An Australian welfare first but Adelaide's destitute asylum from 1856 a sorry end of the line for poor women
The destitute asylum (at left) viewed from North Terrace, Adelaide city, in about 1869. The mounted police barracks are at right.
Image by B. Goode & Co., courtesy State Library of South Australia
The lying-in hospital, to care for destitute pregnant women, was part of South Australia’s 19th Century destitute asylum, a large complex set up from the 1850s off North Terrace, Adelaide city, and a welfare first by Australian governments.
No other agency at that time in South Australia was prepared to take on looking after destitute pregnant women. Over the lying-in hospital’s 30 years, 1,678 babies were born there.
In the 1850s, the South Australian province’s government had to deal with 3,000 men, women and children needing poverty relief. This poverty came from excess female immigration that pushed down wages. A failed grain harvest increased unemployment and many wives were deserted by their husbands leaving for the Victorian goldfields.
The destitute asylum grew from the 1850s into a large complex clustered around three quadrangles with a collection of buildings described as “largely official Jacobean imitation”. A board was set up in 1849 to superintend the “relief of the destitute poor” and to manage the asylum that was started in 1852.
In 1856, the destitute asylum, the first of its kind in the Australian colonies, was providing “indoor relief” to 65 women, 30 men and 43 children. Fifteen of those women were in the final stages of pregnancy or recovering from childbirth. Ten had the added stigma of being unmarried. Until the lying-in hospital was completed in 1878, destitute pregnant women had no place specifically provided for them.
Single women – often in domestic service – had to content with the paternity of babies being denied by claims that the mothers were prostitutes. The cost of raising their child was often beyond single mothers. Many women terminated their pregnancies or killed their babies. If convicted for this, they could be hanged but the sentence was automatically commuted to imprisonment with hard labour. If a woman decided to have her baby, it would, in many cases, be given up to “baby farmers”.
Besides the old and sick, poor pregnant women and abandoned children, the superintendent, matron, and attendants also lived at the asylum complex.
Asylum inmates had to wear a uniform and to rise, eat and sleep at set times. The able-bodied were obliged to work; men in the asylum gardens and women in the traditional pursuits of cooking and sewing.
Inmates were only permitted to leave the premises one afternoon a week. They were allowed to see visitors for three hours every Wednesday. Parents were allowed to see their children for two hours once a month.