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Australian Asylums and Their Histories:
Introduction
Mark Finnane
| More than other modern medical institutions mental hospitals, where they survive at all, labour under the burdens of their histories. The lunatic asylums of the nineteenth century, the great age of social experiments, survived well past their founding conditions of existence to become places of acute social conflict by the mid–twentieth century. The generations-long struggle to jettison a shameful and shaming past by emancipating the confined and recognising their citizenship has left the asylums with a very mixed historical legacy. |
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An exhibition held at the Museum of Brisbane between November 2007 and March 2008 was the occasion for a seminar (sponsored also by the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University) which produced the papers included in this issue of Health and History. 'Remembering Goodna: Stories from a Queensland Mental Hospital' (expertly curated by Jo Besley of the Museum) explored the history of that state's original asylum, founded almost at the beginning of the colony of Queensland's separation from New South Wales, and having a continuous history until its formal closure in 2001 (the conclusion of a long transformation discussed in Finnane's paper here). Located at the very heart of the state's metropolis, the Museum of Brisbane was an appropriate location for such an exhibition, bringing back to the city the stories which it had literally and metaphorically expelled in 1865. In that year the insane confined in Brisbane's gaol were shipped up the river to the new asylum, constructed under the imperial mandate that spawned the colonial institutions of mid–Victorian Empire. Over the four months of the exhibition more than 60,000 visitors encountered not only the archival record of fabric and human stories, but also the video record of vibrant, witty, but frequently painful stories told by those who experienced the recent decades of the hospital—patients, staff, and families. |
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I emphasise this context for the papers presented here. The seminar was primarily intended to provide for a general audience an overview of the rich contributions to the history of asylums and mental hospitals which have been and are continuing to be made by Australian historians. That context explains the mode of address as well as the range of subject matter. In convening the seminar we wished to connect an interested public, which included past and present mental health patients/consumers as well as professional and institutional staff, with the results of the deep inquiries that historians undertake into the origins, functions, rationales, experiences, and memories of institutions like Goodna. We wanted to identify the complexity of those histories which made asylums and their successor hospitals less than they might have been and also the ways in which they might from some perspectives have been other than we might expect. A less explicit but to my mind vital element was to exhibit through the range of papers the variety of sources, methodologies, and perspectives that now characterises work on the history of these institutions. The seminar was focussed explicitly on institutional histories. This was not the place to explore the histories of madness, or the broadening agenda of the history of psychiatry and mental illness, particularly its very welcome recent directions into noninstitutional experiences and perspectives. Rather, we sought to understand the institution that embodied for so long the dominant social provision and response to mental illness and intellectual disability. |
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The collection of papers expresses these objectives in a variety of ways. The asylum was an expression of a particular imagination that saw a specific architecture as a desirable framework for accommodating the mentally ill. But as Elizabeth Malcolm explores in her study of the Kew Asylum the translation of this vision across the seas and in the constrained conditions of a colonial economy diminished the possibilities imagined by the visionaries. In spite of the criticism faced almost de novo by the asylum, it was from the first (as Catharine Coleborne shows) not simply a receptacle for people deposited by police but a place to which individuals were brought by families, an institution whose social functions and rationale was shaped by those well beyond its walls. In a quite different way the asylum and mental hospitals were shaped by another, and little-studied, population—their workforces. The institutions were labour intensive and originally, as Lee-Ann Monk argues here, interlocked with local economies; only slowly did a more specialised workforce emerge to replace the 'attendants' to the insane who defined the everyday practices of the early mental hospitals. Within the hospitals, attendants and volunteers were able to create an atmosphere in which sports and music both had a place, as Dolly MacKinnon demonstrates. From these different perspectives the contributions here define unexpected histories, less determined and less unified by the objectives of founders and policy makers than by the historical interaction of actors within and without the asylum. |
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Historical experience is a poor guide to the future, but historical perspective offers the better prospect of questioning current wisdom and policy preference. Approaching the vexed question of the contemporary condition of the mentally ill in postinstitutional life, Stephen Garton asks us here how far the abandonment of the asylum as a model of care reflected a distorted vision of the institution's history and functions. There was much to lament and criticise over its long history, but careful description of the population movements in and out of hospitals, and the varied experiences within them prompts the possibility of recovering the positive dimension of the vision of asylum. The danger has always been, however, that the noble objectives of care, recovery, education, and rehabilitation would be undermined by a policy of neglect and parsimony leading to overcrowding, understaffing, and the threats of violence and abuse. In turning to the voices and experiences of the former residents of the century-old facility for the intellectually-disabled, Melbourne's Kew Cottages, Corinne Manning recovers the intimate experience of living in an institution whose inhabitants recall it with very mixed feelings. |
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Historical work is too important to be left in the books and on the shelves. The growth of alternative forms of presentation of historical research (including not only museum exhibitions, but documentary broadcasting and of course a multitude of web-based possibilities) is something that historians welcome. Importantly these alternatives are also embraced by diverse communities of interest—the seminar which occasioned these papers demonstrated such an engagement. At the same time, we welcome the opportunity afforded by Health and History to give these examples of current research on Australian asylums and their histories a more permanent form. The paper by John Weaver and David Wright, in which suicide statistics are used in an imaginative way to explore the place of psychiatry in the community, has been added to the papers that came out of the seminar at the Museum of Brisbane.
Griffith University
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