TO the Matilda Hospital where author Joyce Smith hosts a wine and cheese soiree for the signing of the second edition of her tome, Matilda - a colourful history of the territory's most famous and historic hospital.
Gynaecologist Dr Lewis Mullins, sipping a glass of Chablis, modestly admitted to delivering over 3,000 bonnie, albeit bawling, babies in a lifetime of, ahem . . . cervix at the hospital.
Though not a product of the good doctor, former government mandarin Dennis Bray shyly confessed to having been born at the Matilda in 1926.
Four years later Bray was to return there for an appendix operation - an exercise completed in those days after knocking out the patient with an ether-soaked pad.
If the ether failed, so legend has it, a pair of heavy forceps was administered to the back of the head.
But everyone present agreed that while ether may have been medically sound, it wasn't half as pleasant as anaesthetising oneself with a bottle or two of good claret.