Mary McConnel (pioneer)

Mary MacLeod McConnel (4 January 1824 – 4 January 1910) was a Scottish settler in the Australian colony of Queensland, who founded the Brisbane's first children's hospital in 1878, which became the Royal Children's Hospital, Brisbane in 1883.

Mary McLeod/MacLeod was born on 4 January 1824 in Edinburgh, the daughter of excise officer Alexander McLeod/MacLeod and his wife Catherine/Katherine (née Rose), and baptised on 2 February 1824 at St Cuthbert's Church in Edinburgh. On 24 April 1848, she married David Cannon McConnel at St Cuthbert's Church in Edinburgh. David McConnel had previously emigrated to the colony of Queensland in 1840, where he had founded Cressbrook Homestead, named after his father's mill in Derbyshire.

On 27 December 1848, the McConnels departed The Downs on board the sailing ship Chaseley arriving in Brisbane on 1 May 1849. Her husband built "Bulimba", the first stone house in Brisbane, and their first son was born there in 1850. Eight months later, she visited the family property at Cressbrook, where she lived when she and her husband were not on one of their many trips to Britain and Europe.

McConnel, a mother of six and grandmother, grew concerned at the lack of primary care for children in Brisbane, and inspired by the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in her home town of Edinburgh, and London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, she endeavoured over fifteen years to raise money to found a children's hospital in the Queensland capital. In 1878, the Hospital for Sick Children opened in rented premises in Spring Hill. McConnel hired a nurse and matron from England to run the hospital, while local women were trained. The hospital quickly outgrew its 15-bed premises, and was moved to a larger building in Herston on land provided by the Queensland Government eventually becoming the Royal Children's Hospital.

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