An estimated 40,000 were infected between the 1930s and 1960s, many died while others were left disabled by the muscle-debilitating disease, and many developed scoliosis, a curvature of the spine.

Robert Cook, of Cronulla, remembers lying in a hospital bed for months on end as a nine-year-old.

"I still have memories of being beside children who died,'' he said.

"You'd wake up in the morning, and they'd be dead ... horrible.''

The first polio vaccine was introduced in 1956, followed by mass government-funded immunisation programs.

Australia is now effectively free of the disease but for some of the afflicted, like Mr Cook, the effects of polio will always be with them.

A retired architect, Mr Cook has lived his life with one leg paralysed and the other partially paralysed as a result of childhood polio.

But the impairment has not ended there.

Forty years after he was stricken with polio, Mr Cook said he discovered new things happening to his body.

A doctor he visited confirmed he had post-polio syndrome and advised him to ``get a wheelchair, sit in it and get used to it, because it's what's going to happen to you''.

"I thought she was mad,'' Mr Cook said. "My universal answer to everything was to just try harder.''

But after five years of ignoring his doctor's warnings, Mr Cook said everything she predicted would happen, did.

He is now wheelchair-bound, and at 65, cannot walk, drive, stand or breathe without the help of a ventilator for 20 hours a day.

He is effectively housebound and reliant on carers. It is estimated that between one and two-thirds of polio survivors will develop post-polio syndrome, with effects ranging from carpal tunnel syndrome, muscle fatigue, and pain in muscles and joints to breathing difficulties and loss of muscle bulk.

Have you been affected by polio? Tell us your story.

Gary Buchanan, who grew up at Yowie Bay, has posted his first-hand account of childhood polio in the 1950s at

www.post-polionetwork.org.au/stories/puddles.html