It was scorching hot on the Dubbo oval when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the western New South Wales town on 10 February 1954. A large crowd turned out to see them. Students stood in rows with their teachers. The pageantry had been months in the planning but it was the heat that Kate Crawford, then a primary school student, remembered most.
Crawford and her classmates donned a special uniform for the occasion and waited on the oval, “standing in the scorching heat for hours”, while town dignitaries hosted the young Queen in a specially constructed podium in the shade.
