As Silverchain prepares to celebrate its 80th anniversary in Albany, Western Australia’s southernmost town and port, we look back to a very special woman and her cottage.
In September 1959, at a small ceremony in the suburb now known as Mira Mar, a plaque was fixed to the front door of a new cottage home on the corner of Nelson and Greenshields Street. It read: "This cottage was built with legacy from Miss Amy and Mr Frederick Heap to perpetuate the services of Silver Chain District and Bush Nursing Assn. in Albany."
Amy never stayed in the cottage that carried her name. In fact, she had passed away, at the age of 82, some three years before it was built.
So who was Amy Heap?
The answer begins more than 15,000 kilometers away in Lancashire, England, where Amy was born in 1874. One of three children, she studied art in Manchester and London before she qualified as a teacher.
In 1909, at the age of 35, she moved to Western Australia with her family and settled in Darlington in the Perth Hills where along with her sister Ethel, she became part of Perth's artistic scene.
By the First World War, Amy was working for West Australian Newspapers as an artist and photographer. She was the Western Mail's specialist in embellishment, framing photographs, poems and short stories with graceful hand-drawn borders before her artwork took pride of place on the paper's Christmas cover, and the last and most recognisable of them, a watercolour of black swans.
This is where Amy’s story and our own are linked.
The Western Mail has a special place in our own story. In 1905, through the pages of The Western Mail, journalist Muriel Chase, writing as Aunt Mary in the paper's Children's Corner, invited children to join a special league of Silver Links for a small fee to help vulnerable children. At the time, there was no children’s hospital in WA. As a result of Muriel’s regular appeals for funds in her newspaper columns as Aunt Mary, the Silver Chain League was created. The Silver Chain League hired WA's first district nurse in 1907, and its headquarters were in the same newspaper offices on St Georges Terrace where Amy worked.
In 1934, at 60, Amy retired and moved to Albany to live with her brother and sister. She never married, and she is remembered as small, elegant and fiercely independent, a woman who drove her own car (uncommon for Australian women at the time).
Refusing to stay still in retirement, she kept creating art and exhibiting with Perth artists, travelled to New Zealand and held an exhibition in England in 1938.
Albany was her home for the last 22 years of her life, before she died in 1956, leaving a bequest to Silverchain in her will.
Our 1959 annual report described the new district nurse quarters in Albany as "made possible from money left to the Branch by the Misses and Mr Heap". The cottage home was named the Amy Heap Cottage, and one of Amy's own paintings hung in pride of place in the lounge room, so she was, in a way, still there to welcome every nurse and family who came through the door to provide care and support for the local community.
Our Albany team now works from our Service Delivery Centre not far away in the same suburb of Mira Mar.
On Thursday 5 November we will celebrate 80 years of care in Albany with clients, families, donors and current and former colleagues.
Today, people who leave a gift in their Will to Silverchain Foundation are known as Silver Links, named after the children who answered Muriel Chase's call in 1905. Gifts like Amy and Frederick's have helped us care for people at home for more than a century, and today they support research, scholarships for our people and respite for carers.
