30/10/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ug3mXKYh3/
The Count
Over 25 years, working the rural stretches of Waipā and King Country, Marie-ann Quin delivered more than 1,200 babies. That’s a small town’s worth of people who entered the world with her in the room.
How She Got There
She trained and worked as a registered nurse at Waikato Hospital first, then did her Plunket training once her own children were small. She split her coverage area with a colleague, Nola Berney, who looked after Te Awamutu town while Quin took the surrounding rural country herself. In 1990, well into her career, she went back and trained formally as a midwife, then set up independently.
The Ordinary Years
Most of a rural midwife’s working life is not dramatic. It’s driving. It’s being reachable at any hour for women spread across a region too thinly populated to support a hospital on every corner. In her later years, she took on work as a rural locum midwife, travelling the country to give other isolated midwives a break, a role partly funded by the government precisely because the job is too demanding for one person to sustain alone forever.
What She Did When She Stopped
She retired two years before turning 68, describing it as finally, reluctantly leaving a career she’d adored. She didn’t stop working with birth. She started writing about it instead.
Her first novel, Emerald to Pounamu: A Midwife’s Odyssey, sold well enough to need reprinting two weeks after launch. Her second, Midwives and Men of War, is the middle book of a planned trilogy tracing midwifery in New Zealand from the first settlers in the 1840s through to the present day, launched at the Te Awamutu RSA to a room full of people she’d likely delivered, or whose children she had.
The Small Thing That Was Everything
She never set out to leave a record behind. She just kept showing up for a quarter century of births nobody but the families involved will ever know about, and when the driving finally stopped, she sat down and made sure the history of the job itself didn’t disappear with her.
Follow us
