Labour of Love: Tales from the World of Midwives
edited by Amanda Tattam and Cate Kennedy. Pan Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 0 330 42166 2, RRP $25
I have never given birth myself. Two decades on, however, tales of my own birth are still a popular topic of family conversation. Dad remembers clearly the doctor in his ‘white gumboots’, but in Mum’s stories the two midwives who were present take the lead role. It is this special and often neglected relationship between midwife and mother that Tattam and Kennedy probe in Labour of Love.
They allow midwives to tell their own stories, taking us across the continent from the isolated Wimmera to the pandemonium of a busy city maternity ward. They chart not just the elation of ‘textbook’ births, but the deep despair into which families sink when something goes wrong. Central to each story, however, is the bond of support forged between midwife and mother.
Readers may find the vivid descriptions of birth and its aftermath confronting. Often it feels that we are unwelcome intruders in someone’s private joys and sometimes-raw grief. It is precisely through such intimacy, however, that Labour of Love captures the anticipation, excitement, and pain of birth and the adventure that follows. The great virtue of the book is to give voice to those often forgotten central figures, the midwives, and the vital role they play at birth and beyond. Thanks to this book, I will now listen to stories of my own birth a little more appreciatively—even the one that starts, ‘Becca had a face like a squished-up prune.’
Bec Butler
The Long, Slow Death of White Australia
Gwenda Tavan. Scribe Publications, 2005. ISBN 1 920 76946 3, RRP $32.95
Gwenda Tavan’s book is an account of the history of the White Australia Policy. It grew out of her PhD thesis of the same topic. There were times I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in fact trawling through one of my history tutorial readings.
Beyond the style, Tavan has written a decent public history of the policy from Federation to present, tracking it from its nationalist beginnings through the postwar pressures for social change and up to its legislative end during the Whitlam days. Leadership and community values issues are themes flowing through the book. Was it the vision of people like Whitlam, Grassby and Fraser that brought Australia into its multicultural era? Or simply politicians responding to society’s changing views