Harriet Stirling and School for Mothers steer South Australia to world's lowest infant mortality in 1937
The School for Mothers, founded in Adelaide city by Harriet Stirling with Helen Mayo and Lucy Morice, became the Mothers and Babies Health Association (MBHA) in 1926 and helped cut South Australia's infant mortality in 1937 to the lowest in the world.
Harriet Adelaide Stirling, eldest daughter of Edward Charles and Jane Stirling, contributed greatly to the health and wellbeing of many South Australians through her efforts for mothers and babies.
Stirling’s remarkable father had a significant role in South Australian medicine, science and politics. including as the first parliamentarian in Australasia to introduce a bill for women’s suffrage.
Harriet Stirling had an excellent education through her wealthy background and was encouraged to pursue wide interests. She was born in London in 1878, and in 1881, her parents took her and her two younger sisters back to South Australia, where they lived first in North Adelaide and then at St Vigeans, near Stirling in the Adelaide Hills. The Stirling girls (eventually five) were taught at home by a well-respected German governess.
Although Harriet Stirling never married, she devoted herself to children’s welfare. In this, she was inspired by her father, who’d worked as a surgeon at the Belgrave Hospital for Children in London and kept an interest in paediatrics while professor of physiology at Adelaide University.
Harriet Stirling’s friends included many influential South Australian women, such as Catherine Helen Spence and Dr Helen Mayo. Spence formed the State Children’s Council with support from Harriet Stirling whose father was its first president. Harriet herself was on the council from 1907 and its president 1922-26. Some orphaned wards of state were taken under her wing at her family’s St Vigeans property.
In 1914, Stirling was appointed an honorary commissioner “to inquire into and report upon the question of the Control and Management of State and Neglected Children in Great Britain and on the Continent of Europe’”. From that, she wrote a “A review of some of the agencies in use in saving child life in South Australia”.
Determined to decrease infant mortality by improving nutrition and hygiene in South Australia, Stirling and her friends Helen Mayo and Lucy Morice held a public meeting in 1909 at Franklin Street (Adelaide city) kindergarten that led to a School for Mothers. Earlier, Mayo had presented a paper on infant mortality that raised general awareness of many of the problems faced by mothers. A visit and lecture by a worker from St Pancras School for Mothers in London inspired the Adelaide school.
In 1912, the state government helped the school with £100 to rent premises in Wright Street, Adelaide city, that developed into the School for Mothers' Institute and Baby Health Centre. By 1926, there were 39 clinics providing services to mothers and babies in South Australia and the organisation was renamed the Mothers and Babies’ Health Association in 1926.
The School for Mothers and its consequences led to South Australia having the lowest infant mortality rate in the world in 1937, and saw the founding of Torrens House in 1938. The work of the School for Mothers eventually became Child and Youth Health.
Stirling and Mayo also were concerned that children under two weren’t admitted to the Adelaide Children’s Hospital except for surgery. From 1913, they campaigned for a babies’ ward to be added to the Children’s Hospital and, when refused, set up their own hospital for babies in 1914. This later was taken over by the government and moved to Woodville as Mareeba Babies’ Hospital in 1917. Harriet Stirling was actively involved with framing the policy for this hospital, as well as being its secretary.
Harriet Stirling lived in the St Vigeans family home near Stirling in the Adelaide Hills until her widowed mother died in 1936, and the house was sold. She later established her own home nearby, commissioning prominent architect Eric McMichael to build Brothock at the top of Birch Road. Brothock was named after the tiny stream next to the village of St Vigeans, Scotland, where her grandfather (Edward Stirling senior) had studied.
