Pamela Lord

Pamela Lord, grazier, volunteer extraordinaire, and member of the Royal Flying Doctor Service Broken Hill Women's Auxiliary for more than forty years, gave up her comfortable Adelaide life and her university degree to run an outback sheep station. 

Pamela Lord, born Pamela Peters, was educated at Girton College in Adelaide. Aged sixteen she and her family started visiting their friends, the Lords, at Thackaringa Station near Silverton, around 40 km from Broken Hill. The station was the historic site, in 1875, of the first discovery of silver ore in the area. Pamela became friends with John Lord on these visits, and in 1948 they were married in Adelaide. They then started their life together at Thackaringa. 

A sheep station in the far west of NSW is a long way from an Arts degree and Adelaide society. But Pamela was already a horse rider and she could cook, which was just as well since there were plenty of hungry station hands to feed. With the spirit of adventure reminiscent of the women who came to the Far West to make new lives in the early days of Broken Hill, Pamela Lord embraced the change from city to outback and was soon a natural hand at station life with its many challenges, including the occasional poisonous snake! 

When her two children left for boarding school in Adelaide after being educated by correspondence at home, Pamela Lord started hospital visits for the Royal Flying Doctor’s auxiliary. This too was a natural impulse for someone who was bought up to be of service. Both her parents had been involved with hospital visiting: her mother for the Red Cross and her father for the RSL. 

She volunteered tirelessly and with great generosity and kindness from 1965, visiting patients in the Broken Hill and District Hospital, running errands, doing shopping, writing letters on the behalf of many who were too weak to write. Her dedication to the community was even more outstanding given that she travelled 40kms to perform this service. The many recipients of her visits always got a smile, and often a joke. Pamela carried on with her visits into her eighties, becoming the sole volunteer for the Flying Doctors when other auxiliaries retired, only slowing down after fifty years of service. 

Pamela Lord was acknowledged for her selfless contribution to the community by being awarded an OAM and being admitted to the Nydia Edes Volunteer Hall of Fame in 2014. She died peacefully on 15 March 2022 at the hospital where she helped and served so many others.