THE great great granddaughter of a midwife who’s a strong contender for a proposed historical women’s walk at Fremantle Cemetery says she continues to be inspired by her pioneering ancestor.
Elizabeth Adams (nee Martin) and her husband William arrived at the Swan River Colony in May 1830 aboard the Rockingham, the first ship to arrive with participants in Thomas Peel’s doomed settlement scheme.
It was a stormy start to life in the fledgling colony, with the Rockingham running aground amid a dramatic rescue, and the seemingly barren ground around Clarence Town prompting Peel to abandon his starving charges and leave them to their own devices.
According to family tradition, it didn’t take long before Ms Adams’ indomitable spirit shone through, being called on to assist the Rockingham’s captain’s wife give birth on Garden Island in the wake of the shipwreck, then going into labour herself and producing her third daughter, Mary, later in the day.
• Granny Adams’ great great granddaughter Dianne Borlase. Photo by Steve Grant
Unfortunately there aren’t contemporary documents to verify that claim, and as the Chook discovered, some of the family folklore turned out to be as leaky as the Rockingham.
But what is certain is that some time after Peel released the Adams as indentured servants, they settled in Fremantle and ended up with 10 children, living in Market Street near the old post office building while William worked on whaling and trading vessels and Elizabeth supplemented their income by working as a domestic servant.
Following William’s death in 1867 she established herself as the colony’s first and go-to midwife, earning the nicknames Granny Adams, the Mother of Fremantle, or “the rabbit catcher”.
Author Jesse E Hammond knew Granny Adams as a young man and recalled in his 1936 book Western Pioneers that she presided over a baby boom in the colony.
“Many times Mrs Adams walked to Perth from Fremantle when there was no conveyance available,” he recalled.
“The distance or the time of the day or night meant nothing to Mrs Adams.
“It has been stated many times that she never lost a case, although she attended hundreds without the assistance of a doctor.”
• Granny Adams. Photo courtesy City of Fremantle’s awesome Local History Collection
Her great great granddaughter Dianne Borlase believes Granny Adams had trained as a nurse early in her life, and met William when assigned to help his rehabilitation after he returned from the Napoleonic wars with major head injuries.
“So she mends him and they get friendly and fall in love, and they have two children,” Ms Borlase says.
Records do show there was something of a hiccup at first, with their first daughter Caroline being born out of wedlock and a Justice of the Peace ordering William to pay the churchwarden’s relief for her upkeep. The pair were wed eight months later.
Ms Borlase says this experience may have sharpened Granny Adams’ commitment to the women she assisted in childbirth, along with the brutal conditions at Clarence Town, where nearly 40 people perished.
“Meagre humpies and poverty conditions…Elizabeth was confronted with the birthing of babies into this upsetting reality,” the 92-year-old said.
She says the carnage across Europe left by Napoleon’s ambitions may have contributed to the pair’s decision to join Peel’s experiment.
“She and Adams dream of a land free of war and damaged; that was such a big thing.
“New settlers brought with them all they knew to survive; instinct.”
Ms Borlase believes Granny Adams’ instinct for survival and her strong intellect were the key ingredients that helped her turn such an inauspicious start into a career that left a lasting legacy.
Granny Adams died in her son’s fishing shack on Garden Island in February 1914 and according to the West Australian her funeral in Fremantle was attended by “nearly all the prominent townspeople”. Although it’s been reported she was buried at the Skinner Street cemetery, the West describes it as the “old burial ground at South Fremantle” which would tally with the Alma Street cemetery, where the government did allow relatives and prominent citizens to be buried there despite its closure several years earlier.
Granny Adams and William were later reinterred at Fremantle Cemetery.
The Metropolitan Cemeteries Board will be looking for other nominees for the heritage walk until the end of November, and a link to the form can be found on its website.
by STEVE GRANT