Professor Sally Tracy, an Australian midwife, midwifery researcher, author and activist comes from a long line of midwives and she is in fact, a fourth-generation midwife. Her great, great-grandmother was a midwife in Scotland as well as a great-grandmother on the other side of the family. Midwifery is in her blood.

So it comes as no surprise that Professor Tracy was recently appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for her ‘significant service to tertiary education and to midwifery.’

Having spent decades delivering babies as well as enjoying a career in academia at the University of Sydney, UNSW and the University of Technology, Sydney, Professor Tracy has been a pioneer and role model for Australian midwives.

Throughout her extensive career, Professor Tracy has advocated for midwives around Australia, highlighting the importance of midwives and the role they play for pregnant and birthing women.

She told Blue Mountains Gazette: “I have spent my whole life trying to make midwives not invisible. I think every woman should have a midwife with them when they give birth.”

“The notion that something as simple and as powerful as a woman having a continuous relationships with her midwife before birth, during birth and at home afterwards has the potential to alter the whole landscape of birth interventions… It reduces the fear of the unknown and helps the woman to trust herself and her body.”

Having co-authored the first midwifery textbook for Australian and New Zealand midwives, Preparation for Practice, Professor Tracy has always been a big believer in giving women a choice when it comes to giving birth.

When the Gazette called her about being awarded an AM, Professor Tracy responded: “It’s just that there are so many people who deserve these things. I don’t know that I fit in that group”.