18/08/2026
🥰 Lovely reading everyone's memories of Dr Pillay, who served as Minyip's Doctor back in the 1960s.
Minyip Progress Association Minyip - What's On?
Today my father would have turned 100. He came to Australia in 1948 to study medicine at the University of Adelaide.
He graduated in 1955 and worked in England, Scotland, Malaya and Singapore before coming back to Australia. The clipping is from January 1962. Minyip, in the Wimmera, population 800, ten beds. He was the only doctor. My English mother was only 23, and her family were in the UK, when travel to Australia meant weeks on a boat.
Before I was born, they returned to Adelaide and built a house in Paradise, an Italian area surrounded by market gardens that are now houses. He learnt Italian and looked after the local migrant Italian community, at a time when almost no GP in Adelaide spoke Italian. We were often paid in produce, more than we could eat.
He practised at Glynde for 55 years. Patients have told me he delivered them, and that he delivered their mother.
He worked seven days a week. I do not recall a single day, Christmas included, without home visits. His patients knew they could ask him to come to their house, and at the end of a long clinic he would go, coming home to eat after everyone else, or eating with us and heading out again.
He operated at Modbury and North Eastern Community Hospital when GPs still did obstetrics, hernias, appendicectomies and tonsillectomies.
He was still going to hospital grand rounds in his eighties. He never stopped learning, a habit I gratefully inherited.
He died nine years ago. People still stop me to tell me what he did for their family. Recently a woman I have never met messaged me to ask whether her childhood doctor was my father. She wanted me to know she was still grateful for the care he gave her family.
His grandson is now the third generation of our family to study medicine at Adelaide University, 78 years after my father arrived.
A note on the clipping. He was Sri Lankan. His parents had migrated from Sri Lanka to Malaysia. And for anyone doing the arithmetic, the paper had his age a year out.
West Wimmera Health Service Australian Medical Association RACGP Australian Medical Association - SA North Eastern Community Hospital
