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00:11Penny: This podcast was recorded at the Richmond Library on unceded, stolen Aboriginal land, the land of the Wurunjeri people of the Kulin Nations. We pay our respects to their elders past and present.

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00:31 Hello, welcome to In Welcome to In Those Days a podcast where we talk about yesterday’s news today. My name's Penny Tangey and my co-host is Christina Adams. We use the National Library of Australia's digitized newspapers in Trove to explore personal history with a guest.

And we recorded this episode in the Richmond Library Makerspace as part of their artist in residence program. So thanks to Yarra Council and the staff of Richmond Library for their support.

In this episode we are gonna read articles from Trove about the first years of baby health services and maternal education in Richmond.

This is a very, very personal topic for me because I was living in Richmond when I became a mother. And having a baby completely changed my relationship with the suburb. I went from not knowing any of my neighbours or people in the local community to saying hello to multiple people as I walked down the street.

I was living in a small apartment so I felt like I needed to get out a lot and walking around with a pram and I just found that people were much more friendly and open to talking to me than they were before. And also, I was just there more.

So in the first part of this episode I talk to one of the friends I met at my Richmond Mothers Group, Jo Rosenberg. Also gonna be talking to my friend Vaya Pashos who had a very different experience of New Parents Group when she had her first baby in 2020.

In the second part of the episode, Christina and I speak with historian, Carla Pascoe Leahy, and she's written a book called ‘Becoming a mother’, which is a history of what she calls matrescence, or becoming a mother in Australia. Now Carla is a proper oral historian. I've found, to be honest, that the interview with her became a little bit of a debrief for me on why and how talking to people to people about becoming a mother can be tricky and difficult and it really explained why she is the expert in oral history and I am an amateur just bumbling around. Maybe I should have talked to Carla first, before I talked to other people. Maybe Carla should be the one doing a podcast. But you know, you do the best you can.

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02:51 Penny: I'm here today with my friends, Vaya and Jo. Jo is someone that I've known for about well, I know exactly how long I've known her for because I've known her for 11 years because that's how old our children are.

Vaya: Awww.

Penny: Because we had our, first babies basically at the same time and we're in the same mother's group. And Jo's also an editor and a publisher. Hi, Jo.

Jo: Hi, Penny.

Penny: Thanks for joining us here.

Jo: Such a pleasure. I wish it could be in person.

Penny: And I've also got Vaya Pashos here

Vaya: Hi.

Penny: Who is I've known for even longer.

Vaya: Oh, that's right. I just don't have I just don't have a child at that age to time the exact meeting.

Penny: Yeah. Exactly. And we used to do comedy together, so that's how how we knew each other. But I've got them both here today because I wanted you're both people who've lived in Richmond.

Vaya: Yeah.

Penny: And we're gonna be talking about maternal child health services in Richmond. But we've all used those services, not necessarily in Richmond, but we've all got kids now. So we've all been through that process. So I thought it would be interesting to look back on how that all started. So, Jo, I thought I'd start off. Do you remember our first mother's group meeting?

Jo: I remember oh, they've sort of blurred into each other. There were a few at the actual maternal child health center. Even 6 or something like that?

Penny: Yeah. Because the first ones are sort of organized for you.

Jo: Yeah. That's right.

Penny: It's a kind of a government finds you a friend program.

Vaya: Yeah. During one of the most difficult times in your life.

Penny: It's like, yeah. 'We think you're probably a bit lonely, so we found some people for you to talk to.' But it I mean, that's I mean, it was good for me.

Jo: Yeah. It was it was pretty good. One of the things I really remember though was that we became homeless very quickly.

Penny: And that's oh, that's right.

Jo: There was nowhere for us to meet. Like, we tried so many different places after we got kicked out of the centre itself because, you know, they moved on to other groups. We looked for a new place to meet for ages. And because it was Richmond, you know, we all had really small houses and no-one

Penny: We couldn't go to anyone's house. And a lot of the cafes were were like they were small. And there was we were a big group. There were, like, 12 of us. And so 12 well we were all mothers with prams. It's a big ask. And we'd be wanting to stay for a while as well. So

Jo: Yeah. That's right.

Penny: Remember that time we went to that pub?

Jo: Yes. Yeah. We went to was it the Precinct? Is that what it was called?

Vaya: Oh, no. Yeah. Saturday night, mother's group.

Penny: It was, like, 11 o'clock in the morning or something.

Jo: Yeah. That's how desperate we were. We tried

Penny: And I just remember the carpet was really sticky and, like, we were putting down, like, mats and blankets for the babies and just feeling like, this is probably not

Vaya: The Precinct knows desperation. Don't worry.

Penny: Exactly. At least they let us in.

Jo: But probably never that kind of desperation. Like, 12 mothers looking for a home to exchange birth stories.

Vaya: They should they should run them and have time so that the clubbers are leaving and then the mothers groups are arriving. So the people that are on the prowl

Jo: I think it's a business opportunity for them for sure.

Vaya: People that are on the prowl for starting their own families can just see a glimpse of their future.

Penny: But the other the other side of it was that, like, after the babies were about, I don't know, 6 months old or something, we started to have nights. We went out for drinks in the evening. We did get a little bit overexcited on those occasions.

Jo: I think we yeah. We we got kicked out of several establishments.

Vaya: Oh wow.

Penny: Because we were always going out, like, on a Wednesday night or something. It'd be 10:30, and they were like, 'Okay. Time to go'. And, you know, someone would be I just ordered another bottle of champagne and

Vaya: Yeah. Because 10:30 is when you get your me time as a young parent. You're like, oh, knock off time. Yes.

Penny: Yeah everyone had put in a lot of planning to be able to be there, so didn't wanna just stay for 45 minutes and go home. I want to ask you though, Vaya, because you had a completely different experience. Because we were lucky we had our babies in 2,012, and you chose

Vaya: 2020, I chose. So get ready to feel bad because check your privilege with your 12 mother strong contingent.

Penny: I know it was so lucky.

Vaya: So I didn't choose, firstly. I just let nature tell me when it was time. And I was thrilled in 2019 when I realized I would be giving birth to a child in 2020. I'm like

Penny: It's gonna be so easy to calculate their age.

Vaya: What a cool birthday! 2020. And as we moved into it, I was like, oh, this is gonna be suddenly the only good thing about this birth. But, not to drag everyone back through where we were in May of 2020, late May, but, our mother's group well, New Parents' Group, I must say, NPG, is what they're all saved as in my phone.

Penny: And I and I think that's really great that that's changed.

Vaya: And because of the circumstances, being that, we were remote. We had to be remote because of lockdowns. Our first new parents group was over Microsoft Teams, which you WE might as well have been broadcasting on a loaf of bread because we it was really hard to hear each other. People were cutting in and out, and we were all sort of desperately clinging on to the idea that there were other people in our scenario. May what we'll glean what we can from this.

And then one day, my partner just started looking at the backgrounds of some of the other people on the screen, and it was mostly a lot of the dads would come along. I don't know about any other. I think most of the family units were typical mum and dad family unit from what I could tell. And one day, my partner just said, oh, look at Luke and Eleanor's background. They've got board games, they've got cats, they look fun. We should organize a meet a walk with them.

And we couldn't do it all together, so we decided to go 1 parent. we had to go 1 parent, 1 kid, 1 parent, 1 kid. So it turned out that KB and Luke were both free one day and they went on a walk with the babies. So the dads got to meet before the mums did, which was nice because often

Penny: That is nice.

Vaya: Yeah. Yeah. The mums do the mental load of making new friendships. And then I met Eleanor, and our babies became instant forced best friends.

And it turns out they're probably the people I see the most out of my wider young parent community. Because of our proximity in the 5k zone that we were in, I missed out on a lot of the community of relos that were across town and connecting with them and a lot of friends that were going through what they were going through. And so, yeah, I saw them in parks more than I've seen a lot of people in the last few years.

Penny: Yeah. And I think there's something about having, a little baby. And when you have kids, suddenly being close to people is one of the most important things.

Jo: You can only get out for half an hour at a time sometimes.

Penny: Yeah. And just the ability to, like, going, I feel like doing something now, but I can't I couldn't have said that yesterday that I would want to do this now. And so if someone's close by, you can do that.

Vaya: And and often with your mother's group people, you sort of start to learn the patterns of, okay, this person's child naps, this person's child doesn't nap. So I know I can reach out to this person, and we can go have a quick walk around the block or park visit or a cafe whenever that became available. But often, it's harder to check-in with, say, friends that work or friends that don't have kids or family you don't haven't seen in a while because it felt like a big production number.

Penny: Exactly.

Vaya: To make that happen. Whereas you could just quickly text your NPG Eleanor and say, 'do you wanna go to the park?'

Penny: Yeah. Exactly. And that's definitely what Jo and I used to do and other people from mother's group as well. I mean, we were lucky because we could have those regular meetups. But after the 1st couple of years, it was more sort of spontaneous things.

Vaya: Yeah. I did actually run into, the other day at the pool, one of the so I did and I was in charge of the WhatsApp group, which I didn't want to, but no one else put their hand up. And it was it was a lot. We were all going through a stressful time, and we all dropped off that group eventually. But I did, at the pool the other day, run into one of the other mUms, and she'd had baby number 2.

And so it was a wonderful moment of reunion, just going, 'oh my goodness'. I'd never met her

Penny: Oh, that's lovely.

Vaya: Because we'd only seen each other on the screen. And I just said to her, '2020, eh. That was that was a lot to deal with.' But it was nice. It was a nice moment in the wild, in the community.

Penny: Yeah. We had our 10 year reunion recently. Oh. And quite a few people came.

Jo: No children.

Penny: Oh, god. No. No. No. No. No. No. And we got kicked out of the restaurant, I think in the end.

Jo: Yes, we did. Yeah. Continuing a fine tradition.

Vaya: Well, I think it is there's quite a lovely thing that happens where the children are kind of irrelevant to each other, really. They just are like, oh, yeah, I'll play near you, but it's the mums that form the friendship or the parents that form the friendship.

Penny: Yeah. Absolutely. So that was all organized through the maternal child health nurse service.

Vaya: Yes.

Penny: The mothers group aspect of that is kind of relatively new, probably in the last 30 years they've started doing that. But the health center the baby health centers have been going since the early 20th century.

Vaya: Wow.

Penny: And so I thought we'd read an article

Vaya: Yes.

12:49 Penny: About one of them. Look, I think there'll be some things we we wanna talk about in this. This article's from the Argus. It's from the 21st January 1921.

"Mother craft, work of the baby centres: Tinned food and milk coolers.

Mrs JJ Hempel and Doctor Isabella Younger were responsible for the establishment of the first baby health centre. It was opened in Richmond in June 1917, and today there are 20 centers in the suburbs of Melbourne, as well as some in country districts."

So this is like the first baby centre, baby health centre in Victoria. I think there'd been ones in Sydney and ones overseas. And so doctor Isabella Younger, who was a woman, and she worked

Jo: And Isabella.

Penny: Isabella. Yeah. She worked overseas in the UK and she saw they were setting up these baby health centers there and then she came back and and set up her own.

Vaya: So in the before times, what would people do? They would just wait for a doctor visit to find information?

Penny: Well, there were doctors and then it was just like family and friends and, like. And there was also a big belief in instinct that mothers knew what to do and you could listen to your family and you trust yourself and you will just know what to do. And then

Jo: People would have been around babies so much more than we are now.

Penny: Exactly. And I think well, that's a sort of a a big difference from you and me, Vaya, because before I had my baby, I had no experience with babies whatsoever, whereas you did, didn't you?

Vaya: I did a lot of babysitting and nannying. I didn't have as many younger siblings as you do. Well, actually, I do mathematically.

Penny: But I didn't look after them.

Vaya: I wasn't around them as much. Yeah. It's such a cliche that you're just never gonna be prepared for parenthood. I liken it to the first time you go overseas. You can imagine it and you can hear stories about it, but until you first set foot on another country, in another culture, you don't know what it feels like.

Jo: But going overseas is way more fun.

Vaya: Yeah. Yes. It is.

Penny: I was gonna I remember, Vaya, like, before I had Leo, you came around one day, and I was, like, 'I don't know how to put on a nappy'. Because I was pregnant, really pregnant. So 'I don't I don't even know how to put on a nappy, Vaya.' And Vaya was like, 'It's pretty easy.' So I got a disposable nappy and some toy and she's like, 'You just put it on like this.' And I was like, 'Oh, okay. Thanks, Vaya'.

Vaya: As as long as it they say back on them, front they don't even say front, but as long as they say back, you're pretty alright.

Penny: Yeah. But you felt like that kind of practical knowledge. It's not all about that, is it, really?

Vaya: When you said before about being around babies, best piece of advice was from my mum. And she said, your baby will tell you what it needs, which is there are some issues with that statement. When things are running the way you expect them to run, yes, you can listen to your baby and basically boils down to, okay, are they hungry, tired? Do they wanna cuddle? What's the other thing they need? Changing. Yes. There you go. When in the early days, you run through those things. But there becomes a point where if there is an issue, you can't necessarily decipher the issue and and the and the language that baby's using, and how can you determine one cry from another cry. I know Oprah had a person that had a way, but, like, you you can't always. So there is a point where a a third opinion is needed. Yeah. Another set of eyes.

Penny: Yeah. And, Jo, is it true you were more like me, weren't you? You didn't have a lot of baby?

Jo: No. None. None. I mean, my sister.

Penny: Didn't we both have dreams where we had a dog. We gave birth to a dog when we were pregnant, and then we were, like, pretty happy with it.

Jo: Well, actually, I severely mistreated the puppies in my dream. So that was not reassuring whatsoever. Yeah I remember the dream. I had some puppies and I put them under the bed and forgot to feed them.

Penny: I think, actually, I think I had a a baby and it was a dog, and then then it was very delicate and it broke. And then someone I was really upset and then someone gave me this really old, quite, I mean, I don't wanna. It was not a conventionally attractive dog. And I was like, oh, well, at least it's alive. And I remember talking about that and being quite surprised that we'd both had this. It's probably like, one of these dreams, like, your teeth falling out or being naked or something. Everyone has it.

Vaya: Also, I think with baby experience, like, yes, I had babysat, but not a newborn.

Jo: It's pretty different

Vaya: Because you don't leave your newborn 20 year old that you don't know very well. So and I had done children's parties and stuff, and they're at least 3. So I didn't have

Penny: You tried putting on your fairy wings and dancing around the room and for some reason.

Vaya: Maybe I should've tried that. That might have helped. We hit every sleep regression under the sun. And those are the sorts of things that I wasn't really reading about because I just got a bit overwhelmed, possibly because of the year I was in. But I just went, I'm not gonna read any of this. I'm just gonna work it out by vibes. And, eventually, I was just reliant on those milestone moments to go into the maternal health nurse and check-in. Alright. Which sleep regression are we up to? Anything I should be looking out for? When should I start putting a toothbrush in his mouth? You know, like, I just figured I'd wait for those moments, those little islands, and check-in there. And then you've got the maternal health nurse on call as well, so 24 hours

Penny: Yeah. That's right.

Vaya: Phone line. So I just figured, in between that and friends in instant messenger chats, I worked it out. And occasionally checking in on my partner on what he reckoned.

Penny: Okay. I'll keep reading the article.

"One of the difficulties experienced, said doctor Vera Scantlebury, the medical officer of the centers yesterday, is to make people understand that these are baby health centers available to all classes of people."

Well, I think the health centers were often first set up in poorer areas and often and Richmond did have quite high infant mortality for a while, and so that was part of the reason why they started the health center. There was this whole idea that it's not for sick babies, it's for healthy babies as well. Like, it's for all babies just to check up. You don't and they didn't wanna call it a clinic.

Vaya: Okay.

Penny: And I heard I read one article. She she suggested "depot". Depot.

Vaya: Oh, I love depot.

Penny: The baby health depot.

Jo: One stop shop.

Penny: Yeah. Exactly.

Vaya: I think it's not too late to rebrand.

Penny: Yeah. Exactly. Because maternal child health nurse is very wordy.

Vaya: It's a mouthful.

Jo: It is.

Vaya: And you never know if it's MCHN or MCN.

Penny: Yes.

Vaya: MCH. Ugh.

Penny: Yeah. Just the depot would be fine.

Vaya: Gotta take this baby down the depot.

Penny: So Scantlebury continues.

"We do not treat children for illnesses. But very often, if they are brought to the centers in time, there would be no illness to treat. We give advice and guidance to mothers. And if this is followed, the necessity for medical attention may be obviated.

Parents have often told us that they did not bring the child to the center before because it was quite well. It might still have been quite well had the advice and guidance of the center been availed of."

Jo: Oh.

Vaya: Oh:

Penny: Yah. So they were they were pretty confident that they were doing a great job. I will say that.

Jo: Also happy to wag the finger.

Penny: Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's and there's gonna be more finger wagging up later. Jo, did you find your maternal health nurse visits useful?

Jo: Um. There was a range. We all saw one in particular early on and I think there were some better options after that.

Penny: Yeah. I mean, I found, like, a couple of it they did pick up a couple of issues, which was really good. Like, just the standard things that they checked for. And there are a couple of times particularly one of them, like, I just wouldn't have known.

Vaya: Yeah. one of mine well, I saw a lovely lady frequently and she was really warm and I really resonated with that. And my friend who saw her didn't as much gel with her. But then this particular woman also missed there was an issue that was picked up by, someone who had filled in. When I went back to the original nurse, she felt mortified that she hadn't noticed it. But I said, 'Hang on, I'm the parent and I didn't notice it, so relax. It's fine.' But I think there's even a sense of competition between them that if, 'oh, I didn't I better pick up on that thing.' Or 'I know I missed I missed that thing.'

Vaya: think they they feel a lot, I'm assuming they're feeling a lot of pressure to make sure that they're justifying their presence and picking up what's needing to be detected.

Penny: Yeah. you hear a lot of stories of times when it didn't maybe the advice wasn't very good or when someone found someone upsetting. But then, also, it can be the same person that someone else finds really, really helpful.

Vaya: Yeah, which is exactly what my friend and I experienced.

Penny: Yeah. It probably is a hard job. Having said that, it's like all professions. I think there's your high flyers and your people who maybe should retire.

Jo: Exactly.

Penny: And the article continues:

"Various methods of teaching mothercraft are adopted at the different centers. The young mother waiting to have her baby weighed is invited by circular to consider why she should give baby tinned foods. The circular continues, 'you do not use them yourself when fresh foods are obtainable. Summer diarrhea among bottle feds is the main cause of death in infancy'."

Which was true. Apparently, the baby's first summer was the most dangerous time.

Vaya: Why do they have to call it summer diarrhea like it's a fun fad?

Penny: Oh, summertime diarrhea. Yeah. No. I think it was just because the the milk would sit out and and all the food would sit out and then the babies would get sick. So they had a point. You give them this pamphlet to read about how you're doing everything wrong.

Vaya: So it wasn't just a fed is best situation. It's like, no sometimes if you can't keep the food sanitary, then fed is not best in that moment.

Penny: Goes on,

"Again, the mother is reminded that you cannot raise a race of sturdy men and women on the bottle."

Jo: A race? Oh.

Penny: Yeah.

"The nation must provide mothers in fact as well as in name."

So this was a stage of real judgment about breastfeeding. You you have to be breastfeeding

Vaya: Oh, get off it.

Penny: It's very it's very judgy. So you're reading your judgy pamphlet, and then you're going in and hearing the judgy nurse.

Vaya: And it's it's still a very, contentious issue regardless of how supportive as a society we feel.

Penny: It's one of the most upsetting things for people. So many people I know who have just found it just so upsetting, the idea that whether they should be or shouldn't be and how hard it is and

Vay: And think about people overseas, like in America, who go back to work 6 weeks after having a baby, and they're pumping 12 hours a day. And the what it's just

Penny: All three of us, I would say, big old nerdy girly swats.

Vaya: Yeah.

Penny: I think that's that's fair to say. And yet, Vaya, you were not into the books with the parenting.

Vaya: Which is strange because I bought the books or I got them handed down to me. I read a book for childbirth and then there was one page that was useful and look, that it was useful. I'm not knocking it. I'm like, god, thank god I read that one page. But then I just kinda thought, ah, I'm just gonna give myself some grace here and I'd I'm not gonna do my homework.

Penny: I didn't read books either. Because I thought after the first you know, my baby was, like, I don't know, 10 weeks old or something, and I thought I was doing pretty well.

Vaya: Yeah.

Penny: I was pretty happy. And someone gave me this book about sleep routines and I read it. And I went into it thinking, well, I'm probably I feel pretty good about it. And I read it, I just felt terrible because I was doing it all wrong according to the book.

Vaya: Actually, Penny, you should write a book because you logged

Penny: And then I just shut the book.

Vaya: You logged all your children's sleep or your first child's sleep on an Excel sheet.

Penny: Yes.

Vaya: So I reckon there'd be some data there that you could mine that would be useful.

Penny: It is very pretty. But, Jo, you're did you were you a reader? You're in publishing? Did you feel that did you get some books?

Jo: I read a few books. Maybe I really liked, from memory, Robin Barker's book.

Penny: Oh, actually, I did read that book.

Vaya: That's the one I felt guilty for not reading because it was one of every

Penny: That was my one book.

Vaya: I should've read it.

Penny: But you didn't need it. No. She would say, 'if you didn't need it, don't read it.'

Vaya: Aw. Thanks, Robin.

Penny: I'm pretty sure. That's her vibe.

Vaya: Look, I all I did read was the apps. So I had one of those ones that measured what fruit the baby was when it was in utero, and then I just kept it cos it kept giving you little updates. Yeah. Like, oh, buy now, this blah blah blah. And so, okay, I get a little little cliff notes version of what was happening. And that was enough to give me the lay of the land.

Penny: And so but you were a Barker fan. Any others?

Jo: Yeah. Sorry. Well, I think I had read Kaz Cooke in pregnancy as kind of everyone does.

Vaya: I didn't. Whoops.

Jo: Yeah. Up the Duff was really popular. I don't know if it still is,

Penny: Oh, it is. Yeah.

Jo: And then she has 'Kid Wrangling' as well.

Penny: Well, she's got the menopause book is the one we need to be getting into now.

Jo: now. Yeah. Yep. That's next. Oh, Kaz, she's looking after us all throughout life. But no, I think they were the only books I know the sleep routine one that you're mentioning, Penny, also was absolutely not for me, but perhaps should have been because my babies were both horrendous sleepers because I was far too lax. I was just told, like, do what works, basically. But unfortunately, what worked for my eldest child was basically carrying her around all the time in the Hug-a-Bub. Of course, that's what she got used to. And then when she was about 6 months, it just no longer works, but I had no other tools in my toolbox. So I was, are we allowed to swear?

Penny: Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.

Jo: I was fucked, basically, For about 4 months.

Penny: But she's out of the Hug-a-Bub now.

Jo: Yeah. She is. And I didn't learn any lessons for my next child. I tried to get her to sleep in the cot, but it was just really hard.

Penny: You do what you can, I reckon

Vaya: It's the great conspiracy I mean, not for people to write books and be in the wellness industry and all that is, you literally can't just can't follow a prescription from one child to the next. One child is so unique that you

Penny: Yeah. I think the the thing that I issue I have with them is often that, like, oh, this is gonna work for everyone. And if it hasn't worked for you, it's because you haven't applied properly. You just haven't tried hard enough.

Jo: You just haven't tried hard enough.

Penny: And it's, like, not a lot of give for individuals. But, Jo, what was so what was the best bit of advice or information that you got?

Jo: I think do what works is pretty good sound advice, but probably the best advice I got was from a friend. She said, 'Your baby's not your project.'

Penny: Ahhh.

Vaya: Ahhh.

Jo: That you can kind of work on and perfect. Like, they are their own little person. You don't have that much power, basically. You know? And that's I think when we become parents for the first time, we really do have this idea that whatever we do will make them a certain way, or behave a certain way, sleep a certain way, eat a certain way, and basically, it's not it's not really true.

Penny: Yeah.

Jo: It's not really true. And probably having a second child really disabuse me of that notion because they are so different, and I am the same person. And I'm not saying I parented them in exactly the same way, but they are opposites, these two children, and that's just how they are. You know?

Penny: It's quite humbling, isn't it?

Vaya: Yeah. I I feel like as soon as my child emerged, I knew who he was, and he knew who he was. And I just he was so calm and relaxed. I'm like, oh, wow. You definitely got nothing from me in the womb if you've come out, like, so chill.

Penny: Did you feel, Jo, that you instinctually knew what to do or that you had mothering instincts, or did you have to get that information from external?

Jo: I mean, it took me a good number of weeks before I kind of felt that sort of maternal love, to be honest, like I wasn't a mum who looked at my baby after giving birth and just was like, oh my God, I love you so much. You're perfect. That took at least, I don't know if it's like 6 weeks to really start happening.

Vaya: And, Jo comment. And, Jo, for your kids, when they listen back to this, you do now think this. You you came to the you came to the opinion that they are wonderful and perfect.

Jo: Yeah. Sure. But then I got a dog. There's no getting around the fact that the dog is now my favorite child ever. Like, a country mile, seriously, and they all know it.

Penny: No. You shouldn't have a favorite. You're right. And you haven't. You don't have favorite child.

Vaya: Yeah. You've got you've sidestepped that issue.

Jo: Exactly. I don't know if it's less offensive, but still. What was the question?

Penny: Just about about instincts, about whether you felt like you knew what to do.

Jo: To a to a degree, but, like, the all the the feeding and sleeping stuff can just be so challenging. It's really beyond any sort of instinct.

Vaya: It's a slog.

Jo: Oh, man. I actually think there's no harder job in the world than breastfeeding a newborn. Relentless.

Vaya: It's not even a job. It's just a a state of being.

Jo: Yeah.

Vaya: You just have to climb from one one hill, climb the next hill, and then wake up to the next day and or the next middle of the night and see what's what's unfolding.

Jo: There's no break whatsoever.

Vaya: This is what I wanna tell the people at the precinct that are clubbing. I wanted to just meet them in the morning with a flyer telling them all this. There's no break.

Penny: Yeah. And that's the thing that people often say, 'Oh, why didn't anyone tell me?'

Vaya: And if you're listening and you don't have kids but you were are considering one. Well, my best advice.

Jo: Get a dog.

Vaya: My little catch cry is one is a lot of children. You don't feel like don't feel like you have to have more than one, because that's what people do, or because you think one needs a friend, or because you want extra people to look after you in your senior years. So, yeah. But also, it's bloody hard. And if you're freaked out about it, it's okay to not wanna do it. That's a valid choice. And and I would love for you to come and hang out with mine if you'd like to.

Penny: There's nothing better than people who like kids but don't have one.

Vaya: Yeah.

Penny: In terms of helping.

Vaya: The friends and relatives in my life, both that do and don't have children, that love my child are, I think, some of the best people that walk this earth.

Penny: And this is one of the things that I often feel guilty about, and I've probably never said to you, Vaya, that you were that for me because you didn't have a baby for, like, 8 years after I had my and you were so nice and you visited and you did so much. And then when you had your baby, we were in lockdown, and I had 2 kids and a whole lot of other stuff going on. I just didn't offer that. I didn't it wasn't reciprocal.

Vaya: But that's okay because I know how good I was to a lot of new parents cos I'm just like, 'I need a me. I need a me.' And it's okay. I can pat myself on the back. But you but also I

Jo: It was 2020, we just couldn't offer

Vaya: Yeah. We couldn't.

Jo: Anything much of value to new parents.

Vaya: Cos I also knew people that were at the other end of life and that they were farewelling relatives in that time as well. Like, they had sick relatives and family members, and they had a hot traumatic experience in 2020 for their own set of reasons, and I couldn't be there for them. So I have my own set of regrets for those friends that I couldn't support.

Penny: Yeah. It was a it was a time where the normal kind of social supports and stuff broke down

Vaya: And it'll change again, and you just do the best that you can in your circumstances. And you learn.

Penny: But anyway, I'm gonna carry on with this article because I don't know I really wanna get a bit of outrage here. Okay.

"To all to all these efforts at education, both Doctor Scantlebury and Miss Peck say there is a visible response. A woman in comfortable circumstances brought her baby in to be assured that it was putting on the prescribed 4 ounces to 6 ounces a week.

What a beautiful baby, remarked the wife of a man who had only half time employment for 7 months and who was feeling the pinch of poverty. Not as beautiful as yours would be if he were regularly washed and combed for a month, suggested the nurse at the scales. The poor woman was skeptical, but she entered heartily into the experiment and was eventually obliged to admit that the theory was correct. It was followed out carefully with the other children so that a little brightness became possible even in the midst of some poverty."

Vaya: Oh, boy.

Penny: So I hate that nurse.

Vaya: Lots to unpack.

Penny: She's a bitch. But, yeah, basically, it's this idea that, you know, if you're poor, you probably you can still look after your baby and there's no reason you know, a baby that's not thriving, it's just because the parents aren't trying hard enough.

Vaya: And the idea of washing and combing it being the solution.

Penny: Yeah. It's not because, you know, the mother hasn't had enough to eat and she's malnourished. No. No.

Jo: Combing what?

Penny: It's just combing. Hang on, this is the problem, and and maybe I just didn't read enough books. I didn't know you were meant to comb them regularly.

Jo: What are you combing? I mean, what are we talking to you?

Penny: It sounds like a very hairy baby.

Jo: Very hairy baby. Maybe it's a dog as well. Maybe it's a center for dog. Like, how many babies have a full head of hair at that time? And even if they do, who is combing that hair?

Vaya: And they stay clean for ages, those things.

Penny: Oh, absolutely.

Vaya: But also I think that the phrase in there, 'at the scales', just took me right back to my son took a while to stack on the kgs or the gs as we were counting them back then. And so I did have that association with the scales. Like, my whole life, I was worried, like, about being overweight, and suddenly my child is underweight. And then so I have a whole new set of associations with being weighed.

Penny: That is such a stressful thing, being weighed and how much emphasis goes on it and everything as well.

Vaya: But then I had that beautiful moment one day when he turned 3 and he had his 3 year old appointment and he oh, maybe it was 2, it's all blurring, but he ran in - I think it was 2 - and he ran in and he hopped on the scale by himself, and I just had that passage of time sentimentality of, 'now he can just jump on by himself'.

Penny: But I want you to see if you guys can relate to this next bit. I'm not sure.

"The experience of the nurses is that with patience and perseverance, the whole of the mothers respond in time. But patience is essential. A method of making from a kerosene tin a cooler for milk is described by the nurse to the mothers.

The installation of this cooler is one of the first steps encouraged by the centre. One day, a nurse visiting a home found the milk for the baby uncovered on the table while the cooler was occupied by a mug of ale. The mother was neither intemperate nor unkind. She merely thought more of keeping beer cool than she had appreciated the necessity of keeping the baby's milk free from germs. When the position was explained to her quietly, she appeared rather penitent and was not afterwards an inapt pupil."

Penny: So she just needed to be told, stop cooling the beer, start cooling the milk. And then she was like, 'oh, shit. I didn't realize. Oh, I'm so sorry.'

Vaya: And No judgment, love. No judgment. You do the best that you can with the information that you have at the time.

Penny: Exactly. And quite frankly, I mean, warm milk, sometimes we do warm milk up, and it's still yummy.

Vaya: Whereas warm beer, disgusting.

Penny: Yuck. Yuck.

Jo: I can understand why she was making that choice.

Penny: Exactly. But, obviously, Maternal Child Health Centres now are a lot more inclusive and a lot more aware of different life experiences. But I'm sure there are plenty of times when people are just being judged as well. I think they do try.

Vaya: They do try, and I think there's always room to improve because

Penny: But it's that spirit of continuous improvement that allows the improvement.

Vaya: Yes. It does.

Penny: Yeah. And even the fact that we just called our mother's group mother's group and none of the dads were involved. And I remember, Jo, your partner Ellie came once to the sandpit at Lord Street or wherever we met up.

Jo: Did he?

Penny: Afterwards, you said to me something like, 'oh, did people think it was weird that'... I'm like, 'I think it's weird that he's the only one who's ever come.' The kind of stereotypical women were staying home and then then we all got to know each other and we did mum's group and the dads were at work.

Vaya: At least 2020, we were all mucking in.

Jo: We were on mat leave.

Penny: We were on leave. So we had the time. It's changing a bit. And now you call it what was it? New parents group, and their dads were actually somewhat Yeah.

Vaya: Everyone was welcome. And often because we were all at home, so the dads were often present or the other partners were present. So they would just hop on the call too, and we'd all be passing the baby back and forth and this and that. And so all just felt very natural in that sense, and we all looked like we were in the trenches together. And it was great to hear the the men speak from a mental health perspective as well.

So it was, really useful in that sense. Silver linings were few and far between in 2020, but we'll grab them. We'll grab them.

Penny: Thank you so much, Jo and Vaya, for coming and talking to me about this. I know it's a big emotional

Vaya: This article is like parenting. The baby's woken up. We gotta go feed it.

Jo: Yeah. A pleasure. Thank you so much.

38:52 Penny: Coming up now Christina and I are talking to Carla Pascoe Leahy. Carla is an interdisciplinary researcher and historian. Her research focuses particularly on parenthood, family and sustainability. And her absolutely fascinating book, 'Becoming a Mother' was published in 2022 and charts the history of motherhood in Australia. It's based on 60 oral history interviews.

Basically Carla is a proper oral historian researcher expert person and in this interview I am Philomena Cunk. Except I'm not doing it on purpose.

39:23 (Jaunty piaon music - soprano part)

39:31 Penny: I had never heard of the term matrescence before I read your book. So would you just be able to tell us a little bit about what that means and how you wrote your book?

Carla: Certainly. Glad that I've introduced you to a new word, Penny, and hopefully, I'll introduce a whole lot of other people to a new word. I think academics often use jargon unnecessarily, but I think in this instance, actually important to have a special word to signify that we're talking about something that's a little bit different to how we often talk about motherhood. The term matrescence comes from anthropology. It's often credited to, anthropologist, Danna Raphael. I'm not 100% sure whether she actually came up with the term. It denotes the idea that becoming a mother for the first time is a rite of passage. And so that's why it sounds a little bit similar to a word like adolescence or, you know, pubescence. So it's this idea that becoming a mother is not just significant on an individual basis, though it is deeply significant on an individual basis, but it's also culturally and socially significant. When you become a mother for the first time, you take on a whole new social identity. And I like to think of it as, it's like moving through a one way door into a parallel universe. So you can't go back once you've made that step. You've seen things, then you've felt things and done things that you can't unsee, feel, or do.

Penny: There's no pill. There's no pill that you can take.

Carla: No. No. You can't take a pill. It's like this parallel universe that you vaguely intuited was there, but you didn't really understand what it was meant or what was going on in there until you step through. And so, yeah, look, I love the term matrescence because I don't really think we have any other words in our language that can signify all of that, you know, in in just one word.

Penny: And I think it is such a full on time. And I'm I've got kids. Christina is child free so.

Christina: That is true. But I am surrounded by children 5 days a week, so that's nice for me.

Penny: Working in schools.

Christina: Yeah.

Penny: But it's such a full on thing becoming a mother. and I think when I read your book, Carla, to be honest, I I read the first couple of chapters, and I think I read the one about birth. And then I took a break because it really just reminded me so much of all those memories and all those like, it's just so intense that then I took a few months off, and then I read the rest of it. Even though I was really, really enjoying it, I found it very, very interesting. It was almost too interesting. And so what I wanted to ask is, like, how do you do it? Like, how do you sit down with so many different women and hear all of these stories and while you're also a mother. And they must be saying things sometimes that you're thinking, oh, no. 'That's not what I did', or 'should I have done that?' Or it's triggering kind of things for you. Are you able to, like, separate that? Or because you're a proper historian. You're just better at it than me?

Carla: No, it's a great question, Penny. Maybe I was thinking as you were talking, maybe I should have warned people not to read the birth chapter first because I think it is the most intense chapter in the book, and it's probably the chapter that goes into some of the most difficult material because we know that unfortunately in Australia, a lot of women have difficult and sometimes traumatic birth experiences. And as I talk about in that chapter, I don't think it has to be that way. I think it's my personality. I'm like this special breed of person that makes sense of the world through research and writing.

When I'm very curious about something, I need to delve into it more to make sense of it for myself, particularly when it's complex. And I think matrescence is really complex. When I became a mother for the first time, 10 years ago now, it was partly that sense that I had that this is much more profound, much more complex, much more difficult, but ultimately much more significant and uplifting than I expected that then led me to think, okay, I need to work out. Is it just me having this experience or are other people having the experience too? And so all of my research is on topics that really matter to me.

And the research is a process of making sense of that. And then I I guess I should explain that I'm a special type of historian called an oral historian. So I do my research through interviewing. And so I was accumulating and working out stuff about motherhood through a series of conversations with women of all different ages. Some of those conversations were really joyful. Some of them were really difficult. Some of them were like both of those things and everything in between. All of the interviews had a lot of emotion in them. I was okay, and I had other oral historians that I could debrief with if

Penny: That's really important. I think in the book, you're talking about how people tell their own story about becoming a mother. There are ways that you can tell it that aren't emotional and that make you feel fine, And then there are kind of details and things that you can tell that are a bit deeper, and I think you definitely got to that in people.

Carla: And that's probably the stuff I was most interested in because, it does strike me that becoming a mother and all of mothering is deeply emotional if we let it be. Well, it is. And then we can choose to be conscious of that or not. And that was probably the stuff that I was most interested in. And I think that that is partly what I wanted to then share with readers that if you're finding this really, really emotional, there's nothing wrong with you. It's a really emotional thing to, like, grow a life inside you, push it out into the world physically, and then be, like, responsible for keeping it alive. That's a very emotional thing. You know?

Penny: Yeah. Absolutely. Yesterday, I had 2 of my friends from one friend from mother's group and just another person I've known for a long time come in, and we read a different article in Trove and and talked about it. And I just became very aware that it was just gonna raise all this stuff for them. And my other question that I always ask everyone is, do you use Trove much?

Carla: I do. There's all sorts of different types of historians out there. The majority of historians I would say use documentary sources, archival sources, so what were originally paper based sources that then are now digitized in places like Trove. A smaller section of oral historians do interviews and then another smaller section use material culture. So use objects and analyze that and and visual culture as well.

I use archival sources, but for me, it was really important to start with the interviews and then go to the archival sources. And that's because in terms of the historical work that's been done on motherhood before, it's people have really led with those archival sources. And what happens then is that the voices of experts are uppermost, and the voices of people's everyday ordinary experiences are kind of subdued and muted.

Penny: And that is absolutely, I think, what we're gonna see in today's articles that we're gonna read. They're about reporting on what the experts in motherhood are doing.

Christina: And I suppose, historically, a lot of them were men too, were they?

Penny: Well, yes. They were. But, actually, in this case of what we are gonna have some there's some female doctors.

Christina: Well, that's reassuring. Oh, good.

Penny: But really carrying on in the grand old tradition of the doctor knows best.

And what about you used to you live in the country now, let's say?

Carla: I I feel like I can hear, like, bluegrass in the background. Yeah.

Jo: I saw a tumbleweed go past. Yeah.

Penny: I'm from Yep. I'm from the country. So, and Christina's semi rural.

Jo: Oh, semi. Yeah. Semi.

Penny: When I got to know you, Carla, we were both Yarra people. Do you have much of a connection to Richmond, the suburb?

Carla: I lived in Abbotsford for a period of time. So Richmond Pool was my local, and I was, yep, hanging out in the on the streets of Richmond. But actually so what I did in my book was my 3 case studies are based on the 3 areas I'm very familiar with, and that was deliberate. Fitzroy, Malvern, and Ocean Grove are all areas that I've lived in and that's why I chose them as case studies because I wanted when I was interviewing people, to be able to actually imagine the streets and the parks and the maternal child health services and everything else that they were describing to me.

48:21 Penny: We might get going with our first article. So we're gonna be talking about basically services, for mothers and babies and education on motherhood that sort of developed at the start of 20th century in Richmond, specifically. The thing to remember, really, which I often have to remind myself, is that Richmond, of course, at that time was not the wealthy inner city suburb that it is now. It was very poor area. People here were very working class, and that might be actually one of the reasons why some of these services first developed in Richmond.

But I'll start with, this article, which is actually printed in the Geelong Advertiser, and it's from the 15th September 19 09. It's titled 'School For Mothers in Melbourne'.

"The first school for mothers has been opened at the free kindergarten Cremorne Street, Richmond by Mrs Presley, president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Christina: Excellent.

Penny: So she sounds fun. Previous to this people still learned how to be mothers, but they didn't go to like, a formal setting to learn about it. So when did this sort of idea that you needed a kind of a more formal education to know how to look after babies start?

Carla: Well, this was kind of the beginning at least in the Australian context, but across, most sort of Western industrialized contexts. So before that, talk a little in a minute about where this still occurs across the 20th century. So motherhood was imagined to be natural and instinctive. It wasn't seen as something that you had to be trained in. This is linked, this happens across a whole lot of areas of life in the late 19th early 20th century as medicine and all sorts of medical specialties become more prominent and influential in society. And most of them are are white men, by the by, who are telling people in a fairly paternalistic way how they should be living their lives. And so, yeah, this idea that mothercraft is, ideally a scientific endeavor that should be approached with and discipline, and you should listen to the male experts in learning how to mother. You start to see it in the early 20th century. But this is really just the early beginnings in Australia, and it takes quite a long time to permeate, more broadly and to actually start to influence the way that ordinary people are thinking as well.

Penny: And the article continues:

"Doctor Constance Ellis quoted statistics to show the extent to which the ignorance and carelessness of mothers were responsible for the sacrifice of child life."

The idea that the mothers don't know what they're doing, and this is why not looking at the social structures and the fact that they're poor and the fact that they don't have enough to eat and they're not being paid enough and all of those sorts of things. But it's just the individual mothers not knowing enough. But most people most people I know have become mothers have taken it, like, super seriously, and have tried really hard. This is an earlier time you were interviewing people. The first people became mothers in the

Carla: In the 1950s. Yes.

Penny: So it's later. But did you find that the sense of responsibility, was that a big theme for people you were talking to?

Carla: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I think part of the context is in the early 20th century, women were becoming mothers at a much younger age, and they were having much bigger families as well. And they would have had much more day to day experience of looking after kids. Whereas the women that I were interviewing, I mean, that was somewhat still the case in the 1950s. But by the 21st century, women are you know, the average age of first motherhood is 30, and women are having, like, 1.8 children on average, though not literally. And so, yeah, family size is is shrinking. And with that, yeah, there definitely comes a heightened sense of responsibility, and it's linked to what you said before as well. Like, this rising sense, probably especially from the 1970s I would say, in terms of what ordinary people experience. A rising sense that you need to learn the right way to be a mother. You can't just like, it won't just come naturally. And then a big sense of, like, pressure and responsibility and, yeah, just weightiness in this role. All of this pressure on this role.

Penny: Yeah. And then also there's, like, now I think a lot of people have this idea that, well, you can't trust the older generation because they did it wrong. They didn't know as much as we know now, so you can't just ask your mum what she did. Though I remember my my dad did the nicest thing when I had my first baby, who was a big spitter upper. After every time he fed, he threw up everywhere. And I was, like, constantly changing him, and I was going, it's just oh god. I'm doing all this washing. And Dad didn't say anything, but he went down the shops. And then later, he came home with all these bibs. And he was like, 'oh, I just thought you can you maybe'

Christina: Chuck one of those on?

Penny: And I was like, bibs. Like, genius. Like, it just hadn't occurred to me because I thought bibs were for when you were eating solid food. So I didn't and then, oh, you just put the bib on, and you don't have to change the entire baby 7 times a day.

Carla: But the women that I spoke to told stories of mainly of, some of them trusted their own parents' advice, but most of them told stories of their parents' incompetence, particularly the more contemporary women. So because expert advice is changing rapidly, you know, things like mums in the seventies were told to drink stout to

Penny: Oh God.

Christina: Seems fine.

Carla: These days, women are told not to drink alcohol while they're breastfeeding. And similarly, the older generation would say, well, you're just dip the dummy in honey, and that'll, like, pacify the baby. Because these days, again, people are told that you're not supposed to give children honey before the age of one because of this miniscule risk of botulism. Which, I'm sure is serious and a bad thing but it's a very small risk. But because the expert advice is changing rapidly then new parents, new mothers are less likely to take seriously what the older generation are telling them.

Penny: Yeah, but they do have great ideas about bibs. So thanks, dad. I'll continue on with the article. It says, this is sad.

"There were here, she said, 3,431 deaths last year of children under 1 year old. A state of affairs which allows so large a number of children to die proves that something must be done to educate and train those who have to deal with child life. There is much to be done, not as charity, but in the way of spreading knowledge and helping people to help themselves."

So, yeah, there was very high infant mortality in Richmond. And I think I read that it did start to go down at this time. Is that right, Carla? Why why did it go down? Was it because these mothers were going to education school, or was it something different?

Carla: Historians have disagreed about that. So the maternal child health movement, which was, you know, previously infant welfare, claimed, you know, the credit for that to themselves. But actually, what was happening at the same time was a whole lot of other factors. So sanitation was improving in cities and places like Richmond there was pollution in the air, in the Yarra, refuse on the streets, outdoor dunnies where the contents of the toilets were collected by the night soil guy going down the lane. Like, there was a lot of reasons that disease spread. As you said, poverty meant that nutrition was not great. And, vaccination and just the availability of medical services for kids was really low. So these things start to change at the same time during the early 20th century to the early 20th century. Pretty hard to say whether it was actually the advice of the infant welfare nurses that was necessarily improving that. It might have it might have felt for some things. But, yeah, as you say, Penny, like, blissful ignorance of the wider social context and why people might be struggling to keep their children alive when they live in abject poverty.

Penny: I'll read this next bit:

"Mrs Edwards, late superintendent of the Foundling Hospital, gave an interesting account of the care which the French government took of the health, not only of its babes, but of its mothers. She spoke of a cafe in Paris where free meals, good soup, milk, and meat, etcetera, are given to nursing mothers and of a hospital which keeps its connection with children born on its premises for 2 years after birth and has them examined and weighed by medical officers at regular intervals, the result being that in 8 years, the death rate among infants was only 0.5%."

French parents are always better. Everyone in France is always doing it better, and I just love to see that that was still happening a 100 years ago. It's definitely better in France.

Christina: Something confusing about the French, they just seem to know how to do things.

Penny: Their children never cry.

Carla: They were probably better dressed babies too.

Christin: Absolutely.

Penny: Better dressed. They knew how to behave in restaurants and

Christina: They knew how to manage their intake of cheese and wine.

Penny: Exactly. You never see a drunk French baby, do you?

Christina: No.

Penny: They know how to

Christina: Rein it in.

Penny: They know their limits.

"The Rev AB Tress emphasized the need of schools of mothers and expressed willingness to render all help in his power to establish them."

The mothers that you spoke to obviously varied a lot from the fifties to the more recent first time mothers. But in general, like, how do people feel about the accessibility of information?

Carla: It was quite interesting. So I always asked women about how they felt about that sort of health advice that they got, particularly from the maternal child health nurses. Their responses really varied. So some women really appreciated the advice and found it really reassuring. So some older mothers told me that in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, you could go to the local maternal child health center as much as you wanted. In the 21st century, you have a certain, I think it's something like 12 appointments in the first 4 years, but that they slowly get spaced out.

Penny: They do get spaced out.

Carla: There's you allotted times you're allowed to come.

Penny: You can make extra appointments if and it would depend on your circumstance. So I think in some circumstances, they'll be like, 'oh, yeah. You can come in if you're worried about x y z.'

Carla: Mothers in Ocean Grove in the fifties, for example, told me that they would just rock up to the local maternal child health center if they had a question or even it was sort of a place where you could sort of hang out and meet other mothers. By contrast, some mothers felt really patronized or bossed around by these nurses or sometimes made to feel quite inadequate about their own mothering. And I think there was probably the sixties, it started to change in the seventies, often the kind of official advice that women would get from nurses worked against successful breastfeeding.

So they would say, for example, that you should spread your feeds out 4 hourly. Some would even say that you should scrub your nipples in between feeds. All these really extreme advice that actually made it much less likely that you were gonna successfully breastfeed. So there was sometimes a tension between what mothers wanted to do and what they were told by nurses. It varied enormously. Some mothers probably became more confident with the more children they had. So they sort of described with their first child, they felt really unsure. They accepted the advice of the nurse because they didn't really know what else to do. And then as they gained confidence, they would kind of work out, 'yeah. Look. I think that advice is helpful, but that other thing they said is just bonkers, and I'm not gonna do it.'

Penny: Did some women react defensively to the idea that someone's gonna come in and tell them how to raise babies?

Carla: I think some women didn't really want to be told how to mother. They felt like they knew what they were doing. There were some interesting cultural differences as well. I think so to give you one example, I was able to interview a handful of First Nations mothers in my study, and one of them was explaining to me that for, so she's a Torres Strait Islander woman. For people in her community, maternal child health nurses are associated with the state and they're associated with practices of removing children.

So there's immediately just if you understand that history and understand that it still occurs in the present day, there's immediately its defensiveness, and it's not it's not going to be like a warm relationship of trust, Just understanding that history. I think that, sometimes for women, if English wasn't their first language, they might have found it difficult to understand all of the advice that they were being given, particularly when kind of complicated language is used that we don't even use very often in English, like the word botulism that I used before. Noone even knows what that means. So if that's not your first language, it's doubly confusing. So I think there was some resistance. I found it interesting that in my you know, they're officially called new parent groups but everyone tends to call them mothers groups, in my mother's group which so there it was convened originally by the local maternal child health nurse in Fitzroy. So she brought us all together, and we had the first meetings kind of under her auspice.

Penny: That was the same for me.

Carla: Speakers and stuff. And then we kept just meeting of our own accord in parks and playgrounds and stuff. I feel like that the mother's group actually functioned to subtly undermine the maternal child in ways that she wouldn't have anticipated. You know? Because we would talk about what she'd said to us and be like, 'that's that's crap. I'm not gonna do that.' That's just silly.

Christina: You were a breakaway group.

Penny: Yeah, talking about what the maternal child health nurse had said and all your experiences was very much part of it.

Carla: Yeah. And I remember in my mother's group, we talked about, you know, books that we might have read that we found helpful or there's a real desperation around the concept of sleep that I think is really hard to understand until you've you've been in that 1st year of a child's life and you're the one that's supposed to be responsible for feeding them during the night and stuff. And so everything was about sleep at least initially and desperately comparing notes on which particular sleeping bag you were using for your child or which which method of wrapping or, you know, or all of these theories. Well, if you just double feed them, you know, right before bed or, you know, they're just just all these things that people were trying to experiment with because they were so desperate to get just a little bit more stuff.

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: then we would kind of pass that information around, you know, like, sacred knowledge between ourselves.

Penny: And I think that's a sign that your mother's group was working well and, like, people are being open with each other as well because I have heard that there's a big discrepancy in how people will report how their baby's sleeping in a group compared to 1 on 1, like, with the interviewer. Like, people lie because it's so in some groups, it becomes, like, if one person says, oh, my baby's sleeping 7 to 7.

Christina: Everyone else's babies start sleeping 7 to 7.

Penny: Yeah. Miraculously. And then you think, oh, everyone everyone else is fine. And so I think there's a big variety sometimes in how how well mother's groups go. Like, you also need I reckon you need one person who's, like, the organizer.

We had one, Rosemary. I'd be very happy for her to he's she really kept us in order and made sure we kept seeing each other.

Carla: Well, I think every any group has its own dynamics, and I think certainly in my interviews. So mothers groups only really started to be an organized thing from about the 1990s. Before that, if women were gathering in groups, it might have been organic or it might have been through the nursing mothers of Australia once they started.

Penny: And, also, I think some I read some early, like, Mother's Day Out picnic things that'd be organized by religious groups as well. And they'd have, like.

Carla: Play groups.

Penny: Yeah. And they'd have, like, a 100 mothers and kids go to the beach for the day, which sounds just chaotic.

Christina: Did everyone get a complimentary bible or something?

Penny: Probably. Yeah. And they'd always report that everyone had a lovely time, and it was wonderful for everyone. And you just think, I wonder. If absolutely everyone had a wonderful time. And that's the thing with newspaper reports. Like, this is why, like, I think when you read Trove, like, you're getting just one

Christina: Blanket message.

Penny: Yeah. Everything went well and

Christina: It's all a bit Enid Blyton.

Carla: Well, that's one of the interesting the things that happened, you know, once the internet kind of reached into most people's homes and lives that mothers could start to talk back to the experts. And so from the 21st century, there's this phenomenon of, you know, mummy blogging and all sorts of different ways in which people expressing their personal experience, not just in conversations among people. People can actually set up their own little blogs or their own little websites and talk about their experiences. And I think that's been a really important phenomenon in terms of sharing knowledge, refuting expertise, which is usually, you know, patriarchal expertise, and kind of talking back to that. But it it's also had the effect that we used to have such a sentimentalization of motherhood that we only ever talked about the good stuff and everything was like a mother's day card. You know?

Penny: Yep.

Carla: Beautiful and perfect and clean, rosy, happy children. And then you I think we kinda had this pushback against that. And people started to talk about the bad stuff, and there's been this very strong trend online of, you know, proudly kind of claiming a bad mum kind of title like

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: You know, and all these memes of of people, like, drinking while child rearing and, you know, and just talking about how hard it is, which it is. And it's really important to talk about that. But some women told me that contemporary mothers told me that they didn't feel that they could talk about enjoying motherhood, in their mother's group or to their friends because because these days you're only expected to talk about how bad it is. That was a really interesting kind of flip, I thought.

Penny: Yeah. Definitely. And I'd, like, definitely find I've had things I won't even say what they are. Like, some things with mothering have gone really well for me and, like, no complaints. And then other things have been really hard. And it is easier to mention the hard things I'd say now. And I find often you don't know what the things are that because I think people don't know what it is with me. You don't know what the things are that people are most sensitive about with them with their mothering and with their parenting either, so it's so easy to accidentally step on that. And there's so much, you know, information around now that you have to make a decision about stuff.

Carla: I think you're so right.

Penny: You wanna believe it's right.

Carla: It's all potentially fraud, like, every aspect. Potentially fraud.

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: And I think it's because women still tend to take upon themselves the primary responsibility of parenthood and whether the child is, you know, putting on weight at the time that they're supposed to according to the growth charts that the maternal child health nurse gives you or whether they're sleeping through the night when all the other babies in the mother's group are or whatever it is, everyone implicitly feels that that is a measure of that woman's competency at motherhood. Even if rationally, we would say, 'oh, no. Of course, every baby's different and', you know, rah rah rah rah. But deep down, you know, 99% of mothers feel that they are judging themselves and are being judged by others on how their child kinda hits all those metrics. And I think that's partly where the sensitivity comes from.

Penny: So for you, someone who is an expert on motherhood in some contexts.

Carla: On my my children are so perfect.

Penny: Yeah.

Christina: Yeah. Yep.

Penny: And you are, you know, you're academic person. Did you go to the books, or did you rely were you more on the either services or family?

Carla: It's so it's partly a historical question that changes over time, but it's also partly a personality question. And you know how I said to you before that I work things out through research?

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: So what I did I mean, I've got a whole, like, shelf of books. So I went and I read or I did a literature review of motherhood, basically. And I, like, read all the stuff, and I'm like, 'that contradicts that. And that doesn't make sense. This could be right. But reading this woman's qualifications, she's got no claim to expertise except her own anecdotal experience.' So do you know what I mean? Like, I

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: Kind of sifted through it all and worked out what I thought made sense. I think also because I have a pretty positive relationship with my mum and my grandmothers I, really enjoyed speaking to them and learning from them. And it wasn't about the specifics because that changes over time. Like, my grandmother was adamant that I should be putting Farax, which is this weird sort of cereal powder that you can make into a goo.

Penny: Oh, yeah.

Carla: She was adamant that I should be putting Farax in the bottle at, like, 2 months or something like completely contrary to. So it wasn't the specifics, but it was just about there's a very special way that becoming a mother catapults you back to your own infancy emotionally, and you start thinking a lot about what was it like for my mum? Did she feel all vulnerable and scared like I do? And how did she raise me, and what decisions did she make? And so it's more that I think there's a real opportunity for intergenerational connection.

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: At that at that time rather than lists of advice or something specific..

Penny: In terms of there being so much, like, information out there, I think one thing I think in the conclusion of your book, you were talking about how and I heard this hear this all the time. Why didn't anyone tell me? Why didn't anyone tell me what it was gonna be like? And I often feel like particular some things I'm like, really? You never heard that? You never heard it was gonna be hard? Like because before I had a baby, all I heard about was that it was gonna be so hard.

I think you said that it it is sometimes about people not getting the information that they need, but maybe there's this other side of it, which is that it's actually not possible to convey what it's like. So there's always gonna be this sense of, why didn't anyone tell me? Which I thought was a really, which really resonated with me. Because probably what I thought, particularly after my first child, I thought I was surprised that more people hadn't told me that it would be nice.

Carla: Yeah. And I felt I felt like that too, Penny. I think I might have even had conversations with you about that. But I think that's why I keep coming back to this idea that I think there are some things in life that are different from all other experiences. And when something is really different from any other experience we've had, we don't really have a basis fully understanding it until we've gone through it, if that makes sense.

I haven't suffered a really, really serious illness like cancer, for example. I suspect that's a similar type of experience where you don't really understand how it feels until you've been there and you've gone through something as harrowing as cancer treatment. It changes you forever. You'll come out the other side a different person. And it's probably quite hard to talk about it with people that haven't experienced it in ways that make sense to them.

And I think I think becoming a mother is a bit like that. I think it's one of the reasons that when they work, mothers groups are really powerful because they deliberately match people whose babies are the same kind of age, which means that you're the same kind of stage in your matrescence and that the mother is a similar way through that journey of change. You're surrounded by all these people that are going through this thing that's really hard to understand and describe.

Penny: And I think that's why people don't tend to go back for a second mother's group when they have their next baby. Or I had my third baby quite a way afterwards and potentially I could have

Christina: You just went solo.

Penny: I could have joined the mother's group, but I thought, 'I do not think that we are'. Like, I just felt like we're not gonna have things in common because we're at a very different stage. Did your mum talk much about what it was like? Because my mum had she can't remember anything. She's got 4 kids and, like, who was who. You know, like, very rare, she's got about 5 stories about when we were little.

Christina: They're on repeat.

Penny: Does your mum talk much about?

Christina: I know that my mum spoke quite a lot about the mother's group that she was in and that that was a really big connection for her. And I think at the time, she you know, I remember a lot of conversation when I was in primary school because mum had gone back to work, and she felt, and I remember hearing this even though I must have only been 6 or 7, that she felt that other mums at school were judging her sometimes when she'd come and pick me up and go flying back to a meeting because she was also a teacher. And so I'd be that kid in the staffroom that everyone's looking at, like, 'why are you here?' So I think there was that real concern from her that whatever she was doing was being judged by other mums, but it had to be right for her. So I think at that time, it it seemed as though she was one of the few mums that was trying to hold down work as well as raise a child, and I think that must have been a pretty tricky path for her at that time because it is something that she does bring up quite often. Not so much now, but but definitely when I was younger, it was something that was talked about a lot.

Carla: What what era was that?

Christina: So that would have been, you know, late eighties, going into the nineties. And I remember as well being one of the first kids in primary to catch the bus home and have a key, and I was going into the house alone with my hockey stick in case there was someone there. And that was not an experience that was happening to many of my friends at school that was quite different. And I guess even when I was quite small, I was aware that that was not how other kids were going home. And, you know, I didn't have a chip on my shoulder about it, but it was just an awareness I had that mum was really tearing around trying to be, you know, a working mum plus an actual mum.

Carla: And so in the 1950s, you would have been called a latchkey kid.

Christina: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So so I I was that latch key kid. Yeah.

Carla: Yeah.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. You know, do you remember in the eighties, if you had your house keys, you had to have that elaborate little plastic coil chain for your school dress just to signal to everyone that was what was going on in your pocket. So that was me. Yep.

Carla: I talk about in one of the chapters in the book, you know, changing ways that mothers have interacted with work over the last 75 years, and that's in broad terms, the biggest shift is from an assumption and an ideal in the 1950s that women were stay at home full time mothers. Wasn't the reality for everyone, but it was the cultural ideal. It was really looked down upon to. It was considered that your children would be irrevocably harmed if you weren't there all the time catering to them.

Christina: Yeah. And look, I think, you know, you can see that in me on a daily basis. The harm.

Penny: She's risen to be an assistant principal now. So.

Jo: Yeah. I'm alright.

Penny: One thing I just I know you've gotta go, Carla, because you've got family things on. But can I ask one more question?

Carla: Yeah.

Penny: I think maternal child health nurse services have changed to try and be more inclusive, but there's probably still gaps. Do you think that they are changing fast enough or that they're working hard enough to kind of manage some of these criticisms that people have of them sometimes?

Carla: It's a really hard question. I think that they're trying really hard.

Penny: Yeah.

Carla: I think all of the maternal child health nurses and services that I've interacted with are trying really hard. I think it's a hard question because they're trying to create a support service that will work for everyone and people's, like individual mothers and children and families are so different and the needs and expectations that they have are so different. And so it's a really hard ask. Sometimes because maternal child health nurses are the primary interface between the mother and the health system and wider community in those months after birth, they kind of get left with all the mess to clean up. Like, they have to clean up

Penny: Oh, yeah.

Carla: The fact that we inadequately support women during birth, and we have known for decades that there's a better way to support women during birth. So they have to clean up all of the mess surrounding that. They have to clean up the mess that women are often not adequately supported by their, you know, partners, extended family if they're around or their friends. And the fact that most people either need to return to work sooner than they are probably fully ready physically and emotionally. And that places a huge burden on mothers as well. And I just think maternal child health nurses are trying to create supports in place that actually speak to a whole lot of other much bigger inadequacies. So I think their role is really hard.

Penny: I think that's right. Like, from my personal experience one time, and it was the maternal child health nurse who helped with, like, mental health issues who and followed up with me. And they that was the service, not the doctors, not the hospital, not the GP that actually checked up on me and, took me seriously. So that was a that was a really positive experience for me.

Carla: And that's been so that's probably the biggest shift is that that change of name from infant welfare to maternal child care signifies something really important, which is that people realize finally and belatedly that it's not just actually keeping a baby alive that is the important part of what that a nurse does in that role. It's actually that they also need to look after the mother and in order to have a kind of happy and healthy child. Increasingly, as we've become more aware of perinatal depression and anxiety from about the 1990s, that they now understand that as part of their role, again, it's not just looking after the physical health of the mother and the baby, but also the kind of emotional health as well. And I think that's a really hard job. I mean, I feel that when I was interacting with those nurses, they were quite clumsy in the way that they try to screen for the emotional issues. Like, you barely know them and they're like, 'so, history of depression?' But I'd recognize that it's well intended, and I think, you know, I think there's more to be done there, but I think that even just recognizing that it's that kind of more holistic view that they need to take, that's that's a really important recognition.

Penny: Well, thank you so much, Carla, for talking to us.

Christina: Thank you.

Penny: That was really good for me.

Carla: Pleasure.

Penny: I got a lot out of that.

Christina: Excellent work, Penny.

Penny: I told you she was really nice.

Carla: Cathartic. Very cathartic.

Christina: Yes.

1:20:22 Next time on In Those Days we're talking to long-time library worker, author and Trove lover, Julianne Negri, about her library experiences and also crime in the library. It's a true crime episode everyone. Get excited.

Julianne: Well like you know like some days I do come home from work with a great story of how I solved a mystery of a missing book.

Penny: Which is very satisfying.

Julianne: Going through the record and you do feel pretty damn good.

1:20:52 (Jaunty piano music)