Official Opening of Stirling District Hospital

Stirling District Hospital was opened in the Adelaide Hills township of Stirling, on a quiet block on Wrenwood Lane a short walk from the centre of the town. It was a small timber-framed cottage hospital — a single weatherboard ward, an operating room, a kitchen, and a verandah open to the afternoon sun — modest by any measure, and the first hospital the Hills districts had been able to call their own.

The opening was the achievement of the district itself. The hospital had been raised the way such places were across the colony: by public subscription, by the proceeds of fêtes and street stalls, and by the donated labour of the district's own tradesmen and farmers. A volunteer board of local worthies — orchardists, a solicitor, the Anglican and Methodist ministers, and the women who had done the greater part of the fundraising — had carried the project to completion and governed the new hospital without pay.

There was no resident doctor. A general practitioner from Stirling or Aldgate attended when sent for, and between those visits the hospital turned on its matron, who lived on the premises and ran the place to her own standards. From its first day it could deliver the district's children, set its fractures, and nurse its sick and its dying close to home.

For the families of the Hills, the opening ended a long and dangerous dependence on the road to Adelaide. A district that had been forced to carry its labouring mothers and its injured down the ranges to the city — a journey not every patient survived — now had a place of its own to be born in, mended in, and cared for in. The hospital belonged to the district that had built it, and on the day it opened that was the whole of its meaning.