From Heritage New Zealand, Spring 2010

by Elizabeth Cox

In the 100 years since it was established, the Plunket Society has left its mark not only on the well-being of the country's children but on its townscapes.

If you overlook the signage and the childproof fence, it would be hard to pick the house in Wellington’s Lyall Bay as being different from any other in the street. But, like other clinics around the country this one, through its role as a Plunket Family Centre, is dedicated to the health of babies and children.

Liz Bell took her little daughter to a Family Centre when she was having trouble getting her to sleep. “They were just so supportive. They have created a great environment for mothers there, where you can feel comfortable talking about any of the issues you have. The Plunket nurse showed me how to make things calmer so that both of us could be more relaxed. I’m so grateful to them for their help and I’m always telling other mothers about it.”

While the talk of surviving motherhood after a high-powered career or the saris and headscarves that fill the house during the immigrant mothers’ Friday gatherings might not seem familiar to the women who worked for Plunket 100 years ago, the basic scene is still the same. The Plunket Society was set up by Frederic Truby King in 1907 and while the Society has had a deep and lasting impact on the health of New Zealand, it has also had a lasting impact on townscapes around the country. Every town and suburb has a Plunket building and these give an insight into not only a range of New Zealand’s architectural styles but also our social history.

Plunket has always been a localised organisation with each town having its own committee, made up almost exclusively of women; the buildings are a symbol of the power of women to get things done. Until a few years ago the accepted understanding of Plunket was that it was a society dominated by Truby King and, after his death, his ghost. But more nuanced analyses of the Society recently have shown that its successes were largely due to the hard work of thousands of women around the country. Local committees raised money to employ their nurses, run cars and provide spaces for them to work. At first the nurses worked out of temporary rooms, but local committees fund raised for buildings of their own.

Every town has its own story of how its Plunket buildings came into being. Joyce Andrews, a longterm Plunket volunteer during the baby boom, was interviewed as part of a Plunket Society oral history project. She said: “Being on a Plunket committee was a night out for the ladies, away from their husbands and children. It was fun and we worked hard.” The Stratford branch held garden parties, manned a tent at the local A & P show and organised mannequin parades. The Tapanui branch ran food stalls at rugby games and held variety shows and “community sings”. Like many other branches, Tapanui also ran an annual Plunket Ball which became one of the most important social events in the town’s calendar.

Plunket clinics were busy and dynamic places, with so many mothers and children filling the waiting rooms there was sometimes standing room only. In 1936 the Auckland Plunket rooms alone received 84,000 visits with as many as 60 or 70 babies in one afternoon. Twenty years later there were almost 600,000 visits a year being made by mothers to Plunket rooms around the country.

The first major spread of Plunket buildings coincided with the development of women’s rest rooms in the 1910s and ’20s. Women often had to fight for public facilities in downtown city areas and, despairing of councils doing anything to help, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union often set them up itself. The rooms gradually became more elaborate and many local Plunket committees became involved, adding their facilities to the buildings. The Hastings Municipal Rest Rooms, possibly the first to be purpose-built in Australasia, was one such place and became an important social asset to the city.

Plunket rooms mushroomed around the country in the 1940s and ’50s. Local committees took advantage of the Labour Government’s wish to create practical memorials to mark the 1940 centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (the lovely classical-style building at Oamaru is one example) and later to commemorate World War II. In 1952-53 alone, 17 new rooms opened around the country. Many of the buildings were modelled on the domestic architecture of the time, designed to fit in with the bungalows, villas or state houses in the surrounding streets. There were some exceptions. The 1930s’ Masterton rooms could be a fine example of an art-deco office building except for the giveaway ramp for prams at the front door and the Patea rooms were combined with the new town library into a rather spectacular Gummer & Ford-designed brick Georgian building.

As the needs of Plunket have changed, the original clinic buildings in some towns are now used for other purposes. The Nelson clinic, for example, has  moved several times but the 1930s’ art-deco building on Cathedral Square lives on as a glass studio. Many others, however, still serve the purpose for which they were built all those years ago.

The Plunket Family Centre in Lyall Bay is one of the small domestic buildings which filled the void left by the closure of Plunket’s much larger Karitane hospitals in the 1970s. While the ordinary Plunket clinics are quieter than they used to be with an appointment system that sees less waiting time, the Family Centres are still lively places with mothers constantly coming in for advice. But pragmatism isn’t all they will find at a Family Centre. “As well as the practical advice,” says new mother Rachel Brown, “there is all the moral support. Most of all they teach you not to worry.”

“I love not knowing what challenge is coming in the door next,” says Plunket nurse Anne Norton who has worked here, and previously in  Newtown, since 1987, “or how long someone is going to stay. Some mothers are struggling with their babies’ sleep and we can show how to put them to sleep in our bassinets here, or they might want help with feeding. We never hurry them, just let them work through things in their own time.”

Today, a large proportion of Plunket’s core-services funding is provided by government. However, extra services such as this Family Centre are funded in exactly the same way as they have always been – from fund raising by local people for local services.

Liz Bell mentioned that the highlight of her visits was “leaning over to the woman beside me in the waiting room, asking her what she was here for. It was great to find other people in the same boat as me”. Small moments such as these in this small house would have made the committees of women of the past 100 years proud. They symbolise exactly what they all worked for.