Trying to piece together my mother’s personal experience of polio in 1950 in the absence of anything she recorded herself, I became interested in the fact that many libraries and archives around Australia have collected oral histories of polio from people who experienced polio infection. To understand more about my mother’s polio, oral history interviews with people of her generation are helping me to uncover more about the health and illness experiences of polio in Australia in the mid-twentieth century.
Oral histories of poliomyelitis
Oral history collections are a significant resource for the national memory of pandemics and may provide guidance on aspects of public health in our present, especially the long-term effects of polio in the twentieth century. As part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project about Australia’s experiences of polio, I am working with a small team to create a Polio Archive Mapping Site (due for public release at the end of 2026) that will share stories from oral and archival collections including images and some material objects, making these collections accessible in one place to help make the memory of polio visible and tangible for the public. The larger project will also help to contextualise specific collections of oral histories of polio, honouring their original purpose for interviewees.
Over a decade ago, libraries, organisations and communities in many parts of Australia became interested in the social impact of polio before vaccines were introduced in the mid 1950s. Their aim was to document memories before it became too late to include generations of people affected by polio in the 1930s and the following decades. My research has identified a significant body of oral history material held in collections at regional libraries and state libraries.
Polio Australia also established a national Polio Register in 2010 which meant that people could register their polio experience, and another site collects polio stories. A quarterly e-magazine, Polio Oz News, has been published since 2011.
At the National Library of Australia, some funding from Polio Australia helped to establish an oral history project for the National Library. The collection of 33 interviews tells us more about the relative silence surrounding polio, as well as about themes such as the impact of polio on families, children being cared for in hospital wards away from their parents, physical disabilities and people who cared for polio sufferers, along with recollections of what daily life was like when polio struck.
Lived experiences of polio
Interviewees include people affected by polio in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and into the early 1960s. The oldest interviewee was 95 years old and contracted polio aged two in the 1930s. Around one third of the interviews took place with men and the remainder with women. New migrants to Australia are included, and people who contracted polio as infants, young children, or as young adults. Family groups also feature along with individuals. Many had contact with post-polio networks, though not all. They come from Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, and remote regional as well as metropolitan areas – from wheat and sheep farms to outback New South Wales, and from North Queensland to the north of Tasmania. There are mentions of many hospitals, convalescent homes, wards, and carers, another theme of my new research, where I aim to link oral stories to institutional archives.
One of the most powerful thematic elements in the collection of interviews centres on family dynamics and the impact of polio on family relationships. Time and again, interviews mentioned family breakdown, tension, the loss of close relationships with siblings or parents as a result of polio.
In several interviews with people who contracted polio as children, memories of polio are bound up with the knowledge of family conflict and marital discord.
Interestingly, given these interviews were recorded in 2011 and 2012, there are many mentions of the importance of vaccination. These polio survivors talk about the significance of vaccination to them, to their families, once the vaccines were available. They recall the differences between the Salk and Sabin vaccines in the mid 1950s and then the late 1960s. They express a concern about the decline in awareness of vaccines and their purpose. Public health approaches to disease monitoring in Australia includes wastewater surveillance.
In May 2026, the Australian Centre for Disease Control announced that polio virus was detected in wastewater in Perth, which does not suggest its imminent return, but is useful for raising awareness about ‘old’ diseases like polio. While Australia has been ‘polio free’ since 2000, vaccination is the key protection.
Polio in the Australian imagination
As recently as the 1990s, the Northcott Society (formerly the New South Wales Society for Crippled Children), promoted a fundraising activity for children with physical disabilities caused by conditions such as Spina Bifida and Cerebral Palsy by reminding the public about the impact of polio in earlier decades. The pamphlet uses 1950s imagery with the tagline, ‘the 1950s gave us the FJ Holden, the Hills Hoist, the Melbourne Olympics, and … polio’.
Polio, then, might be located in the public imagination in the 1950s, distant enough now to be almost forgotten.
‘Imagine not being able to get around, to walk, run, lift, go shopping, or to a football match’, the leaflet states.
The leaflet made me think about whether there is an ‘Australian experience’ of polio, one peculiar to what happened here, in how the virus shaped the lives of thousands of people, and our collective responses to it.
We might say that the shared, public memory of polio in Australia is a memory with different inflections: the triumph of the vaccines, and the dramatic decline in infections. Yet the public memory of the illness itself has faded. Some elements of this have been ‘privatised’ for individuals. This private memory of polio is a memory of disability, institutions, families left to struggle and rely on forms of care that sprang up around the epidemics and their aftermath. There is a silence, then, about polio as an experience that was ongoing for so many people. This is why oral memories can help us to examine the depth of the polio experience, and offer both commonalities, but also individual stories that demand attention.
More information about this project:
- National Library of Australia, Experiences of polio in 1950s Australia.
- The Conversation, My mother survived polio – stories like hers show why vaccination matters.
- ABC Late Night Live, Silence, stigma and survival: polio in postwar Australia.
