The list of services they provide free of charge to the city’s women is seemingly endless: from trauma counselling, crisis support, clean bathroom facilities, pregnancy counselling, and economic guidance to computer lessons, craft sessions, gardening classes, and ukulele groups. 

Now, after almost 40 years of providing constant support to Wagga’s women, the Centre is taking the chance to look back and honour the very dedicated women who laid its foundations in the 1970s. 

Jan Roberts, one of the original founding mothers of the Centre, said it all began when women started leaving the Riverina to attend university. 

“We were the first generation of women being educated at universities in Sydney during the 1970s, and you had a whole range of revolutionary things happening then,” Ms Roberts said.

“There was the advent of the pill – the single most revolutionary thing that had ever happened for women –but also the moratorium movement, which eventually ended the Vietnam War, and the new Family Law Act that brought no fault divorce.

“So when many of us graduated and came to Wagga to begin our careers, we came back to virtually no recognition of any of the issues that had been at the centre of our discussion for the past few years – it was incredibly conservative here.” 

While things like contraception were becoming more common in the city, Ms Roberts and her peers returned to a very different reality in the Riverina.

“We had a very large number of Catholic doctors in town, and it was against their creed to be involved in contraception – whether or not you were a catholic patient,” Ms Roberts said. 

“We said it wasn’t good enough that women here were being treated so differently to women in the city.” 

Gail Meyer, the current manager of the Centre, described one incident of a Wagga woman being denied the pill that even made headlines in Sydney. 

“Things really came to a head when the wife of a RAAF captain went to get a prescription for the pill,” Ms Meyer said.

“There were 41 doctors in Wagga at the time, and not one of them would prescribe her the pill because of their belief systems.

“She was a married woman with three children who had traveled all around the country and lived in lots of different places – so this was a real shock.” 

With this incident finally bringing women’s issues into the spotlight in Wagga, Ms Roberts and her peers decided it was time to act. 

“This is how naive we were – we decided all we had to do was make a case for why we needed this service and we’d get funding,” she said.

“Everyone told us it was a wonderful idea, but there was no money – so we decided that if they weren’t going to see this as something women had a right to, then we’d go ahead and do it without them.” 

With each of the founders contributing a sum of their income to cover the $45 rent each week, the Wagga Women’s Health Centre opened its doors at 131 Edward Street on June 28, 1979. 

“We were all volunteers, so we had to rapidly undertake training – I did training as a family planning educator, a couple of others had nursing backgrounds, and we set up a little clinic for women to receive advice on contraception,” Ms Roberts said. 

“We knew we were working within a patriarchy, and we faced quite rabid opposition – there were letters to the paper about us, people accusing us of being lesbians, which was supposed to be an insult in those days, and people calling us family-breakers.” 

The Centre continued on, supported only by the generosity of its volunteers for the next six years until it finally secured funding from NSW Health in late 1985. 

With more financial security, Ms Roberts and the staff at the Centre were able to expand their services and support more and more of Wagga’s women. 

“By making all of our services totally free and totally confidential, we were able to take away all the barriers we possibly could and make the Centre an absolutely safe space for women,” Ms Roberts said. 

“I think we were very much at the forefront of women’s services in our community, and I think we’ve also shone the spotlight on things that were once taboo subjects like domestic violence,” Ms Roberts said.

Looking back on the struggles and achievements of her predecessors, the Centre’s current crisis and support workers Julie Mecham was still in awe. 

“They all had paying jobs in the beginning, but they believed in the Centre so strongly that they ended up giving up their jobs and ran it voluntarily as a collective – remarkable courage and belief in what they were doing,” Ms Mecham said. 

Today, almost 40 years on, the Centre is providing more extensive services than ever before to the Wagga community, offering support to women in almost every aspect of their physical, mental, and emotional health and wellbeing. 

While their achievements to date have been far reaching, the Centre’s struggle is still far from over. 

“40 years down the track, we’re still struggling with women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies,” Ms Mecham said.

“When they first started, the workers believed they would probably work themselves out of a job – that society would change in a way that would mean a gendered health approach would no longer be necessary – that’s just not the case.”