Sydney Day Nursery Association

In the early 1900s in Sydney, working-class women in the role of sole or co-family breadwinner had no options for professional long day child care.

[1] On 7 December 1905, these well-connected women opened the Association's first long day nursery in a terrace house at 126 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo.

[6] Poet Dorothea Mackellar, Marguerite Fairfax and Linda Littlejohn[7] (née Teece) were early members of the Sydney Day Nursery Association's governing committee.

[14] Over subsequent decades the Association opened more nurseries, expanding into working-class areas and suburban Sydney, and later rural New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

[15] In 1975 the Federal Government began administering the Nursery School Teachers’ College, by 1981 becoming the Institute of Early Childhood Studies, and by 1994 incorporated into Macquarie University.

Children playing in the courtyard of the long day nursery at 126 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo, Sydney in 1906.
Children playing in the courtyard of the long day nursery at 126 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo, Sydney in 1906.