Scores of bacteria can hitch a ride on an ambulance and back in the day ambulances had their own special car wash to rid them of disease carrying germs. In Herberton’s pioneering days, after a call-out the ambulance would drive into the fumigating room. Everyone would leave, the room would be sealed and sulphur fumes or another decontaminate pumped in. Today it’s more mop and bucket and cleaning rag.

The fumigation room at the Historic Village Herberton was once part of the old Atherton Ambulance Brigade station and more recently was the official entrance to the village – with the doors removed.

It sits alongside a 1926 rail ambulance, used in Queensland remote communities from 1919 onwards to get injured or sick people to hospital quickly and efficiently, and when roads were impassable. They were used up until the 1990s in some Queensland towns.