Pamela Butler (left) as a young nurse. Photo supplied.
‘The reason I became a nurse is because I wanted to be an air hostess!’
Pamela Butler turned 90 years young in April, a week after she officially retired from the Victorian Maternal and Child Health Line. Having worked as a nurse, midwife and maternal child health nurse for 72 years, she has seen enormous growth in the professions and her message for those still working and those just beginning is simple: nursing can take you anywhere.
Pamela began her career in 1954. She initially wanted to be an air hostess – ‘I still want to be an air hostess,’ she deadpans – but she was rejected for being too young and was told by the airline ‘to do nursing because a lot of their hostesses were nurses’.
So she went into nursing, doing her training at Sydney’s Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children [now known as the Children’s Hospital at Westmead]. ‘Of course, once I started, I liked it and kept on nursing,’ she notes before joking that the reason she didn’t end up switching to a career in aviation was because she got married.
‘In those days, you weren’t allowed to work and be married as an air hostess. So I never let him forget that I gave it up for him!’
From ‘invalid cookery’ to nursing around Australia
Even still, Pamela’s more earth-bound career has taken her all over Australia, and provided her with an incredible lifetime of memories.
‘I remember the first year of nursing well,’ she says.
‘In my very first days in PTS [preliminary training school] one of the paediatricians said to us: “breastfed babies can have 14 bowel actions a day or they can go 14 days without a bowel action” and I’ve never forgot it but 72 years later people are still ringing up the Maternal and Child Health Line because their baby hasn’t had a bowel action. They haven’t been told. Seventy-two years later, and we’re still not telling new parents this.’
Pamela Butler’s 1958 Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children graduating class. Photo supplied.
Pamela spent nine weeks in preliminary training school before her four-year hospital-based apprenticeship. She was on the ward in the first week of PTS, however.
‘In the first week we went into the ward straight away and we did what they laughingly called “invalid cookery”. Every Friday we had to go in our nurses’ uniforms, by public transport, across to East Sydney Tech on the other side of the city and learn how to cook for patients. There were even exams!’
It may seem ‘odd’ these days, Pamela says, but ‘it’s information that has been built on over the years, so I am absolutely grateful that I trained at the time I trained, in the hospital I trained. And that goes for midwifery as well, because some of the stuff I learnt in those days is still relevant today, well and truly.’
Grateful for the union
While the basics don’t change, Pamela says ‘you can’t compare nursing today with what it was like back then.’
She recalls, for example, that there were no allowances, no personal leave and no entitlements. ‘If you were the nurse in the diet kitchen, making up great vats of milk – this is pre-formula – the night nurse came and woke you up at 5am and you went to make all the bottles for the babies. At 7:45am you could go and bundy on,’ Pamela says, referring to Bundy clocks that were used for recording staff start and finish times.
‘We can thank the union for developments we now take for granted.’
‘Because overtime was not allowed. It was the same in the wards: if you hadn’t finished your work and the shift finished, you had to go and bundy off and then come back and finish your work.’
Pamela is unequivocal that ‘we can thank the union for developments we now take for granted’ such as penalty rates, allowances and leave. Pamela joined the union in the 1960s, and it has paid her back in many ways. In addition to improving her general wages, conditions and entitlements throughout the years, being a union member has also helped her further her career through continuing professional development – ‘the union has helped me go to conferences’ – and support. ‘I’m grateful for the union,’ she says.
On babies, children, teen girls and anti-vaxxers
In addition to her work in paediatrics and maternal and child health, Pamela has worked in oncology, palliative care and HIV AIDs. But her greatest joys as a nurse and midwife have been ‘delivering babies and nursing children’.
‘Certainly, apart from delivering babies, nursing children is my big love. The big thing with children compared to adults is that children get well. They don’t have the sort of chronic diseases that adults have. And they’re great patients because they’re not hesitant about recovering from surgery, for example, in the way adults are so often.
‘They’re also really good to immunise,’ she says. ‘Especially compared to teenage girls. Teenage girls won’t relax. I’ve had teenage girls screaming, and when I told them that if they didn’t get this needle they could get this disease, they’ve replied that they’d rather get the disease.’
Immunisation and infectious disease has been a particular interest of Pamela’s. She vividly remembers nursing children in iron lungs, or with tetanus, measles, we had children with pertussis – ‘all those diseases that you hardly see now,’ she notes.
‘So when I see anti-vaxxers, it’s hard to understand. Most of them are not old enough to have seen a child going through spasm with tetanus, but if they did they might be a little bit different, especially if it was their child.’
Pamela Butler’s 1958 nursing graduation certificate, and Pamela during her midwifery graduation in 1960. Photos supplied.
Second thoughts about retirement
Pamela is still so interested in this topic that she’s had second thoughts about retiring. ‘I’m still incredibly interested in all of it, so who am I going to talk to about it now? My family get bored out of their brains if I tell them about it all the time!’
It’s not just the work that she misses, it’s the people. ‘You are so much with people, even on the Line,’ she says. ‘All my life I’ve worked closely with people so I’m going to miss that.’
For those coming after her, Pamela is emphatic: ‘If you’re a registered nurse, it’s wide open. It’s such a varied career, and you can do so many different things in nursing. If you’re unhappy in your role, move around, try different aspects of nursing. Everything you learn grows on knowledge you’ve already got.’
