Calvary Hospital, Tasmania

Augusta Road

Calvary Hospital opened in November 1938 on Augusta Road in Lenah Valley, on the lower slopes of kunanyi above Hobart's northern suburbs. It was founded by the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, a nursing congregation established in England in 1877 by Mary Potter to care for the sick and the dying. The Sisters had run Calvary Hospital in North Adelaide since 1900 and hospitals in Sydney and Wagga Wagga since the late nineteenth century. Hobart was their first foundation in Tasmania.

The invitation came from the Archdiocese of Hobart, which had spent most of the decade lobbying for a Catholic hospital in the south of the state. The Royal Hobart Hospital was the only large hospital in the city. It was public, crowded and, for many Catholic families, uncomfortably Protestant in its management. The private hospitals that existed were small nursing homes run by individual doctors or matrons, several of them in converted houses in Sandy Bay and New Town, and few had more than a dozen beds.

The Sisters bought a sloping block on Augusta Road that had been an orchard and paddock, with a view down the valley to the Derwent. The site was chosen for its air, its quiet and its price. Construction began early in 1938 and was finished in less than a year. The first building was a two-storey brick block with thirty-two beds, an operating theatre, a small convent wing for the Sisters and a chapel on the ground floor. The Archbishop of Hobart blessed it on its opening day, and the first patients were admitted the following week.

Six Sisters came from Adelaide to staff it. Their superior was Mother Mary Columba Feeney, a Victorian-born nurse in her late forties who had trained at North Adelaide and run its surgical floor for a decade. She was small, exacting and entirely unsentimental about money. The hospital opened with a mortgage that the Sisters' own accounts described as alarming, and for its first five years Mother Columba ran it on the margin, taking every patient whose doctor would send them and turning down nothing that paid.

The Maternity Ward

The war shaped Calvary's first decade. Several of Hobart's younger doctors enlisted, and those who remained were stretched across the Royal Hobart, their private rooms and whichever beds they could find. Calvary took the overflow. It nursed surgical patients, the elderly and the chronically ill, and in its first years it admitted a steady trickle of servicemen on leave or discharge whose families preferred them nursed by the Sisters rather than in the public wards.

The maternity ward opened in October 1944. It occupied a new wing at the northern end of the building, with twelve beds, a labour ward, a nursery behind a glass partition and a small room where fathers could wait. Mother Columba had argued for it for three years. Hobart's birth rate was already rising as the war turned, and she judged, correctly, that a reputation for maternity care would carry the hospital further than any other service could. Within two years the ward was the busiest part of the hospital and its most reliable source of income.

The midwife in charge from its opening was Sister Mary Catherine Doyle, a Sister of the Little Company of Mary trained in Sydney. She ran the ward for twenty-two years. She was gentle with mothers and severe with everyone else, including the visiting obstetricians, whose habits she recorded in a private notebook and whose instructions she sometimes declined to carry out. Hobart families came to request her by name. By the time she left the ward in 1966 she had attended more than six thousand births.

The post-war years brought money and pressure in equal measure. Hobart's population grew quickly in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the maternity ward ran at capacity for most of the decade. Calvary was a private hospital, and its patients paid fees, supported after 1953 by the new Commonwealth hospital benefits and by private insurance. In practice that made it the hospital of Hobart's middle class: public servants, professionals, shopkeepers, teachers. Families who could not afford it went to the Royal Hobart, and some of them resented the difference.

Sister Mary Catherine's Ward

The hospital's patients were never only Catholic. From the 1940s onwards a large share of its mothers came from Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and unbelieving families, who chose Calvary for its nursing and its quiet. The Sisters made no condition of faith. They did keep the crucifixes in every room and the chapel bell at six in the morning, and they did expect every patient to tolerate both.

Richard Alan Rothschild was born at Calvary on 24 June 1953, delivered by Sister Mary Catherine on a cold midwinter morning. His family was Jewish by descent and secular by habit, and his parents chose Calvary on the advice of their doctor and the recommendation of friends. His father spent the night in the fathers' room at the end of the maternity corridor, as fathers then did, and was shown his son through the nursery glass. He later wrote that the Sister who handed the baby to his wife had asked him, in passing, about the history of the family name, and that she had known more of Tasmania's colonial history than most of the men he worked with.

The 1950s also brought the hospital's first major building programme. A surgical wing opened in 1958, with two new operating theatres, a recovery ward and forty more beds, paid for with a bank loan, a public appeal and a bequest from a Sandy Bay timber merchant whose wife had died in the hospital's care. A new convent for the Sisters followed in 1962, built on the slope above the main building. At its peak in the early 1960s the Hobart community numbered twenty-three Sisters, nearly all of them nurses, and they still held every senior post in the hospital.

The relationship between the Sisters and the doctors was never simple. Calvary's obstetricians and surgeons were visiting specialists who admitted their private patients and were paid by them, not by the hospital. They valued the nursing and resented the authority. Disputes over theatre lists, staffing and the Sisters' habit of overruling medical orders on the wards ran through the 1950s and 1960s. The Sisters usually won, because the building and the beds were theirs.

Lay Hands

The Second Vatican Council, which closed in 1965, changed Calvary more slowly than it changed the parishes. But the change came. Fewer young women entered the Little Company of Mary, and those who did were less willing to spend their lives in a hospital. Through the late 1960s and 1970s lay nurses and lay administrators took over posts that Sisters had always held. Sister Mary Catherine retired from the maternity ward in 1966 and was replaced by a lay midwife, Joan Talbot, the first woman outside the order to run a ward at Calvary.

The Sisters kept two things for themselves: the chapel, and the hospital's ethics. Calvary did not perform abortions, tubal ligations or vasectomies, and later did not offer IVF. Patients who wanted those procedures were referred to the Royal Hobart. The policy caused friction from the start. Several obstetricians who worked at both hospitals found themselves sterilising patients at the Royal Hobart on the morning after delivering their babies at Calvary, and at least two moved their practices away from Augusta Road altogether in protest during the 1970s.

Money was a constant problem. The introduction of Medibank in 1975 and the repeated changes to hospital funding that followed left private hospitals uncertain from one year to the next about who would pay for what. Calvary's beds were full, but its costs rose faster than its fees. For several years in the late 1970s the hospital ran at a loss, covered by the order's reserves and by a series of public appeals that the Sisters disliked and the Hobart Catholic community supported more generously than anyone expected.

Two Daughters in 1975

The maternity ward in the mid-1970s was busy, old-fashioned in its routines and increasingly open to fathers, who were by then allowed into the labour ward at the discretion of the midwife. Sister Agnes Mulvany, one of the few Sisters still nursing on the wards, worked the maternity floor through most of the decade. She was younger than her predecessors, quick, humorous and less inclined than they had been to enforce the rules on fathers.

Sandra Elizabeth Harris was born at Calvary at 9:07 am on 22 March 1975, the second child of a violinist, Robert Harris, and a painter and art teacher, Margaret Harris née Whitfield. Sister Agnes allowed Robert to stay in the labour ward, a concession that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. That afternoon Margaret asked for paper, and Sister Agnes gave her a pad of fluid-balance charts. She drew the folded blanket at the foot of her bed on the backs of them.

Six months later, at 2:40 pm on 17 September 1975, Alice Catherine Hughes was born on the same ward, the second daughter of a Treasury accountant, Robert James Hughes, and Margaret Grace Hughes, who had worked as a medical records clerk at the Royal Hobart before her first child. She was delivered by Dr Eleanor Voss, one of the first women in Tasmania to hold admitting rights as an obstetrician. Voss had come from Melbourne in 1971 and spent most of her first years in Hobart fighting for a share of the theatre lists that the established obstetricians regarded as theirs. She delivered at Calvary for twenty-four years.

Storm Weather

Theodore James Rankin was born at Calvary at 4:23 pm on 12 March 1981, during an autumn storm that had driven the fishing fleet into Constitution Dock. His father, William Theodore Rankin, had secured his trawler, the Southern Current, and reached the hospital just before the worst of the weather. He spent the afternoon in the labour ward with a marine radio on the windowsill, listening to the fleet reports between contractions. The midwives remembered the radio long after they had forgotten the storm.

The rest of the 1980s were the hardest years in the hospital's history. Hospital funding changed again with the introduction of Medicare in 1984, private insurance membership fell sharply, and Calvary's occupancy dropped for the first time since the war. In 1985 the hospital closed a medical ward and cut nursing hours across the building. The Tasmanian branch of the nurses' union called a series of stoppages over staffing on the surgical floor in 1986, the first industrial action in the hospital's history. The Sisters, who had never negotiated with a union, found the experience bewildering and distressing.

In 1987 the Sisters appointed Calvary's first lay chief executive, Kevin Doolan, a former administrator at the Royal Hobart. The decision was the order's own, and it was the right one, but it was not easy. Doolan restructured the hospital's finances, renegotiated its contracts with the insurers and closed the nurses' home. He also moved the Sisters' superior out of the hospital's management meetings and into an advisory role. Several of the older Sisters never forgave him for it. The hospital returned to surplus in 1990.

The Wider Calvary

Through the 1990s and 2000s Calvary in Tasmania grew from a single hospital into a group. The order took on the management of St John's in South Hobart, an older Catholic hospital with a long record of its own, and in 2004 and 2005 acquired St Luke's and St Vincent's hospitals in Launceston. Lenah Valley remained the largest of the campuses and the one most Hobart families meant when they said Calvary. Its buildings were extended and refitted several times, and by the early 2000s little of the 1938 block was visible from Augusta Road.

The maternity ward was refurbished in 1998, with private birth suites replacing the old shared labour ward. On the night of 14 March 2002, the evening shift on that ward included a midwife named Helen Varga and an obstetrician on duty, Dr Simon Treloar, who were called to the birth of Grace Evelyn Marston. Her mother, Alice Catherine Marston née Hughes, had been born on the same ward twenty-six years earlier. Grace was delivered by ventouse at 11:52 pm after an eighteen-hour labour. Her father, a detective sergeant, was at a service station further down Augusta Road buying coffee when she arrived. The hospital kiosk had closed for the night.

The ward came close to closing a few years later. In 2007 and 2008 a combination of retirements, rising insurance premiums for obstetricians and a statewide shortage of midwives left Calvary with too few specialists to staff its roster safely. The board considered ending maternity services altogether and transferring its births to the Royal Hobart. It was persuaded not to by its own midwives, who organised a petition, and by an agreement with the Royal Hobart under which obstetricians shared on-call duties across both hospitals. The ward survived, smaller than before and running at the edge of its capacity for the next decade.

The Sisters Leave

On 1 January 2011 the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary formally handed their canonical stewardship of the Calvary hospitals to a new lay Catholic body. The change was the end of a process that had begun in the 1960s. By then there were only four Sisters left in Hobart, all of them retired, living in a few rooms of the 1962 convent that the hospital had long since converted to offices.

Sister Agnes Mulvany was the last of them. She had nursed on the maternity ward through the 1970s, worked as a pastoral carer through the 1980s and 1990s, and stayed on in Hobart after her companions had moved to the order's retirement house in Sydney. She left Lenah Valley in 2012, at eighty-one. Before she went she walked through every ward in the hospital, including the operating theatres, and blessed each one. Several of the younger staff had never seen a Sister of the Little Company of Mary in the building before.

The hospital kept the chapel, the crucifixes and the ethics. It also kept the tensions. The prohibition on sterilisation and IVF continued after the Sisters' departure, as did the referrals to the Royal Hobart. In 2017 the hospital's refusal to allow a tubal ligation to be performed at the time of a caesarean section, on a woman who had requested it in writing, became the subject of a complaint to the state health complaints commissioner and of an unflattering article in the Mercury. The hospital's position did not change.

Pandemic Years

When the pandemic reached Tasmania in March 2020, Calvary's private wards were placed under agreement with the state government for the duration of the emergency. Elective surgery stopped. Theatres and wards were held in reserve for public patients in case the Royal Hobart was overwhelmed, which in the first wave it was not. For several weeks the surgical floors at Lenah Valley stood almost empty while their nurses were redeployed to screening clinics and the public hospital.

The maternity ward stayed open throughout. Visitor rules changed from week to week. For a period in the autumn of 2020 partners were allowed into the birth suite only for active labour and were sent home within two hours of the birth. Several fathers missed the births altogether while they waited in car parks for results. The midwives held telephones up to the cots so that grandparents could see the babies, and they kept a box of donated knitted blankets by the nurses' station for mothers who had come in with nothing.

The hospital also opened a private emergency department on the Lenah Valley campus in the years after the pandemic. It treated patients with private insurance who might otherwise have waited in the corridors of the Royal Hobart's emergency department, and it was criticised by some public health doctors as a two-tier service. Its supporters answered that every patient seen at Calvary was one less in the queue on Liverpool Street. Both sides were right.

Nine Hundred Births

In 2025 the other private maternity unit in Hobart closed, and Calvary became the only private hospital in southern Tasmania delivering babies. It expanded its maternity service in a matter of months, from around three hundred and fifty births a year to capacity for around nine hundred, with Commonwealth funding shared between Calvary and the Royal Hobart. The ward that had nearly closed in 2008 was, by the end of 2025, the busiest it had ever been.

The expansion was not smooth. Calvary recruited midwives from interstate and from overseas, refitted a surgical ward as a postnatal floor and reopened rooms that had been used for storage. For the first months the new staff and the old did not always work well together, and several long-serving midwives left. The refurbished maternity ward was blessed by the Archbishop of Hobart in 2026, eighty-eight years after his predecessor had blessed the first building on the site.

By 2026 Calvary Lenah Valley was the largest private hospital in Tasmania. The 1938 chapel still stood, refitted and rarely full, on the ground floor of the oldest building. The bell no longer rang at six in the morning. A framed photograph of the six founding Sisters, taken on the front steps in November 1938, hung outside the chapel door. Few of the people who walked past it each day knew who they were.