Our working generations are always busy on our smart somethings.
Smart phones, smart strategic plans, smart ways to do business. We look back at past generations and wonder how they ever managed to do anything at all, relying on technologies like typewriters, the postal service and telephones.
I’ve just published a book on a brilliant Australian woman from just such a background. When Pixie Annat got her first job as a typist at the Brisbane General Hospital in the mid-1940s she used Pitman’s shorthand and a manual typewriter to do her job every day.
Pixie trained as a nurse at the Brisbane Hospital in the late 1940s. There was no texting home to her mum if she needed something to keep her going during a 12-hour-a-day training shift. When she finished work on the wards and then went to training school at the hospital, in her own time, she couldn’t lament her lot by posting a gripe on Instagram.
Pixie with her beloved sister, Ellie.
There was no uni course for Pixie and her fellow-nurse trainees in those days. And their pay rate was lower than a junior shop assistant.
Pixie trained as a nurse at the Brisbane Hospital in the late 1940s. There was no texting home to her mum if she needed something to keep her going during a 12-hour-a-day training shift. When she finished work on the wards and then went to training school at the hospital, in her own time, she couldn’t lament her lot by posting a gripe on Instagram.
There was no uni course for Pixie and her fellow-nurse trainees in those days. And their pay rate was lower than a junior shop assistant.
This did not stop Pixie and her generation’s progress. They became wonderful nurses, sisters, managers – Pixie eventually became a hospital matron and CEO. During her extraordinary career she campaigned, among other things, for better working conditions for nurses, for superannuation for nurses, to get nurses trained at universities.
When Pixie became Matron and later CEO of St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital in Brisbane she just got things done. By talking to people every day. Persuading. Cajoling. Setting an example. She knew the name of everyone who worked for her – treating cleaners and doctors with the same respect. If the hospital needed to be doing something new, Pixie set about making it happen. That’s why this then rather small hospital became the first private facility in Queensland to offer open heart surgery in the 1980s. She pulled this off by helping raise millions of dollars to buy the equipment necessary for safe cardiac surgery to be performed. And then she worked with the talented heart surgeons and cardiologists to get the service running. The list of firsts she achieved at St Andrew’s over 27 years, and in her many other endeavours, leaves most high-achievers I meet these days in the shade.
During the research for my book, I studied some of Pixie’s meticulous papers and plans – nothing was too complicated, her writing was good and her ideas usually made sense. She was a practical person. And highly intelligent – that much became clear as my story on Pixie progressed.
When Pixie decided to retire from St Andrew’s in 1992 she took on senior director positions for many leading charities and healthcare organisations, helping to grow several small projects into large businesses and charities. She found time to get involved with a trust that supported homeless women, and headed a committee dedicated to providing scholarships for nurses to study for their PhDs. The list of her interests and activities goes on and on.
And she did all this without a smart anything – she finally got her first computer about a decade ago.
She uses email, but sparingly, she has a mobile phone, but prefers you to call her landline and leave a message. At 85, she has not the remotest interest in social media, yet she has hundreds of real friends whom she talks to regularly.
When discussing my new book to many in the media I realised, once again, that being old is unfashionable. Old isn’t seen as smart. Old isn’t trendy or likely to trend. This is not surprising but it’s a little depressing.
I remember as a young working woman my mother saying to me that as you get old you feel the same inside. And that’s true. We have equal capacity to be smart, no matter whether when we hear the word “wireless” some of us think radio, others think “damn, it’s down again”.
Pixie Annat: Champion of Nuses, by Colleen Ryan Clur (Published by UQ Press). See more at:
http://standrewshospital.com.au/community/pixie-annat-biography