Fifty years later and Fay Redhead is still a member of the Blayney Hospital Auxiliary.

“As a doctor’s wife I had an interest in the hospital, I wasn’t a nurse or anything, the other doctor, Dr Bruce Jones and his wife Elaine Jones bought me along for the first time,” she said.

They could have been described as the original tree-changers when Mrs Redhead and her husband Harris ‘Chip’ Redhead moved here from Lane Cove and established themselves in Millthorpe.

In the days before social media and the internet, they immersed themselves into the community by becoming active participants in it.

“We had all our children here and they all went to the school here so that was what you did in those days when you were new to town, you got involved with the school groups.” 

So that Dr Redhead was closer to the hospital, the family moved down to Blayney and became active in establishing the current high school.

“The school was here and we wanted our children to stay here so we both worked to get a full high school here so that they didn’t have to go to Orange or Bathurst to finish their schooling,” she said.

As the Hospital Auxiliary’s historian, Mrs Redhead can access visual records of most of what the group has achieved.

“I have three albums of the history of the auxiliary and it shows the progress from this little cottage that it was and how it was enlarged before it was ultimately torn down and the new one was built,” she said.

The albums are full of images of fetes and presentations and many of the current members can be found amongst them.

‘We used to have an annual fete and a lot of the town groups would support it,” she said, “like the Lion’s Club that we had then and Rotary would come as well.” 

Mrs Redhead has been an executive on the auxiliary for 46 of her 50 years beginning as secretary / treasurer for 13 years, four as secretary, 13 as president, 10 as vice-president and now treasurer for her sixth year.

Like many other organisations like the auxiliary, membership numbers are dwindling.

“It’s very sad but when I joined I was a young mum with small children but women these days, they’re all working, it’s a different life altogether,” she said. “My friends were all stay at home mothers and it was only a few that would go out to work.” 

The auxiliary meet at the hospital day care centre on the third Wednesday of the month.