The baby stripped bare – and left in direct sunlight for 30 minutes

A yellow envelope arrived in the post, sent by my aunt. From the envelope slipped a book, ancient and tinder dry. Printed in 1948 and originally belonging to my grandmother, it was a guide to sound mothercraft. My aunt thought it might be amusing for me, as the mother of a baby myself, to read about how things used to be done.

Our Babies was printed by the NSW government and distributed to mothers for most of the last century, beginning in 1931. By the time this particular copy was printed, 680,000 had been distributed to mothers through baby health centres from Glebe to Wagga.

Reading it was like opening a time capsule from that other baby boom, the one before nappies were disposable and mothers’ groups met in pubs, back when layettes of pilchers, shawls and bonnets were sewn by hand and babies were weaned on to such wholesome delicacies as cod liver oil and brains.

The illustration on the cover of the book gave a taste of its tone. A cross and frazzled stork, carrying a gumnut baby under each wing, griped to a kookaburra: ”I hardly like delivering the goods, Mrs Kookaburra, them humans is so gum careless of ‘em.”

Within its pages the advice is just as strict and admonishing. Babies had to be fed by the clock every four hours during the day, with no feeds at all after 10pm. Dummies were deemed ”unnecessary and objectionable”; finding one in a sleeping baby’s mouth was ”a reflection on his mother”. Kissing babies was out, too: ”It is hard to conceive anything more calculated to injure babies than the common practice of kissing them on the mouth.”

For the mother who failed to mother according to these strict rules, disaster lay at every turn. They were warned against the ”advice of ignorant women” and the dangers of ”wrong feeding and bad handling”. Babies, unless promptly trained, ”will become a source of incessant trouble” and ”regrets and heart-burning on the parents’ part in after years will not make amends for giving baby a bad start”.

Some of the most amusing advice concerned sun. For the modern parent, accustomed to dirty looks for taking a baby to the beach without a neck-to-knee sun suit, hat and sunscreen, the insistence that babies spend 30 nude minutes in direct sunlight each day seems vaguely obscene.

The book criticises one mother for mistakenly giving her baby his ‘’sun kicks” in the shade of the verandah. ”She was astonished to hear that the baby should be gradually accustomed to being almost wholly exposed (at any rate to the waist) to the direct sun for a time each day, and he would greatly benefit thereby”.

Given how much the advice for the proper tending of infants has

changed over the years, it is perhaps not surprising that grandparents schooled in these old ways are now sent off for re-education at hospital-run grandparent classes. But for all the changes and the archaic details – cot mattresses were ideally ”made of horsehair, or good quality kapok or fibre”, babies were protected from flies with Shelltox – a lot remains the same.

Far from being a modern phenomenon, the pressure to breastfeed is thread throughout this old book. Nowhere have I read anything quite as hard about bottle-feeding mothers as inOur Babies.

”Failure to breast-feed the baby is nearly always due to LACK OF PREPARATION”. Pregnant women were instructed to scrub their nipples with toothbrush and soap to guard against cracked nipples: ”If mothers could only realise that ARTIFICIALLY-FED BABIES ARE SEVERELY HANDICAPPED and that no infant can be deprived of his natural food without detriment, they would not neglect these simple precautions”.

It is tempting to be nostalgic for a time when parenting was unpressured, when life was easy and less was expected from mothers. Reading Our Babies made me realise such a time probably never existed.

While flipping through this time capsule made me feel lucky to be a mother today it also made me see that the real art of motherhood is timeless throughout the ages and consists of knowing when you probably should listen to expert advice and when you should tell the experts to go jump.

Final column

This was going to be my last column for the Herald but they have just told me they are not going to publish it, so I figure I may as well post it here so it doesn’t go to waste …

Okay. This is going to be a little bit awkward. You see I’ve been thinking about things and, well, before I start, I just want you to know you haven’t done anything wrong.

It’s not you, it’s me. So let me just come out and say it. After nearly five years and something like 200 columns, our relationship is over.

Let’s not forget the good times though. I will always remember those Saturday mornings we spent lazing around, your eyes skimming lightly over my first few paragraphs, your fingers flipping the page to something more substantial about infrastructure or water allocations on the other side.

When you take on a column you are supposed to commit for life. Keep your head down, take the money, hope like buggery that no one takes it away from you after an ill-advised tweet about a gerbil or a child star. So it does feel flamboyantly wasteful to end a column without some kind of lurid scandal, and five years is not long at all in the scheme of column writing.

America’s longest running magazine column, with its wonderfully retro title Can This Marriage Be Saved?, has been published in the Ladies’ Home Journal since 1953.

Individual columnists have been known to die in the job. Charmian Clift, my favourite Herald columnist of all time, who dignified the women’s pages with thoughtful words which helped wrench this city out of its small town mindset, wrote right until her untimely death in 1969.

Columnists have even written about their own deaths. Gene Amole wrote a column for the Denver Rocky Mountain News from 1977 until death came in 2002 at the age of 78. Through his final months, when he knew he was dying, he kept up with his six columns a week. He wrote on from the grave, his final thoughts published, as planned, the week after his death.

As I write that last paragraph, it strikes me that, eight years on, it is not strange any more than someone would post regular missives of their final days. If there is any strangeness about it, it is that someone might get paid to do it when so many willingly do it for free.

Personally I am planning on living way too long to keep writing the same column till the end. There are only so many columns you can write about gay marriage, selective high schools, feminism, cycle lanes, sexual politics, taxation and the cost of airport parking.

So I am off to start something new, to begin life as one of those infuriating mature-aged university students. Perhaps spending too long in the world of opinions has pushed me towards more scientific pursuits, another world where an atom is still an atom no matter how floridly you argue otherwise, no matter how novel your quick take on the atom issue, no matter how many letters to the editor it attracts.

As this relationship ends, I want you to know how much I have gained from my time with you, such as a regular income and the opportunity to get flamed at dinner parties over opinions I only half hold but was forced to express forcefully because it read better.

And part of me will grieve for the future we could have had, growing old and tired together. There was so much still to do. I hadn’t even given my daughter a cute pseudonym, nor regaled you with tales of her adorable antics. Nor will I have the chance to veer right with middle age, railing against the death of manners and grammar, getting enraged about the misuse of terms like “beg the question” and “decimate”.

As for your future, it is bright. You are beautiful and clever. Your powers of concentration are amazing. You have made it almost to the end of this column, when so many would have given up long ago.

Soon there will be someone new in your life, someone with their own pet topics and wavering degree of sarcasm. And there are so many exciting things to write about in our ever changing world. The state election is coming up, electricity prises are on the rise and a brand spanking new Westfield has just opened in the city. Life goes on.