Laura Corbin starts day nursery for children in Adelaide city's poorest south with a stress on health/hygiene in 1887
The last traces of the 1896 South Adelaide Creche building in Gouger Street, Adelaide city, were demolished 100 years later. No image of creche founder Laura Corbin, wife of Dr Thomas Corbin (middle, left) was ever found. The Corbins’ home in King William Street south, Adelaide city, later survived as Muirden Senior College (top right). Her sons John (middle right) and Cecil became doctors after serving in World War I and there were nurses among her daughters (bottom right) who included Elizabeth, Eleanor, Margaret and Dorothy, pictured in 1895.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Laura Corbin, with her husband Dr Thomas Corbin, became prominent in South Australian community service in the later 19th Century.
The Corbins’ community work became most active from the early 1870s when the moved into the large medical practice at 368 King William Street south, Adelaide city, that also was home to their family that grew with eight surviving children. Besides his extensive medical practice, Thomas Corbin was honorary surgeon and board member at the Adelaide Hospital,and the surgeon to the Home for Incurables at Fullarton. He became second president of the South Australian branch of the British Medical Association and his community service including founding the St John Ambulance Association in Adelaide.
The Corbins’ social conscience was heightened by living near Adelaide’s poorest southwest area. Continuing her own family's charitable traditions, in 1876, Laura Corbin, at 35 and having had six of her 10 children, joined Mary Colton and others on the foundation ladies' advisory committee in planning what became Adelaide's Children's Hospital.
Corbin became deeply concerned at the plight of poor mothers, often widows, forced to leave children at home alone, sometimes with tragic consequences, while they worked at charring, laundering or office cleaning. In 1887, Corbin founded the South Adelaide Day Nursery for “taking care of the children of women who go out to work by the day”. It opened with four children in a rented room. Corbin visited city missions to publicise the service. Admissions, staff and facilities gradually increased.
By 1889, weekly attendance at the nursery averaged 41. Babies and children under six, admitted for twopence per day between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., were washed, freshly clothed and given good food and care by carefully-chosen staff. Health and hygiene were paramount considerations and the “sleeping decoctions” some mothers administered were banned.
With her family's backing, Corbin devoted herself to every aspect of management. She presided over the general and house committees, whose pioneering rules were adopted by crèches in other Australian colonies. Despite “disappointments and discouragements”, she persevered, encouraged by the children's wellbeing and mothers' gratitude.”
A visit to Britain and France in 1891, possibly due to her father-in-law’s death the previous year, gave Corbin the chance to study similar children’s care place in London and Paris. This gave rise to the name South Adelaide Crèche that became a “became a colony-wide cause: many, like Port Elliot's needlewomen, giving essential money and gifts in kind. Governors' wives were patrons."
During the 1893 depression admissions temporarily plummeted. Corbin started a soup kitchen and a women's distress relief fund, working hard with Augusta Zadow and Mary Lee, to "organise and distribute necessities to impoverished families.”
In August 1896, in a ceremony watched by thousands, Corbin laid the foundation stone of a distinctive new crèche building, reminiscent of a doll's house, in Gouger Street, Adelaide city, to be built using donations from the popular children's Sunbeam Society.
In 1897, having seen 37,000 admissions, Corbin resigned from her presidency and “labour of love”, taking her last opportunity to protest against employers' long hours for working women. Corbin died of pneumonia aged 65 in 1906 at the Adelaide suburb of Woodville. Ninety years later, the last traces of her heritage listed creche building in Gouger Street were demolished.