awarded a posthumous OAM in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Rural doctors of many years seem to have a special kind of dedication, and this was most certainly the case for the late Dr Keith Beck, who received an OAM in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honour List.
Dr Beck was awarded his OAM for ‘service to medicine through a range of roles’, but will be known best to those in the local region as a committed GP in Delegate during the 1950s.
Having a remarkably long career, Dr Beck worked as a GP right up until he was 85, but his daughter, Denise McCarthy says that it was his initial years in Delegate that kept him practicing in the country for most of his life.
“Dad and mum didn’t know what they were getting into, leaving Sydney for Delegate in 1952, but they loved their six years there,” Denise said.
“They had just married. Dad got a bit of money from his father-in-law and bought a little Morris, and they drove down to Melbourne for their honeymoon, and then up to Delegate. They lived in a place opposite the school there.”
Denise remembers a number of family names from Delegate and said there were many funny stories to tell from those years, including his house calls, and people paying him in milk, fruit and vegetables.
