Barbara Bowen OAM

Barbara Bowen OAM was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for her service to the community of Canberra.

When Barbara Bowen moved to Australia in 1958 from the United Kingdom, she started working at Canberra Hospital at a time when it was “overlooking paddocks”.

 

Now, more than 65 years later, she is being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the community of Canberra.  

 

“As a registered nurse and midwife, it has been a great privilege to be there for people at the beginning of their life and at the end of their life. I hope I have helped make life, and death, a little easier for them,” Mrs Bowen says.  

 

Mrs Bowen’s nursing career took her from delivering babies for families who were part of a new Canberra, to community nursing in Canberra’s oldest suburbs, to end-of-life care for high needs patients living at home in their final years.

 

She also helped set up Campus Childcare Collective at the Australian National University, allowing student parents to continue their studies, ran the clinic at Canberra Girls Grammar School for more than a decade and volunteered with AFS international exchanges helping to settle teenagers from different cultures into their new host families in Canberra.

 

Meanwhile, she and her husband Alan had a busy plumbing and drainage business in Canberra, working on new suburbs, government buildings, embassies and a renovation of the Hyatt Hotel. They sponsored migrant workers from the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, who became part of multicultural Australia. 

 

Her motivation always came from a feeling of satisfaction at using her practical skills to help make people’s lives a little easier, Mrs Bowen explains.  

 

“I have met so many people who faced extraordinary challenges in their lives in Canberra – new migrants with no English giving birth for the first time in a new country, young parents wondering what on earth to do with their children so they could get to their lecture, and carers achieving almost the impossible due to absolute, sheer devotion to their loved one,” she says. 

 

“I feel such deep admiration and respect for how they navigated their circumstances and found a way through … I’m glad to have been able to have helped a little. 

 

“I have seen so many extraordinary cases of people coping in unbelievable circumstances, it is they who deserve the recognition.”