Writing
the lives of midwives on the Mid North Coast (see fuller description of my my
long years of research on my website at: Midwives of the Mid North Coast of New
Sout Wales, Australia)
Macleay Argus
4 January, 1924
As I draw near to the final stages of my research
and writing about the lives and careers of midwives (and nurses), and their
private maternity hospitals, I find myself sometimes catching a glimpse
of who they were...I chart their lives on the mid north coast towns where they
worked as this is the focus of my study. But, to understand
them a little more and fill in their lives, I also sketch in their beginnings,
some family information, their training,
and the many moves they had to make to find work in the years 1890s through to
the 1940s. And I do look at what happened to them when they left the mid
north coast as these women were highly mobile and always looking for their next
appointment.
I am struck always by their resourcefulness, their willingness to accept
change, their strength and their endurance as they sometimes changed
places/towns and employment sometimes yearly, always often. One example is
Clara Armitage who was the licensee and resident manager of Kendall Lying
In Hospital (a small village near Port Macquarie, NSW) from 1920 to 1926. She
then returned to Sydney where she worked in Hurlstone Park (1927), Marrickville
(1928), Coogee (1929), Arncliffe (1930-31), and then moved to the country town
of Guyra (1932-1937). Clara was single and was 84 when she died a few short
years later in1941. She had been working
and delivering babies and caring for women all of her life.
Clara is just one of the 200 women’s stories which
will be part of my Historical Biography of these women. But as I attempt to
fill in these final pages and write how these women were I do have a sense of them, some idea of who they were, a glimpse of
them in my mind’s eye, so many of them passing but real in that ghostly, fading past. It is so important that they are remembered, these indefatigable women who gave so much to local communities and are still, in many cases, remembered by those communities today.
I will publish my book Women's Business: Midwives
on the Mid North Coast of NSW, (a historical biograpy of the Hastigns, Macleay
and Armidale regions to 1950) in 2017. Updates will be posted on my blog and my website at: www.writingfamilyhistory.com.au
