Mareeba Hospital, Adelaide

The building known as Mareeba sits at 19-21 Belmore Terrace in Woodville, an inner-west suburb of Adelaide. Over one hundred years old, the journey of this building is one of resilience and adaptability as it has been repeatedly repurposed to meet the changing health needs of its local community.

Mareeba Hospital c. 1920, courtesy of State Library of South Australia, ref. B11657

Mareeba was originally built in 1912/1913 by Mrs TRR Gun, the wife of a developer. The original building was a two-storey red-brick Edwardian style building with white concrete detailing, large sash windows, Dutch roofs and wooden filligree balconies with iron lacework detail on its southern and eastern sides. It was set on a large plot of land, back from the road with a circular driveway and an external staircase. Always designed as a medical facility, Mareeba was to be used by local fee-for-service doctors for their most serious cases. A court case in August 1915 saw Mrs Gun attempting to recover unpaid rent from one doctor for the housing housing and running an X-Ray machine; the case failed, and may indicate that the hospital un profitable for the Guns.

In any case the Guns made the decision to sell Mareeba to the South Australian State Government in 1916, at a price lower than the they had paid to build it. The government announced that while the building was ultimately intended to be a babies' hospital, it would immediately lease it to the Red Cross for use as a convalescent home for returned soldiers, who were anticipated to spend two weeks there after recovering from significant injuries. Led by Lady Galway, the Red Cross raised the 2500 pounds needed to open and the Governor cut the ribbon in August, 1916.

After the flow of injured soldiers eased in later 1916 and early 1917, the SA Government started making good on its original plan to have Mareeba be home of a Babies' Hospital. The building was again refurbished to make wards for babies and the first babies were transferred to the building in August 1917.

From the early 1920s a steady stream of improvements, alterations and additions were made to the Mareeba grounds, including more wings, accommodation for nurses and storage buildings. In the 1920s Mareeba was the location for nurse training and in the late 1930s an operating theatre was installed to correct cleft palates, among other congenital birth defects. In 1939 the Hospital treated 448 babies.

As Adelaide grew, its need for larger metropolitan hospitals intensified. The large-scale Queen Elizabeth Hospital was opened in 1954 in the same suburb of Woodville, just five minutes away, and from 1959 the hospital took over the Mareeba building and renamed the service as the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Children's Annexe. Despite some investment by the State Government to modernise facilities in 1960, the childrens' and babies wards were closed down in 1961 and services transferred to the larger, better appointed facilities.

For the next 30 years Mareeba and its surrounding patchwork of buildings were put to varying uses, the original building being used for residential domiciliary care and respite care until 1987, and then as storage space until 1989.

In 1989, the site was snapped up by the South Australian Health Commission (SAHC) as the site for the long-promised Pregnancy Advisory Centre (PAC), which offered a complete suite of pregnancy  advisory care, from diagnosis and counselling through to a safe and specialist abortion clinic.

The PAC had been the result of over a decade of feminist activism, health worker advocacy, and planning by SAHC, all of whom recognised the need for specialist abortion care services. But one of the major stumbling blocks to opening had been the lack of a site. According to SA law, abortions had to be performed in a hospital; and the major SA hospitals that provided abortion services were stricken with reluctant staff and inadequate facilities. A standalone service was needed, and when successive hospitals refused to house one, Mareeba was identified as a hospital that was vacant, available, and only five minutes from the major TQEH, in case of emergency.

Once again put to use, Mareeba was refurbished in 1990 and 1991 with the help of architects Brown and Falconer, and in a style that was deliberately warm, welcoming and informal. Not even a Supreme Court challenge by the local Woodville Council, who did not want an abortion clinic in their area, could prevent its reimagining and rebuilding as a place of essential services, this time for women who had unwanted pregnancies and their partners. The building being set back from the road provided a shield from pavement protesters, there was plenty of onsite carparking and the external staircase was enclosed to enable a secure entrance.

The PAC at Mareeba will be the subject of another post, but - spoiler alert! - as a service it is considered one of the most successful women's health innovations in SA history. Mareeba providing the physical location is just another twist in the tale of this significant building, which has provided comfort to private patients, wounded soldiers, sick babies and children and finally people needing abortions. While the future of the building is uncertain, surely there can be few others that have provided such a volume of care from such a relatively small space.