GERTRUDE ABBOTT, founder of a hospital for women, was born Mary Jane O'Brien on 11 July 1846 in Sydney, daughter of Thomas O'Brien, schoolmaster, and his wife Rebecca. In December 1848 the family moved to Dry Creek, South Australia, where her father ran a licensed school, then took up farming. In February 1868, taking the name Sister Ignatius of Jesus, she entered the Order of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, founded two years earlier by Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison-Woods.
Influenced by Tenison-Woods, she and another nun claimed to witness visions. A scandal arose when the other nun was found to have faked manifestations. Although blameless, Sister Ignatius left the order in July 1872, four months after taking final vows, and returned to Sydney. No longer able to use her religious name, she became known as Mrs Gertrude or 'Mother' Abbott.
For the next twenty years she waited in vain for approval to found an order of contemplative nuns. At her establishment in Surry Hills, she gathered round her a small community of women who survived chiefly by dressmaking. After Tenison-Woods's death in her care in 1889, she inherited his estate of £609.
In 1894 Mrs Abbott opened St Margaret's Maternity Home at Strawberry Hills, claiming the home was 'unsectarian in principle and working… providing shelter and care for unmarried girls of the comparatively respectable class'. From March to December 1894 she admitted 9 married and 23 unmarried patients; 3 nurses trained in midwifery that year and 8 were receiving instruction in 1895.
Mrs Abbott ran the home for the next forty years, assisted by women of a quasi-religious community who followed an unofficial Rule; she obtained permission for Mass to be celebrated in the hospital chapel two or three times a week. In 1904 St Margaret's began to treat diseases of women and opened an out-patients department.
In 1910 Mrs Abbott leased, and later bought from the Sacred Heart nuns a property in Bourke Street, where she relocated the hospital to. As it was not officially recognized as a Catholic institution, money was raised by a series of large art union lotteries from 1921. That year she received a first government subsidy of £250, and patients' fees out-stripped for the first time fees paid by nurses.
In 1926 Sister Magdalen Foley, who had been with her since the earliest days and had been in charge of training nurses, died; from about then Mrs Abbott withdrew from the running of the hospital until her death on the 12th May 1934.
Read lessGERTRUDE ABBOTT, founder of a hospital for women, was born Mary Jane O'Brien on 11 July 1846 in Sydney, daughter of Thomas O'Brien, schoolmaster, and his wife Rebecca. In December 1848 the family moved to Dry Creek, South Australia, where her father ran a licensed school, then took up farming. In February 1868, taking the name Sister Ignatius of Jesus, she entered the Order of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, founded two years earlier by Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison-Woods.
Influenced by Tenison-Woods, she and another nun claimed to witness visions. A scandal arose when the other nun was found to have faked manifestations. Although blameless, Sister Ignatius left the order in July 1872, four months after taking final vows, and returned to Sydney. No longer able to use her religious name, she became known as Mrs Gertrude or 'Mother' Abbott.
For the next twenty years she waited in vain for approval to found an order of contemplative nuns. At her establishment in Surry Hills, she gathered round her a small community of women who survived chiefly by dressmaking. After Tenison-Woods's death in her care in 1889, she inherited his estate of £609.
In 1894 Mrs Abbott opened St Margaret's Maternity Home at Strawberry Hills, claiming the home was 'unsectarian in principle and working… providing shelter and care for unmarried girls of the comparatively respectable class'. From March to December 1894 she admitted 9 married and 23 unmarried pa... More
