Them thar were fightin' words from our list mother no less.  I've left it
for a digest or two waiting to see other Aussies rush in to defend our
statistics, and other than Ellen being very diplomatic there's been nothing.

Kathleen, how could you suggest that all is not what it seems in our fair
land Down Under!!  Now I'm not a great statistician, but I do happen to know
that Queensland's fully breastfeeding on discharge from hospital rates are
over 80%.  Average length of stay is about 3 days, though in the private
hospitals it's closer to a week.

As a midwife now for nearly 20 years, not initiating breastfeeding is very
much the exception to the rule and has been for all that time.  I don't get
the impression that it's dropping.
Now our 6 week, 3 month and 6 month figures I don't have, but expect them to
be less than I would desire.  However, in a breastfeeding support project
that I ran at our local hospital for 12 months we had 80% still
breastfeeding at 6 months.  OK I know all the research purists will tell me
that this was a subset of a subset and is definitely full of 'confounding
factors', but I'll skite about it unashamedly anyway <g>

As to our prodigious milk production I believe Kathleen is speaking of the
Western Australian study done quite a few years ago now - probably by Peter
Hartmann.  Now I haven't lived in WA for 16 years now, but that was where I
first learnt about breastfeeding and where I learnt all about ENGORGEMENT!
Yep they sure used to be able to produce the milk.  Actually it would make
for good sociological research - back then there weren't a great many local
born and bred girls.  There seemed to be a huge number of 'easterners' (ie
from the east coast).  I wonder if the breastfeeding was so good because
they didn't have the family support saying you couldn't feed more than every
four hours, etc, etc - only one another and they just all did what felt
right.  There weren't even a great many books with rules and regulations for
parenting.

I think Kathleen was trying a little bit of international stirring...no?  :-)

Keep up the good work Kathleen - you're still on my Christmas card list.  :-)

Denise
defending our fair country