The Australian Women's Register

Pam Peters was educated at Girton College (now Pembroke) in Adelaide. At sixteen she began to visit the Lords, family friends living at Thackaringa Station in New South Wales, 40km from Broken Hill. She and John Lord became firm friends and were married several years later, in 1948, at St Peter’s College Chapel in Adelaide. Pam willingly gave up her university Arts course and moved to Thackaringa to take on the role of station-owner’s wife, a world apart from the Adelaide social scene of beach holidays and Friday night dances. Already a competent horse rider, she relished station life and soon turned her hand to cooking for eight men, cranking the engine for electricity and, on the odd occasion, dispatching poisonous snakes. John and Pam had two children, Sally and David. After several years of South Australian school correspondence lessons they attended boarding school in Adelaide.

Pam Lord joined the Royal Flying Doctor Service Women’s Auxiliary in 1965, volunteering for hospital visits. In those early years she was delegated to provide patients with cakes and sweets, toiletries and even cigarettes, or to run errands for them and write letters on their behalf. As the number of Auxiliary members dwindled, Pam became the sole hospital visitor for the Auxiliary in Broken Hill, remaining in this role until she was in her eighties. Today the Auxiliary has a stronger focus on fundraising and finds terrific support in this endeavour from Broken Hill residents. In 2008, it was able to raise $65,000 for the Flying Doctor Service. One of the Auxiliary’s biggest fundraising campaigns is the Christmas Pudding Drive – 25 women bake for two weeks to produce and sell 2,000 Christmas puddings. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in January 2009 for service to the Broken Hill community, particularly through the Base Hospital and the Royal Flying Doctor Service Women’s Auxiliary.

In 2018, John and Pam Lord celebrated their platinum wedding anniversary – 70 years.