Woodville Spastic Children's Home

The Woodville Spastic Children’s Home was established by the South Australian Spastic Paralysis Welfare Association (SASPWA) at Woodville in 1952 to provide care and respite accommodation for children with disabilities. It also provided accommodation for children from country areas attending the school at Ashford House. In 1953 it had accommodation for 4. This had doubled by 1954. In the late 1950s or early 1960s the Woodville Spastic Children’s Home became known as the Woodville Spastic Centre.

The Woodville Spastic Children’s Home was established by the South Australian Spastic Paralysis Welfare Association (SASPWA) at Woodville in 1952. The South Australian Spastic Paralysis Welfare Association purchased property at 98 Woodville Rd Woodville in 1951 and after successful fundraising opened the Spastic Children’s Home in 1952. According to a newspaper article of the time the intention of the Spastic Welfare Association was to provide care and respite accommodation at Woodville for ‘severely handicapped children’ who did not fall within the scope of the Crippled Children’s Association:

Those children of this type who have been cared for at the play centre in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, are now attending the Woodville centre which eventually will also take such cases into residence for temporary holidays of a month or more with the object of relieving for a period the heavy strain on mothers who have other family responsibilities. The association hopes also to be able to include country children in this holiday plan but that, probably, will not be for some considerable time.

In June 1953 two bedrooms with two beds were operating at Woodville. These were being used by city children with disabilities whose parents were ill. Newspaper reports of the time state that the Home was seeking further funds to create more accommodation so that children from the country could live at the Centre and attend the day school at Ashford House.

By June 1954, 7 children were living in the ‘Nursing Home’ at the Woodville Spastic Children’s Home and a further 16 were attending day classes. In that same year the Miss Australia Quest was launched with proceeds going to SASPWA. The success of the Quest in the 1950s and 60s enabled expansion of the Woodville site. Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s the Woodville Spastic Children’s Home became known as the Woodville Spastic Centre.