With about two months remaining of my pregnancy, I e-mailed the Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages.

I explained that I would not be birthing in hospital and was not enlisting the services of a midwife, so thus my need to have the necessary birth registration forms sent to me.

I said that if extra steps were needed in filling out the birth registration due to not having medical providers present at my birth, I wanted my e-mail forwarded to someone who had access to the law the Registry was bound by when registering unassisted births since I wanted proof of any extra compliances that I had to adhere to.

A week later, I was e-mailed back by the Registrar-General of Queensland. It was a short and simple e-mail stating that the necessary forms for birth registration, a birth certificate application form, and a blank statutory declaration had been sent to my residental address.

If my husband was present at the birth, he would be the one to fill in the statutory declaration as a witness to my birth. If not, I would be the one to sign it. We did this, and a Justice of Peace notarised the document before we sent it back along with the forms.

6 weeks later, we had our child's birth certificate, which we took to Centrelink and used it to apply for and get the Maternity Payment instead of having a hospital sticker attached to the form.

Centrelink was a pain, we asked several people in person and on the phone how to get around the part where it asked for the hospital sticker. Several people said the birth certificate would suffice, one said that I could get my midwife to sign it declaring I gave birth at home.

Upon further enquiry on the absence of a midwife, they asked shocked - "But how do you get a birth certificate then!?" When we told them that we had to sign a statutory declaration and fill in the birth registration form ourselves, they went off and whispered in the corner before coming back to say "The baby needs to be seen by a doctor and the doctor can sign in place of the hospital sticker".

Ohh what crock. They obviously pulled that one out of their arses. I brought in the birth certificate a week later when I got it and nobody said a word!