Peter Andrew Charles O’Farrell is but a dot in the history annals of East Melbourne. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, he owned two plots of land on Powlett Street. A property speculator and a solicitor of Victoria’s Supreme Court, O’Farrell was a volatile and obstreperous individual. Shining a spotlight on his shady character, this presentation explains O’Farrell’s close connections with three unlikely bedfellows: a midwife, a Bishop, and an assassin.

Our speaker, Madonna Grehan is a historian, a registered nurse and midwife, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. The subject of this presentation emerged from her PhD, in which she examined the care of women by nurses and midwives in Port Phillip and Victoria from 1840 to 2002. Supported by a CJ La Trobe Society Fellowship at State Library Victoria in 2013-2014, Madonna has expanded her research into women, family life and maternity care history in Victoria with a non-fiction manuscript of this work underway. In her spare time, Madonna is President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, a member of a human research ethics committee at the University of Melbourne, and in her 11th year of social history tour-guiding at the Abbotsford Convent