English News

Visit from Gary Marrs

Year 12 English students are currently studying Joan London’s novel The Golden Age which partly explores the impact of polio and is set in Perth in 1954.

On Tuesday 23rd May Gary Marrs, a local Mitcham resident, came to speak to Mrs White’s English class about his experience of catching polio when he was only eight.  Later in life Gary became a teacher and he used all his classroom skills to give a vivid and engrossing account of his experiences.  Students were amazed to hear that in the initial stages of the disease Gary was not even able to open his eyes and had to live in an iron lung for 8 months so that he could breathe.  He recounted how, unlike the students in the novel, he received no education for over a year and when he recovered he went initially to a school for the handicapped where minimal education occurred.  He explained how the illness changed his life, but he doesn’t regret that he caught it as it made him who he is today.  Oddly, his wife now plays tennis with the very nurse who looked after him when he was in an iron lung in the 1950s.  Gary is pictured here with Emily Butcher of 12B.