Nola Wong

It’s my 50th year of midwifery in 2021 and I’m pleased to be part of this project as I’m fascinated by our Australian midwifery history.

In 2015 I graduated with a Masters of Health Research by thesis after completing a quantitative research project titled: “Getting the First Birth Right: A Retrospective study of outcomes for low-risk primiparous women receiving standard care versus midwifery model of care in the same hospital”. This only confirmed what we already knew!

I wrote and edited a book: A Birth Centre for Canberra, which was self-published in 2018. I decided to write about the history of Canberra’s Birth Centre because it was such a contentious project and took some years and many tears to come to fruition. The Birth Centre continues to thrive and is in its second location since the Centenary Hospital for Women & Children was completed in 2012.

I have a valuable copy of a book written by a historian in my home town of Crookwell: A Good Pair of Hands, which records stories about the ‘granny midwives’ in that area in the 1800s