The Long Way Round

Alice Catherine Hughes was born at 2:40 pm at Calvary Hospital on Augusta Road in Lenah Valley, the second daughter of Robert James Hughes, an accountant with the Tasmanian Treasury, and Margaret Grace Hughes née Lyall. She weighed seven pounds four ounces. She was delivered by the obstetrician Dr Eleanor Voss, with Sister Agnes Mulvany attending, and the birth was without complication.

The Hughes family lived in Bellerive, on the eastern shore of the Derwent. The Tasman Bridge had been down since January, when a bulk carrier struck it and brought down two of its spans, and the eastern shore had been cut off from both of Hobart's hospitals ever since. Robert crossed to his office on Murray Street each morning by ferry. Margaret had planned to stay with friends in New Town for the last fortnight of the pregnancy. The baby came before she went.

Her contractions began in the late morning, at home, with her elder daughter, Jennifer Louise Hughes, aged three. Margaret walked next door to the Harcourts, who had a telephone and a car. Betty Harcourt took Jennifer and rang the Treasury. Her husband, Noel Harcourt, a retired council engineer, drove Margaret to the hospital the only way a car could go: fifty kilometres north up the East Derwent Highway, across the old lift-span bridge at Bridgewater, and back down the Brooker Highway on the western shore. Traffic queued at Bridgewater, as it had every day since January, and the drive took an hour and a quarter.

Robert took a taxi from Murray Street and reached Calvary in ten minutes. He arrived nearly an hour before his wife. He waited in the fathers' room at the end of the maternity corridor without any means of knowing where on the road she was, and asked Sister Agnes for news at intervals she later described as frequent. He spent the rest of the time on the Mercury crossword, in fountain pen. Margaret was admitted shortly after half past one, well advanced in labour, and the baby was born a little over an hour later.

The name had been settled for weeks. Robert held his second daughter briefly at the bedside and then telephoned the Harcourts from the ward to tell them. Noel Harcourt drove home the long way round. Robert stayed with his wife until the end of visiting hours and caught the last ferry back across the river to collect Jennifer, who had spent the afternoon in the Harcourts' kitchen and fallen asleep there.