In 1919 a Grahamvale schoolgirl was sitting at her desk in Class Seven practising handwriting in her blue exercise book.
The world was still reeling in the aftermath of a brutal war that had cost 20 million lives. Now it was battling an even bigger killer — the great influenza pandemic, or Spanish flu.
Myrtle Pinner's handwriting shows the elegant cursive script practised by young writers using nibs dipped in inkwells long before the Biro and the keyboard arrived to reduce the average person's penmanship to a scribble.
With her flowing hand, 14-year-old Myrtle wrote:
“If the influenza had been looked after with more care it may not have spread so far but this was a hard thing to do because there were people travelling from one part of the world to another.”
More than 100 years later, we are given a window into a familiar moment when a terrifying virus was the subject of conversation everywhere. Myrtle's note becomes both an echo of and a mirror to our own annus horribilis of 2020.
Her schoolbook was found by Myrtle's youngest son Richie when he was sorting through his older sister Katie's possessions with other family members after her death about 15 years ago.
They were among a cache of black and white family photographs, letters and other items from the Pinner and Doherty families kept in a box in Katie's Mason St home in Shepparton.
They are now in the treasured care of Richie's wife Jeanette, an amateur historian who was astounded when she saw the faded school exercise book and its contents.
“They were going to throw all this in the bin. But Richie saw the value in the writing books — they were by his mother, so he kept them.
“When I read her words I thought how relevant they are today. How the virus spread because people travelled everywhere,” Mrs Doherty said.
“I thought, `That's exactly what happened today'. It's just amazing. It's a complete fluke I came across those words. I was researching other family history, but when I saw them, they just jumped out at me because of what we are going through today,” she said.
The exercise book is one of two filled with neatly written compositions on nature, reflections on war, mathematical problems and diagrams, dictations and short prose poems.
“These are valuable not necessarily in monetary terms, but as a record of times gone by — and for our family they are irreplaceable,” Mrs Doherty said.
Myrtle Pinner was born in the Shepparton district in 1905 and lived with her parents George and Matilda and brothers George and Percy on a Grahamvale orchard. Myrtle was just 12 years old when her mother died, forcing her to take on the running of the family home.
Myrtle went on to marry Frank Doherty and they settled in Mason St, Shepparton, where Frank worked at Stuart's bacon factory. The couple had five children before Myrtle lost a long battle with throat cancer and died in 1952. She was just 47 or 48 years old.
Today, her school exercise books provide windows into a world long past, but which sadly is still very much with us.
