MIDWIVES OF THE BLACK SOIL PLAINS

Illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings and maps.

The black soil plains of western New South Wales were occupied by graziers from the middle of the nineteenth century, and, where flocks and herds were taken, shepherds and stockmen and teamsters and drovers followed, as did gold prospectors, railway workers, policemen and school teachers and their wives, daughters and other womenfolk. Towns were small and surrounded by isolated properties and communities of displaced Aboriginal people.

Dr Mavis Gaff-Smith has written a careful history of the midwives, trained in hospitals or trained only by experience, who set up private ‘lying-in’ establishments to cater for the needs of birthing women in Warren and Nevertire in an era when a woman was too often alone at the most crucial moment of her child’s life.