When Jubilee House opened its doors at our Parafield Gardens site four decades ago, a young woman from five minutes down the road walked in on the very first day and never really left. Her name was Kay Freer, and in a sector where long service is unusual, her 40-year milestone sparks curiosity and deserves celebration.
It turns out she didn’t arrive with a grand plan. Kay simply saw a new nursing home being built and thought she’d apply. “I’d done some domiciliary care and nursing in the country,” she says. “So, I put in a resume expecting to hear something in six months. A fortnight later, I got told I was going to start.”
She began as a catering assistant, back when meals arrived cold from North Adelaide and were reheated in wall ovens. They catered for three lunch sittings at noon, twelve thirty and one o’clock. Jubilee House was small then – around 45 residents, most fairly independent – and Kay rotated between there and Ruth Eaton every three months. “We got to know all the residents,” she says. “It was nice.”
The early days were full of community colour. “Visitors used to come in for craft sessions such as ceramics, jewellery and painting. And each year we held a fête out in the carpark. There were stalls selling all sorts of things – fairy floss, hot dogs and all the beautiful craft. The money made would then go back into Helping Hand. Everyone at the organisation celebrated these days. We’d take the residents out for a look and a shop, and the public would attend too.”
It was an event that kept on giving. At Christmas time, unsold items would be given to staff as gifts. “I’ve still got my Christmas earrings,” says Kay. “They’re plum puddings.”
She fondly recalls the weekend barbecues that used to take place from time to time. They’d set up in the garden with residents helping cook and arguing over who did it best. “Everyone would have a sausage and bread or something like that, and some drinks, followed by an ice cream in a cone. It was wonderful.”
All jobs bring their challenges, and only a few years into her role, Jubilee House flooded on New Year’s Eve. Staff were called on to move residents – beds and all – into the dining room. “We sang to them and joked around,” she remembers. It took about a week to get everything sorted and put them all back in their rooms.
Across the decades, Kay has done “a bit of everything”: laundry, maintenance, afternoons, linen collection and kitchen work. Her current title is Hotel Services Assistant, which she says is quite similar to the role she started out doing, preparing and plating up food. Her favourite part of the job happens when she’s collecting dishes or moving between areas. It’s chatting with residents.
Kay loves hearing about their lives and learning from what they did and didn’t do. “I think the older people are a bit more tolerant,” she says. “Kids these days think they’re hard done by if their phone dies! Some of them are missing out by not hearing what the older generations have been through.”
When Kay was preparing for a 2015 trip to Gallipoli, several residents assisted her. Mr Piro, an Italian gentleman, helped her practice his native tongue for her side trip to Rome. “When I brought him back a little fridge magnet he started crying.” Another resident, a WWII veteran like her parents, helped her to understand what her father’s medals were for.
Outside of work, Kay married, raised three children and spent years deeply involved in Scouts as a Cub leader. She still owns the camera she bought when she started nursing and can often be spotted clicking away like a snap-happy tourist, capturing just about everything.
At 72, she’s still energetic, bored easily and hates being on her own. Perhaps that’s why she owns over 200 teddy bears and has no plans to stop collecting. “They need to have a character that speaks to me,” she says. She jokes with staff that when she eventually moves in, she’ll need “a room for myself and a room for my teddy bears.”
After 40 years of dedicated service, she’s just about earned them both.
