There were nights in the little West Gippsland town of Neerim South when anxious parents brought ailing children to the only doctors in the village, begging treatment.

Maybe the child needed an appendix removed, or perhaps there’d been an accident requiring surgery.

John Murtagh and his wife Jill, both doctors, had three children of their own, but they never turned anyone away.

They simply asked the concerned parents to stay and look after their sleeping children while they drove their little patient to the new bush nursing hospital down the other end of town.

There, John performed the necessary operation while Jill administered the anaesthetic.

Here then, for a decade during the 1970s, was the quintessential country practice.

The Murtaghs brought babies into the world, treated towns

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