Newly constructed hospital 1939 with itas now-instantly recognisable art deco facade
By the early 1950s, the King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women had far outgrown its humble beginnings as a 20-bed unit. A number of building works had been commissioned, including Carson House (1922) and its later extension, the Main Entry building (1939) and the Agnes Walsh Nurses' Home (1952) [https://inherit.dplh.wa.gov.au/public/inventory/printsinglerecord/aaf0f53f-8e48-498c-ba70-d63fa21dcfad Accessed 3rd November 2023].
Like every other women's hospital around the country, KEMH in the postwar years was a hub of activity. The 'baby boom' saw .... babies born at KEMH during ... Historians such as Kerreen Reiger and Janet McCalman have suggested that within this environment, the lack of care paid to women who miscarried or gave birth to deceased babies were more sins of omission rather than sins of commission, and the memoirs of nurses and staff at KEMH from this time attest to this.
Women who lost a baby during this time at King Eddies have recalled that they were not permitted the opportunity to see or hold their infant, and some were not told even such basic information as the child’s sex or any possible explanation behind the infant’s demise.
One woman recalled: Audrey recalled that she was told that her
baby was ‘defective’; a reason which effectively put an end to the conversation: ‘I
remember saying, ‘Why did it happen, doctor?’ And she sort of looked at me and she said,
‘well dear, I can’t tell you this. It’s nature’s way, sometimes, if things aren’t right’. And
they were her words. And I didn’t question her any more’.395
Many
women were placed back on
maternity wards after delivering deceased babies - or within earshot of
the busy postnatal ward. One woman remembered being put in a room with a
younger woman whose baby was being adopted:
We [both] could hear the crying [of babies]. That’s all I remember of the
hospital’.
sedated to prevent ‘unnecessary emotion’ and were, upon returning home, expected to ‘carry on’ with day to day life.
As one mother put it, after her son was stillborn at King Eddies in 1967
‘You went home, and you got on with it, and my friends around the district, you know, lady friends that I was working on the [kindergarten] committee with, they all had young children and they were supportive, I suppose, but it wasn’t something – the first time they’d see you, they’d ask, and say, oh I’m sorry – but you didn’t really talk about it, and I didn’t really talk about it. I didn’t talk about it to a lot of people.'
To make matters worse, oral history suggests that very few women left hospital knowing how and where their infant was buried, having had little or no input into these important decisions.[i]It was, as one woman in her nineties whose first son was stillborn in 1940 said, ‘as if [they] had never existed’.
Another recalled her experience at KEMH thus:
I had identical girls, was never asked if I wanted to see the babies and they took them away very quickly. I regretted that I didn’t ask to see them. I think they believed that what you didn't see … you wouldn’t miss them. A few days later the matron came down to see me and asked me to fill out applications for birth and death certificates. When I said I needed to make arrangements for the funeral the matron said, ‘Oh, don’t you know, there won't be any funeral.’ She told me that the babies had been disposed of. When I asked what did that mean, she said, ‘you don't want to know.’ Apparently I was one week gestation off what was considered ‘human life’……… a bit bizarre. [And] that was it. Later I did ask a nurse and was told that they put them in the hospital incinerator.
Certainly it would be wrong to attribute callousness or indifference towards staff working in such a busy hospital as King Eddies, in a different social and cultural context than today.
There are a number of possible explanations for this widespread silence around miscarriage and stillbirth during the postwar years – and, indeed, surrounding death in general in Western Australia. Historians have attributed this culture of ‘death avoidance’ to a number of factors: the growing Western rejection of religious ideals of eternal life; the medicalising of death, so that most people were shielded from death which previously had happened in the home; to the sheer tragedy and overwhelming loss of the two world wars bookending the deprivations of the Great Depression. All cultures have proscribed norms as to what constitutes ‘appropriate’ responses to the death of a loved one; the great losses of the two world wars completely shifted the way that Australians publicly mourned their dead, which flowed into the private language of grief. Public displays of grief became seen as indulgent in the light of the massive loss of life in the Great War; grief then became expected to be restrained and stoic, what Ken Inglis has called ‘spartan sorrow’.
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