unflappable Matron.

While experimenting with, as all country kids do, things which go “bang” and sometimes cost the odd finger or hand, I tested my latest invention, a makeshift bike pump combined with a double-bunger firecracker, in my natural playground, the hospital grounds.

The experiment went a bit wrong and I shot - accidentally, I still maintain - one of my best glass marbles through a hospital window, just to the left of the main front door.

While I legged it a long way north, fast, the always formidable looking Matron had a posse of partially able patients search the grounds.

Neither the posse nor the Matron ever found me.

But to assuage nearly a lifetime of guilty conscience, I now formally and unreservedly apologise for committing such an atrocity.

I’d offer reparations, too, but with the wrecker’s hammer poised over the entire hospital building, I suppose it’s a bit late.

My Dad cut his teeth as electrical linesman and electrician helping install Kiama’s first street lights.

Many years later, to continue what he said was a family tradition of helping the hospital (because the family had donated the land for Kiama’s first cottage hospital years before), Dad used to repair the hospital’s electrical equipment without charge.

Working at home or across the road at the hospital, he repaired all things electrical, many of them weird-looking apparatuses whose uses I was too frightened to think or inquire about.

The Iron Lung alone filled me with dread.

Dad painstakingly showed me how to fix them all so that I, too, could one day help the hospital keep its electrical equipment going.

Eventually, however, increasing government regulation and the growing complexity of the equipment itself denied me the opportunity of continuing the family tradition of serving the hospital.

But the hospital continued serving us, sometimes in unusual ways.

In about my 15th year, I returned to the chamber of horrors of my fifth year.

But they’d made some improvements; a specialist anaesthetist using a new machine dispensing odourless, sleep inducing gases had replaced Dr Stevenson with his big hand, tea-strainer and bottle of ether.

It was almost a pleasure to have removed what the doctor described as the scrawniest appendix he’d ever seen.

I have always been grateful for service above and beyond the call of duty performed by the hospital’s always wonderful nursing staff when my Mum was seriously ill once and kept asking to speak with me.

I’d been away in Canada for a couple of years by then and was in a pretty remote area of the Rocky Mountains on this particular day.

I received over my brand new, world class technological marvel – a small hand-held transceiver - a message from the radio and television station for which I was reporting.

My Mum was really ill in Kiama Hospital, my newsroom told me, and the hospital staff would make all the arrangements necessary for her to get a call from me if we at the Canadian end could get a call patched through from the wilderness on our combination of hand-held transceiver, microwave links, telephone landlines and overseas’ operators.

An hour or so later the hospital nurses helped put it all together and It all worked.

Mum’s frail, tearfully happy voice came from her hospital bed in Kiama to me as I sat, equally tearfully and relieved, on a fir tree stump beside a fire trail in the remote Rockies. Mum always said that call helped her turn the corner to recovery.

One of the many deep and enduring memories I’ll savour fondly as I visit my old friend on Saturday, is the role she and her staff played in the passing of my Dad; the caring and understanding that was palpable throughout the week or so that he struggled very hard against the gradually worsening effects of a series of small strokes.

I’ll stand in the ward on Saturday where his face lit up with delight and the very best smile he could raise on his crippled face when I arrived from my interstate workplace.

He recognised me immediately and held out his arms for a big hug.

On Saturday I’ll visit the room where, several days later, we said farewell to Dad, holding hands as he closed his eyes and took his last breath, the end of another family era.

And never to be forgotten are the looks of knowing, understanding and kindness from the two nurses on night duty as my sister, son and I, hand-in-hand, walked by in the gloomy half light and I said softly through my tears, “he’s gone”.

Out through that once-grand front entrance we walked (they’d since built an annexe at the front with a little standard-size side door) and still hand-in-hand, we trod the playground of my youth towards home across the road.

I fancy that I could hear Mum calling us in for dinner and see Dad coming home from work along Bonaira Street on his old bicycle.

Well, my old friend, you’ve done a wonderful job serving generations of us here in our beloved municipality.

Collectively and individually, we have so many marvellous memories of you, as well as of the countless nurses, doctors, support staff and hospital auxiliaries who helped you to care for us so very well.

Sometimes we’ve been most unkind to you; we’ve defaced you with first with an administration annexe and now with a brash new box out the front transgressing the once embracing green field of my precious boyhood playground.

But behind it all you maintained your caring charm. Now, sadly, you, too, are nearing your end. Rest assured, though, my old friend, that our lifelong memories of you and the people you cared for, will live on.

-Graham Pike