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Toowoomba – Day 1 – Sightseeing With Good Friends

April 2, 2011

We started our day with some serious soccer.

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before we ventured out to see the surroudings of Toowoomba. We stopped for a moment to admire this cool bottle tree:

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We zipped by St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the center:

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before our friends took us out onto a long stretch of rural farmlands:

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until we reached a small town called Nobby. Our goal was Rudd’s pub. A good old fashioned Australian pub, complete with an old car on the other side of the road:

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There was lots of history on the walls. It felt more like a museum than a pub. Here is one of the owners, Sam LIttle (the other owner is his wife), behind the counter:

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Nobby is a very small place. In the 2006 census it was registered with a population of 391. Yet, 2 well-known Australians have had their homes here.

One of them was Steele Rudd, which the pub has been named after. He was an author.

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I haven’t read any of his books, so let’s skip to the next person, Sister Kenny, which I find to be a fascinating woman:

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She was born in 1880, worked as a “bush nurse,” and never had any formal education. During World War I she worked as a nurse on transport ships and did 16 return trips to Europe. She continued her work as a nurse after the war and it was first in 1929, when she was 49 years old, that she started the work that would make her famous.

By chance she was asked to treat a child with Polio. At the time, the standard established treatment for Polio was to completely immobilize the affected muscles of the patient by using splinters and plaster casts. Prognosis after such treatment was rather grim, as immobilization leads to muscle atrophy (loss of muscle mass). Intuitively and without any training, Sister Kenny experimented with doing the opposite. She would stimulate the muscles with moist hotpacks, and have them moved, stretched and exercised. She very quickly produced what seemed to be miraculous results at the time. Some of her patients effectively had their muscles cured and could live normal lives after her treatment.

The established medical community fought against her. In 1934 the Queensland Health Department started evaluating her work and a Doctor Raphael Cliento, who headed the evaluation, mostly criticized her work. Sister Kenny defiantly replied publicly, something unheard of from an uneducated bush nurse at the time.

In 1936 a royal commission started examining her work. In their report, published in 1938,  they commented that. “The abandonment of immobilization is a grievous error and fraught with grave danger, especially in very young patients who cannot co-operate in re-education.” And she had been producing results in Polio patients no one else could match for more than 8 years!

Isn’t it fascinating and scary how difficult it is to correct an erroneous well-established “fact” once powerful people have their prestige invested in it?

In 1940, when she was 60 years old, Sister Kenny left for the United States to finally make her medical breakthrough. She stayed in Minneapolis for 11 years and became a US celebrity. Upwards of 300 doctors attended her classes at the Univeristy of Minnesota and treatment clinics were established throughout the US. In 1951 she headed the Gallup poll’s Most Admired Women list, displacing Eleanor Roosevelt from the first place.

She returned to Australia in 1951 and died from complications of Parkinson’s disease on November 30, 1952. She is buried in the Nobby cemetery. You can read more about her in this article.

We got some real Australian food:

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Helene and Helen:

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On our way back we stopped at Picnic Point a for a great view. The strange decapitated cone on the right is Tabletop Mountain:

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The top is a more or less a flat grass field. The mountain is a volcano, but there have been no eruptions here for the past 20 million years. The top was used by the aboriginals for Corrobore ceremonial meetings and there was a battle here between settlers and aboriginals in 1843. Our goal is to climb up there tomorrow.

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Mandatory photos. Here we are with Ian and Helen:

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And here are the boys with Zac. Iseline completely refused to be in the photo:

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Just next to the vista point we found this sign. It is impressive how almost all signs of this type seem to include Oslo. There is no doubt that we are a long way from home. However, we are closer to home than we are to Rome, not to mention Dublin. Not necessarily obvious when you are used to studying the world on a flat map. Take a look at a globe and it is a bit more evident.

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In the evening we were pampered with a real Australian barbecue:

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We had had a great day with good friends. Tomorrow we get up early to take on Tabletop Mountain.

 

Eirik

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One Comment

  1. Marc says:

    The nurse’s story is amazing! I see things like that here all the time. The old ways are the only way even when they lead to ruin…ok, enough melodrama!

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