ANNETTE Taylor was a bright, active, healthy girl, when a cerebral haemorrhage unfairly took her life only three weeks before her 12th birthday in 1975.

But what her death would lead to was the start of the organ donor program that has since saved hundreds of lives in the ACT.

Annette’s story started when a family friend was a recipient of a donated kidney.

“We knew a chap who had just been given a kidney, about six months before,” Marjorie Taylor, Annette’s mum, told “CityNews”.

“She was very inquisitive to know from him what happened.

“Then she mentioned to me, while I was cooking dinner one night, that she’d like to be an organ donor if anything happened to her.”

Marjorie who was the sole breadwinner of the Taylor family – her husband was a paraplegic – was working in Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s office as a “gopher”.

Annette’s unexpected haemorrhage left her brain dead and forced Marjorie to face the reality they would have to turn off the life support. But Marjorie was also faced with Annette’s wish to be an organ donor.

“It came back to me really suddenly when the doctors told me that she wasn’t going to make it,” Marjorie said.

“Back in ‘75 there wasn’t legislation but I just happened to be working in the Prime Minister’s office and I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“If there’s no legislation, I asked ‘can I have the phone? Can I call my boss?’, at the time it was Gough Whitlam.

“They didn’t ring him, but they did take me very seriously ”

Her request led to a chain reaction of events that saw ACT with its first legislation on organ donation.

“It’s not until the last few years that I realised, gee, I must have really opened Pandora’s box in intensive care at the old Canberra Hospital,” she said.

“Doctors seemed to come out of the woodwork everywhere and they took me rather seriously and over the next three days they said ‘yes, they would be taking her kidneys’.”

One kidney went to a man in Sydney, the other to a 14-year-old boy from Queensland. She has since learnt the man had passed away.

She said when she was told they found two people, it “gave us back a little hope that Annette’s wishes would live on”.

“It gave them a huge opportunity to have a better quality of life and took them off kidney dialysis machines,” she said.

Marjorie has lived a busy life, but it was 10 years ago, after her husband passed away, that she started to work with DonateLife and in particular the DonateLife Walk – Canberra’s largest community activity during DonateLife Week (February 19-26), that promotes organ and tissue donation nationally.

She said it was the first time she really came out and told Annette’s story in full, at times to thousands of people at one time.

“I can really talk about it now without breaking up,” she said. “I have a tear in my eye and my heartache is still there to a degree, but I can tell it how it is.”

She hopes events such as DonateLife will bring the importance of organ donation to the spotlight and encourage other families to have similar kitchen conversations, like the one she had with Annette 37 years ago.

“I can’t stress strongly enough to people to basically talk about it to their families, to their loves ones,” she said.

“To carry out someone’s wish is a privilege… because at the time, and it’s even grown stronger, that we get great comfort, of knowing we fulfilled her last wishes.”

DonateLife Walk has attracted more than 2000 participants in the past. This year, Masterchef’s Alana Lowes will be cooking a free breakfast barbecue.

DonateLife Walk starts at Regatta Point, Commonwealth Park, Lake Burley Griffin at 6.45am for a 7am start on Wednesday, February 22.

To register visit www.giftoflife.asn.au. To become an organ donor visit http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/