Wednesday, 17 July 2024
Government House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you this morning in the language of the Gadigal, the Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. I extend that respect to the Elders of all parts of our State from which you travel.

It is always a pleasure to have guests here at Government House and when we do, it is invariably to recognise and honour the contribution so many people have made to others in the community. And that is why we are here today, but with a twist.

It is not often, if at all, that we recognise and honour those who have done something for themselves, something as seemingly simple as looking after their health.

For those with diabetes, that is exactly what you do - and why you are here – because you have, and you do, look after yourselves so well. Although you may not have thought about it this way, in doing so you are making an important contribution to the wider community.

By looking after yourselves, and with your support person, by ensuring that your health is optimal, you can participate in the community, you can look after your children, perhaps even your parents, you can work, and you can have an active life. By looking after your wellbeing, you add to the community’s wellbeing.

Living with a chronic disease isn’t easy and for those with diabetes, a disease which has no known cause and no known cure, you live with it, not only day by day but sometimes hour by hour. Although often a grind and with challenges many do not understand or are even aware of, you do it with a smile on your face, just as I see looking around the room here today. With vigilance and patient tenacity, you live full and enriching lives.

Much of this, of course, is made possible by insulin, in the words of the historian Michael Bliss, an “elixir of life for millions around the world.”[1]

And I’ll tell a story, from the 1920s, and the very beginning of the impact of its discovery.

For those of you who were diagnosed as children, we can all be thankful for your parents – as was the case with Phyllis Adams, who, as a 5-year-old diabetic weighed only 10 kgs. Her father, Harry, was determined that she be given the best medical care possible. 

At the time, prognosis for the disease, particularly in the form we now call type 1, was extremely poor; the only treatment was the so-called ‘starvation diet’, a dramatic restriction in calories that might delay death, but only for year or so. Phyllis’s doctor had said Phyllis would be lucky to live to 6.

Harry had heard about a team of researchers in Toronto, Canada, who were working to perfect a process of extracting insulin, the pancreatic hormone that, if administered to those with diabetes, was hoped would alleviate its life-threatening symptoms.[2] He wrote to them, asking about their progress; “Just keep her alive”, they had replied, “it’s not too far away.”[3]

A few months later, several vials of the extract, wrapped in tissue, were despatched to Australia.  Harry rowed out from Pyrmont to meet the PO Liner that was transporting this precious cargo. Little Phyllis received the first of the daily injections she would take, sometimes up to five times a day, for the rest of her life.[4]. Ever cautious, her doctor had said, even with the insulin, Phyllis might still not make it to 9. Phyllis lived to 81.[5]

Along the way, she received Kellion Victory Medals for 50 and 60 years. When eligible for 70 years she didn’t get one, because, at the time, there wasn’t one[6]. That, of course, as we shall see shortly, has changed.

Thank you all for, like Phyllis and her father, looking after yourselves and each other so well.

Thank you to everyone at Diabetes NSW-ACT, now part of Diabetes Australia.

[1] Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin: Special Centenary Edition, University of Toronto Press, 2021; p.11.

[2] See, for instance: Louis Rosenfeld, ‘Insulin: Discovery and Controversy’, in Clinical Chemistry, 48:12 (2002), available at: here

[3] Studley Lush (Junior), in ‘100 years of Insulin’ video, available here

[4] ibid. As her son would also later recall: “The minute she had the insulin at the wharf, they gave her half a Sao biscuit which she recalled as one of her greatest meals; she never forgot it”: Studley Lush, quoted in ‘The First Australian to Receive Insulin in 1922’, Diabetes Australia website, available here. It has been claimed Phyllis was the first recipient of insulin in Australia; however, a variety of dates are given for her first injection: ranging from the end of 1922 to sometime in 1923: e.g., ‘The First Australian to Receive Insulin in 1922’, Diabetes Australia website, available here. Another candidate for Australia’s first insulin recipient is Dawson Hanna, who was given a batch of insulin produced in Adelaide by DR Thorburn Robertson on 7 January 1923: see, for instance: ‘Insulin Manufacture’ on The University of Adelaide website, available here

[5] ‘The First Australian to Receive Insulin in 1922’, Diabetes Australia website, available here. In 1992, when Phyllis was in her late 70s, she entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest surviving diabetic, having endured, over the course of her life to that point, a record-breaking 675,000 insulin injections: ‘Australian Diabetic in Record Book’, Canberra Times, 3 February 1992, p.5, available here

[6] ‘The First Australian to Receive Insulin in 1922’, Diabetes Australia website, available here