June Opie was twenty-one when she contracted polio in Cairo on her way to England in 1947. She spent two years in a London hospital. Against terrible odds, June recovered from full-body paralysis and learned to walk again, albeit on crutches and with both legs in callipers.
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Opie wrote her autobiography Over My Dead Body after her return to New Zealand in 1957 as a thank you to the St Mary’s Hospital staff and her friends in London. It became an international best-seller within days of publication.
It is a narrative in which courage, pluck, and optimism help overcome debilitating disease. The story traverses her illness, her paralysis and confinement in the dreaded, but life-saving, iron lung, and her slow but triumphant recovery. |
Over My Dead Body was picked up for serial publication by The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
Editor Jean Wishart called it “one of the finest books we have ever serialised”. Opie’s story, said Wishart, “might have been considered morbid, depressing, monotonous or sad, yet it is none of these things. Instead, it is a rare blend of courage and humour—and most of the courage is to be found between the lines, for the writer makes it clear in a matter-of-fact sort of way that she has no time for self-pity.”
The Woman’s Weekly published photographs of the decorous and pretty Miss Opie. From the adoring letters to the editor from readers, it is evident that her character and determination inspired a generation of New Zealanders still living with the effects of polio.1
June Opie, born in Mokau in 1926, died of cancer in Sydney, Australia in 1999, aged 73. In her words, "I can never get the blood of the wild Mokau River out of my veins."
See Rhonda Bartle's Puke Ariki Taranaki Story, Over My Dead Body – the June Opie Story
To locate the cache...
Visit June Opie's grave (STAGE1)
Her epitaph is in two blocks of three lines each
Add the number of letters SSS in the last line of her epitaph to the South minutes
Deduct the number of letters EEE in first four words of the first line from the East minutes
South 38° 41.661+SSS East 174° 37.059-EEE = Final
The nearby seat offers a place for quiet contemplation with a beautiful view, so you too can appreciate, 'the river, the trees and all those things of the wild landscape.'
1Lucy Hunter. © 2017 University of Otago, Medical Humanities. July 4, 2016 .
Available at: The inert body alive on the page: June Opie’s Over My Dead Body Accessed: October 29, 2017