Most will suggest sensitive photographers who can photograph mother and child so as to give the grieving mother lasting and tangible mementos of her baby.
Other services, such as making an imprint of a baby’s feet, will also often be suggested.
Benalla’s poet
The baby will then be interred as any other member of the family.
This is what happens now.
However, until very recent times, a mother suffering this terrible loss never saw her child.
Instead, her baby was swiftly whisked away from the mother by nursing staff.
The mother was encouraged to forget the child and move on with her life.
Kerang’s White Clocktower
Doctors often told her to get pregnant again as soon as possible to overcome any grief she might be experiencing.
The practice of hospitals varied as to what happened next.
In Sydney, for example, hospitals buried these babies in mass unmarked communal graves in the heart of Rookwood Cemetery in Bankstown.
Thirty thousand stillborn or dead newborn babies were buried there from the 1920s to the 1970s.
It was thought better if mothers and families were not given any details of this.
A history of local news in Benalla
As times and community expectations began to change in the 1990s, Rookwood Cemetery Trust erected a metal fence around communal graves.
It erected a sculpture of a mother and child at its entrance.
In 1998, the cemetery trust dedicated the area as the Circle of Love and publicised the use that had been made of the area by Sydney hospitals.
After 1998, mothers who had lost a stillborn or newborn baby were encouraged to hang a star on the fence commemorating their child.
A forgotten tragedy
Inspecting stars hanging on the fence circling the mass grave, one is struck by the grief that clings to these hundreds of stars.
It was a grief that never went away.
For example, Constance must have been in her late 90s when she erected a star to the memory of her much-wanted Dorothy Joyce Oldham, a stillborn child buried here in February 1923.
Other stars hark back to babies dying in the 1940s and 1950s.
Collisions and compensation
What is even more poignant are the words found on so many of the stars - "At last I have found you".
Despite efforts of the Cemetery Trust to set aside this area as a known burial site, Sydney hospitals continued to use it as a mass communal grave for stillborn or deceased newborn babies until 2001.
This only ceased when community expectations demanded that these children were interred by their families as the loved persons that they were.
In Sydney as in Benalla, cemeteries often have special areas set aside for the interment of children, but stillborn and newborn babies are no longer interred in mass communal graves.
John Barry, Coo-ee
