Botham calls on Poms to beat 'convictsHello All, Some may have missed Iam Botham's almighty 'balls up' article which appeared on the ABC's web site. Regards, Peter Mayberry Tuggeranong Australia ********************** The article is as follows: Botham calls on Poms to beat...
Some years ago, when bereaved parents were still fighting for the right to have their stillborn-neonatal rests treated in the same manner as rests of older babies, one of the ABC's new programs highlighted the efforts of a group of parents who were trying to find the location of their babies' burial in Sydney cemeteries.
It seems it was common practice for ceremony directors, or was it the hospitals, to hold the bodies for burial until a sizeable number were collected and then all were buried in a common grave. These graves were unmarked.
In 1944 my mother gave had a daughter who died shortly after birth. The rest was registered - given name shows as "Stillborn (Female)". My mother told me that the ceremony directors suggested that she have the baby interred in the coffin of another deceased person to save money. Not being very flush at the time, she agreed to this. The name of the other person was not given to her and the cemetery where her baby was supposedly buried has no record of her burial. Her one memorial was the receipt from the ceremony directors.
The ceremony directors were a long established firm who conducted business over many years. I guess this was a common practice back then. My guess is that the improvements in refrigeration probably led to the common grave situations. However, my sister was born at home and this may have made a difference - perhaps my mother actually had a choice.
I think there was a huge difference in prevailing atbreastudes from around the 1940's to the early 1980's and those of earlier times. Leaving aside the legalities of registering the birth or rest, a rest was a rest, regardless of the age of the deceased and public grieving was both expected and permitted. The 1940's seemed to spawn a belief in the magic of medicine and a rest, particularly that of a baby, was an admission that medical intervention had failed. An "out of sight, out of mind" atbreastude was encouraged and mothers were expected to get over it and get on with it and a neo-natal rest and a miscarriage were regarded pretty much in the same light.
The wheel turns ....
Barbara
