Quambi Nursing Home

The Quambi Nursing Home, North Adelaide, was established around 1910. It was a maternity home, run by Mrs Bartels. Around 1913, the Babies’ Hospital Association arranged for a tent to be sent up in the grounds of Quambi, for the care of sick babies, whose mothers could not afford the regular fees of a private hospital. Due to overcrowding the Association established the Babies’ Hospital, St Peters, in 1915 and it took over the role of caring for sick infants from the Quambi Nursing Home. The Quambi Nursing Home continued to exist as a maternity hospital for several decades.

The Quambi Nursing Home, a private maternity hospital, was located on Pennington Terrace, in North Adelaide,

Quambi was in the newspapers in January 1910 after a hot air balloonist’s parachute failed, and he fortunately landed in a tree on the grounds of the Home. ‘When he fell through the tree, he landed within a yard of a baby in a cot, and within two yards of a lady patient, who ran screaming away at the sudden apparition’ (Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1910).

In 1913, Babies’ Hospital Association, an association of prominent philanthropic ladies and concerned Adelaide doctors, lobbied for the establishment of a special ward for sick babies under the age of two at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital. When this attempt failed the sick infants were cared for at the private hospital known as Quambi Nursing Home. According to newspaper reports from the time, babies belonging to mothers who could not afford the fees of the private hospital were cared for in a tent in the grounds of the hospital arranged for by the Association (‘A visit to Mareeba’, 1917).

Overcrowding became a problem at the Nursing Home and so the Association leased a large property in Winchester Street, St Peters. In 1915 this became the Babies’ Hospital, St Peters and took over the role of caring for sick infants from the Quambi Nursing Home.

Quambi Nursing Home continued to operate as a maternity home for several decades, and eventually became part of the Memorial Hospital.