Wikimedia Commons/Author suppliedMeasles cases have already been reported in most states in Australia this year. Cases tripled here last year, compared with the previous one. It’s hard to believe just over a decade earlier, in 2014, the disease had been declared eliminated in Australia by the World Health Organization, thanks to the efficacy of the preventative vaccine. But like many other countries around the world – particularly the United States, which has a “measles crisis” – we’ve seen a resurgence in outbreaks since the pandemic. Experts trace it to declining vaccination rates created by post-COVID “vaccine hesitancy” (as well as international travel).Measles is “the canary in the coal mine”, epidemiologist Katrine Wallace told News.com recently: it’s our “most contagious” disease, so measles outbreaks are a warning for what might follow. In the US, under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the number of recommended vaccines available to children in the US was cut in January. Immunisation programs introduced during the 20th century helped combat not just measles, but a range of diseases dangerous to children, including diphtheria, whooping cough and polio, which was declared eradicated in Australia in 2000. Polio enters the nervous system and can result in paralysis or death. Children are most at risk. The stories of people who survived it remind us how important vaccination is and what can happen if we let it slide.My mother’s polioWhen my mother was only seven years old, she contracted poliomyelitis and spent a year in bed. She lived in Orange, New South Wales, in the industrial area of Glenroi. In that year, 1950, polio infections peaked: the state experienced one of the worst years for polio on record. My mother was lucky: she recovered. But polio left her, like many others, with physical and psychological scars. Catharine Coleborne with her mother, who survived a year-long bout of polio in 1950. Author supplied A collection of 33 oral history interviews about the social history of polio, held at the National Library of Australia, reveals what it was like to live with polio – and its lifelong impacts in the 1930s and in the decades that followed, before vaccination was possible. These polio survivors and their loved ones were from all walks of life. The interviewees came from cities and towns all over Australia, with a mix of ages, genders and backgrounds. “I must have been just so frightened as a child,” Bernie O'Grady told an interviewer, talking about his experience of polio aged seven in NSW, in the 1950s, including very painful treatments. Rebecca Round, who also caught polio aged seven in Railton, Tasmania, recalls that everyone was frightened of the disease – not just those who had it. Families of those with polio could be isolated, even shunned, some interviewees recalled.“I don’t think contemporary Australians can comprehend the fear that ran through our community at the thought of polio,” recalled former Labor federal leader Kim Beazley, who was hospitalised with the disease when he was five. An ambulance transported him from his childhood home.Though Beazley was the son of a Labor MP when he was struck down, polio was generally viewed as a disease of the impoverished at the time. But in fact, it struck indiscriminately before the widespread introduction of a state-based national immunisation program in 1955. The Salk vaccine injection became widely available in Australia in 1956, followed by the Sabin oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 1966, which was easier to distribute, especially to remote areas. I remember drinking the little cup of pink liquid medicine at primary school in regional Victoria in the 1970s. I was part of the first generation of children to receive the oral polio vaccine.Our recent history offers an urgent opportunity to tell these stories: not just about polio, but about a world before vaccines. Polio sufferers were affected in many different ways. In serious cases, the disease spread quickly: they lost the ability to breathe unaided and were placed inside the “iron lung” – a mechanical ventilator – to help them breathe. Others experienced stiff limbs and necks, partial paralysis, and were treated either with splints, which immobilised their limbs, or with painful physical therapies to ensure their muscles kept warm. Others later had to wear metal braces called calipers to help them walk, once they had recovered from their infections.‘I just couldn’t get up’The year my mother caught polio, around 800 cases were notified in NSW. There were more than 600 admissions to Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital between 1950 and 1951. Children and young adults were most affected, and 47 people died, including children. Back in 1950, the vaccines were still several years away. My mother now lives in aged care, unable to remember much, or to talk about her life. She has always been a very private person, reluctant to seek medical help. I have often thought her guarded nature may have been shaped by her childhood experience of illness. In a world before vaccines, polio was rife in Australia. My Child has Polio! Poliomyelitis Society, Milson’s Point, c. 1953 – 55, State Library NSW She never really told her story of polio. There have only ever been fragments: snippets of memory, passing comments. Symptoms, too, of post-polio syndrome, a diagnosed neurological condition that affects around 40% of people who recovered from their childhood polio infection. Patient advocacy group Polio Australia explains that symptoms can affect mobility and cause joint pain, breathing complications and cognitive changes. Mum has had problems with her legs later in life, as well as unexplained pain and sudden spells of paralysis.A short story Mum published in 2004 describes an older woman, Irene, who fell, without warning, to the ground. She tells her husband: “I was out there with the clippers, cutting the dead heads off the geraniums and suddenly I was down on the deck and I couldn’t move a muscle.” In the story, Irene has been bitten by a spider. But mum is describing what happens to older people who had polio as children or young adults. “I don’t know what happened,” says Irene. “I think I fell over.” She continues: “I just couldn’t get up. I’m sorry.” Before now, I only really knew she was bedridden for a year when she was seven. Recently, my aunt Cath told me their mother, my nan, cared for her in the room my mother had shared with their younger sister Margaret, using warm washes and massage, at all hours of the day and night. Cath recalled getting up in the night and seeing Mum being nursed. Mum stayed quarantined from the rest of the family – her two sisters and brother – and school. Mum’s own silence around her polio has always been curious to me. ‘The family was shunned’Trying to make sense of this gap in what we know about her, I have wondered whether she simply didn’t want to talk about it. In her short story, Irene’s apology is typical of Mum. Was it the shame of the illness that prevented her remembering more? These days, we are more likely to talk openly about our health conditions, evidenced by podcasts such as the ABC’s What’s That Rash?. We also tend to share more personal information in public than past generations. It is possible that people of her generation, born in the 1940s, may have not felt comfortable discussing private topics like illness. Yet I have also puzzled over whether the relative silence about it in our family was formed through embarrassment at having been afflicted, and whether it was shared by other polio families.Polio was surrounded by stigma: beliefs about the disease and how people caught it shaped understandings about those who had it, as well as about their families and living conditions. These ideas have been well documented by survivors.My uncle used to say that when Mum had polio, “the family was shunned”, though my aunt Cath disagreed. She told me their mother was well known in their neighbourhood as someone to call when a child was ill, as she understood how to look after sick children. But people, she stressed, were awfully frightened of polio. Families could suffer a double blow: childhood infection and debility, and potential social ostracism. ‘I think they were frightened’Oral history interviews are helping me understand more about my mother’s polio. They tell us about the relative silence surrounding the disease in the mid-20th century.Bernie O’Grady recalled his mother being avoided by their neighbours. Others interviewed spoke of people avoiding each other in the street.This kind of reaction may also have been shaped by public health practices. Rebecca Round remembered her Tasmanian family’s home being marked by a quarantine sticker in an outbreak of polio in the 1930s. People did not go out in public. “I think they were frightened. And people considered at that time that it was only the poor and the dirty that got polio.” The fear of the disease was justified: more than 1,000 people were in hospital with polio during the summer when Round was ill, along with many others. Boys with polio taking lessons on outdoor verandah at Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital, Mt. Eliza, 1936. State Library of Victoria Round’s memories suggest something else: it seems likely that earlier polio outbreaks of the 1930s – especially the fears surrounding the sheer scale of the infection and its horrible outcomes – influenced how later generations of parents viewed the disease in the 1940s and ‘50s. They were aware of the sudden impact of polio infection, which presented symptoms like those of a mild cold, but could progress quickly and lead to paralysis or death.Family shame, silence and reluctance to remember are all themes in the oral interviews. “You didn’t talk about it”, said Round. Later in life, she reflected on the way it affected her relationship with her sister, after she was separated and isolated in hospital. Her mother was only able to visit and look through the window, because of concerns about infection. Polio, Round said, “separated you from people around you. It gave you a sense of difference.” That sense of difference was made more extreme by her experience of ongoing, painful treatments as she grew older and had to return to the hospital to have her “tendons stretched”.Polio changed families and family dynamics. Peter Willcocks grew up in Melbourne, near Elwood, and contracted polio when he was four. He speculated it was because he swam in the canal, which may have been affected by effluent. He spoke about social isolation, too, and the feeling his family was treated differently because of his illness: “to this day I can still know the feelings that people must’ve had towards my family.” In bed for a yearIn the 1970s, our family spent holidays visiting Orange and the small house in North Street in Glenroi at the top of the cul-de-sac, with its majestic walnut tree in the backyard. In the bedroom, my sister and I would make shadow puppet hands on the wall. At Christmas time, the youngest cousins, including me, sat near the table in the low-slung back room – an addition to the original house – on a folding card table. My nan sang and whistled all day long and there were endless cups of tea. My pop sat on the front porch painted red in the sunshine and never failed to eat a whole orange every day, a habit I later picked up. Pop injured his back as a young man working as a pastry cook and was permanently bent over, only able to take on limited work. Catharine Coleborne’s extended family outside the house in Orange where her mother spent a year in bed with polio. Author supplied Europeans established a presence in the longer history of Orange, on Wiradjuri Country, in the 1850s. Glenroi’s population grew in the 1940s, when new fibro-clad housing was built to accommodate munitions workers. Factories such as Emmco, the manufacturing plant involved in wartime production (later an Electrolux whitegoods factory), moved into the neighbourhood.Many families, including Mum’s, ate from their gardens.There’s a photo of mum holding me as a baby in the front garden of her family’s house near the famous rose bushes with their prize-winning roses, which Nan used to thwack with rolled-up newspapers to get rid of the earwigs. It was in this modest house that my mother lingered in bed for a year with polio: her limbs aching, her body confined to the small room where she was nursed by her mother. That must have been a choice and decision. Many other children were taken to hospital wards for long stretches of time, separated from their parents and siblings.Bernie O’Grady, whose mother was from Orange, was born in 1944 and contracted polio when he was in Grade 2 at Catholic school in Lidcombe. He spent time in the Children’s Hospital at Camperdown in Sydney and later, a rehabilitation ward at the Margaret Reid Hospital in Wahroonga. His painful treatments included hot plaster bandages wrapped around his legs, and the manipulation of his limbs and massaging of his muscles. This treatment took place at home after he returned from hospital, where he had worn limb splints and was suspended over a bed, possibly to clear his lungs. Early theories about immobilising patients gave way to understandings of movement and activity as modes of recovery, advocated by Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880–1952), who became famous for her then-controversial theories about polio treatment. Girls with polio making craft outdoors, at Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital, Mt Eliza. State Library of Victoria 'The world was full of them’Polio interrupted schooling, sport and friendships. When he did return to school, O’Grady remembered falling over in the classroom – his legs unsteady after months of polio treatment – and being humiliated by his weakness. Kids often had to learn to walk again after infection. Some tried to conquer their weakness by pursuing sports. Mum did this, as a runner, in her early teens. My aunt Cath told me Mum was always a very fast runner. Like so many other polio survivors, she was clearly determined to prove herself.Yet for most survivors, of all ages, life had changed irrevocably. Play and activity were limited by calipers, special boots and other forms of physical assistance they needed to move around. Social welfare organisations such as the NSW Society for Crippled Children, established in 1929 by Rotary (now known as Northcott), supported families with practical help.A few interviewees remember experiences with the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, an organisation devoted to the care of regional and remote children, based in the Sydney suburb of Manly. The Far West Scheme provided calipers to children who needed them and residential camps at the Sydney beach for children from across NSW. The sight of “irons” (calipers) on children’s legs was common in the 1940s and ‘50s. Interviewees often talked about witnessing visible physical disability and deformity following polio infection, while others were lucky to escape the worst outcome of total incapacitation. Adults were also afraid of polio. German immigrant Peter Hannemann came to Australia from Berlin in the late 1950s, but his children missed out on the vaccine because of a localised shortage in NSW. Three of his children contracted polio in 1961, one with serious, lifelong illness that left her immobile and dependent on constant nursing care.And I remember […] so many other people were sick. And then they had polio. Grown-up too. Not only children. Grownups. The world was full of them. And they ran out of breathing apparatuses.One woman interviewed talked about being infected with polio while working with preschool children when she was 21.Caring for polio sufferers was done by nurses and volunteers. One man who had polio in 1950, aged 17, talked about his younger brother dying from the illness at 13. He told the story of a woman who would visit the hospitalised and provide them with a cake of soap and a face flannel. Volunteering was recognised as a valuable social contribution back then, he said.Several interviewees mention a new awareness about simple hygiene during the epidemic, reminding us polio outbreaks were also opportunities for the transmission of public health messages. Memories and memoirsThe most famous polio survivor in Australia is the writer Alan Marshall, who contracted polio aged six in 1908. His papers are held in the National Library, and his book I Can Jump Puddles has been loved by generations of readers. Personal memoirs of polio, written by survivors, help us paint a more detailed picture of the patterns of polio in everyday life. So do histories such as Kerry Highley’s Dancing in my Dreams (2015), which draws on oral memories of polio in Victoria from the 1930s.In 2021, it was estimated around 40,000 older people who had contracted polio were still living in Australia. Most survivors of the epidemics of the late 1940s to the early 1950s are now near the end of their lives. Librarians have documented their memories before it became too late. My reading of these personal histories has helped me place my mother’s experience of polio into a national and local context. Immunisation is a 'must’By the time the first vaccines for polio were introduced in Australia in the mid-1950s, many thousands of people had already been infected, with lifelong consequences for their health. The eradication of polio in the 20th century is acknowledged by historians as a positive beacon in public health and medical research worldwide. Yet the threat of polio has returned in chaotic Middle East conflict zones such as Gaza in the recent past.Polio survivors in Australia have noted the relative lack of attention to their experiences. Many of those interviewed in the oral history project commented on the importance of vaccines. Several hoped their memories would benefit others. Round said she talks about her experience because she wants the message about immunisation to get through. “Polio is not eradicated. It is controlled. You must continue with immunisation.”Catharine Coleborne receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She currently holds an ARC Discovery Project grant to investigate the social history of polio in Australia (DP260101953). She also holds a Visiting Fellowship from the State Library of New South Wales and a National Library of Australia Fellowship (2025-2026). Permission was granted to quote from oral interviews held by the NLA's Oral History and Folklore Collection at ORAL TRC 6245/1, 6245/2, 6245/3, 6245/11, and 6245/33.