Dressed in well-pressed uniforms, a group of nurses formed a guard of honour outside the new Maitland Hospital outpatients wing on 7 November 1942. Proud to be present at such an historic event, the Governor of NSW, Lord Wakehurst and Lady Wakehurst began by inspecting the guard, then unveiled a plaque to commemorate the hospital’s […]
It was a proud moment for Gordon Lindsay when he was presented with this trophy for breaking his schools’ record for the under 14 ‘hop, step and jump’ (triple jump). It was 13 December 1939, and though it was a hot evening, every seat in the West Maitland Town Hall was filled for the annual […]
The Inebriates Act of 1912 enabled involuntary admission of alcohol dependent people to institutional, or hospital, care. From 1929, Morisset Hospital was one of seven public facilities in NSW authorised to receive ‘inebriates’ into the dedicated Ward 1. Within professional circles alcoholism was viewed as a disease to be cured rather than a crime to […]
After returning home each evening, weary from work, Morpeth furniture craftsman Joseph George White (1822-1912) probably followed the fashion of his fellow Victorian era gentlemen. Retreating to a quiet room in his home after dinner, he probably put on a smoking jacket and this smoking cap. But did he then light up a pipe and […]
Mothers regularly pushed their prams up the ramp of the local courthouse in 1950s Morpeth. But it was not a judge and jury that they were to there to see—it was a baby health nurse. In this unlikely place from 1954, about ten years after the the building had been closed as a court house, […]
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