By Dianne Hall
Published in Women's History Review, January 2026.
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Abstract

This article analyses the networks that were developed by Irish-born women in colonial Australia as they approached childbirth in the 1860s. Although previous historical scholarship has concentrated on the distress and disadvantage that Irish women faced, this article suggests that instead, many of these women consciously established and accessed formal and informal support as they planned for their maternity care. This article uses two data sets from the Australian colony of Victoria to analyse Irish women and their networks of maternal care. One group of sources is narratives of birth attendants recorded through inquests into maternal deaths. While these testimonies of tragedy provide vivid detail of networks of care, they cover only a small number of births, so the records of the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital, a charity hospital serving the poor of inner-city Melbourne, are also analysed. These particularly complete hospital records, although they do not usually include lengthy narratives of births, do include information on a larger number of women than the inquests.