Dolly MacKinnon

Divine Service, Music, Sport, and Recreation as Medicinal in Australian Asylums 1860s–1945

Australian asylum records (circa 1860 to circa 1945) demonstrate that medical staff went to great lengths to provide recreation to suitable patients. This article examines how the demarcation of Australian institutional spaces along gender divisions was also mirrored by the gender-specific recreational activities provided in purpose-built facilities. Using Australian examples I demonstrate how the main forms of recreation—that is divine service, music and dance, and sport—were justified to governments on medical grounds. Some designated recreational spaces even offered select female and male patients the opportunity to mix under medical supervision. Recreation was therapeutic because of its psychological, physical, social, and moral benefits, and government authorities funded the construction of costly chapels, recreation halls, and sports grounds expressly for this medical purpose.

Stereotypical views of asylums or mental hospitals do not conjure up images of recreation and entertainment, but rather places of isolation, gendered confinement, and boredom. Yet within the surviving Australian institutional records (from 1860 to 1945) it is clear that medical and lay staff, patients, and volunteers went to great lengths to provide entertainment and recreation for asylum inmates.¹ A constant feature of surviving former psychiatric facilities across Australia is that from the 1860s to the 1940s they contain purpose-built recreation halls and sports grounds. The therapeutic demarcation of space along gender divisions in the asylum was mirrored by the gender-specific recreational activities provided.² Designated recreational spaces offered one place within this medical environment where, potentially at least, select female and male patients could mix under medical supervision. In some cases recreation also included members of the broader community. Australia, like their European and British counterparts, understood the forms of recreation to be therapeutic for certain patients because of its psychological, physical, social, and moral benefits, and government authorities, on medical advice, funded the construction of chapels, recreation halls, and sports grounds.

Recreation as a focus of research within the history of psychiatry is an area yet to be fully analysed. Within an Australian medical history context, recreation has largely remained a small, but welcome, part of either institutional or state-based studies, as in the following ground-breaking works on insanity in Australia: Stephen Garton's study of New South Wales; Catharine Coleborne's study of nineteenth-century Victoria; and Lee-Ann Monk's study of attendants.³ Recreation also featured, most recently, in Mark Finnane and Jo Besly's public exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane (MoB) entitled 'Remembering Goodna' (November 2007 until March 2008). My own publications on music, madness, and the body, building on Sander L. Gilman's research, has provided a cultural history of music as a healing regime in the treatment of the mentally ill in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by demonstrating that the origins for these ideas are to be found in a chronology of literature stemming from classical antiquity that understood music as both a cause as well as a cure for mental illness.⁴ In addition, my innovative work on the soundscape of madness analyses the provision of gendered recreation using examples from Queensland psychiatric institutions.⁵

The near-absence of recreation in the history of psychiatry is baffling, as much of the surviving built heritage from Australian, British, and European sites includes ample evidence of heritage listed chapels, recreation halls, and sports grounds.⁶ Even the most recent international essay collection by Leslie Topp, James E. Moran, and Jonathan Andrews that examines the architectural and built landscapes of European, American, South African, and Indian asylum spaces, does not include recreation as a central theme.⁷ Thus the significance of formal and informal recreational spaces within the asylum landscape remains an uncharted avenue of research. Therefore the formal gendered recreation provided within Australian institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is what I will very briefly consider in this article.

The small amount of international research that does discuss sport and/or recreation in asylums appears in either the history of nursing or sport.⁸ Cherry, Munting, and Brimblecombe provide useful case studies for some British and Canadian asylums, and they examine recreation either from the perspective of the implications for staff, who were often employed because of their musical or sporting abilities, or from the narrow focus of the asylum in the history of sport. As I have published elsewhere, sport (most commonly experienced by select patients in the role of a spectator, and only for a few individual patients as a participatory recreation) was only one of a broad range of recreational activities provided to patients.⁹ 'Recreation and entertainment' included the provision of religious services, walks, music, dances, concerts, sport, and after 1910 the showing of films (at first silent films with piano accompaniment provided by either a staff member or patient, and then after 1930 talkies) and radio within the asylum.

In addition, the existing literature on the history of sport and nursing fails to recognise that the populations involved remained consistently small. As I have published elsewhere, the purpose-built spaces that were created were never intended to accommodate the entire asylum population.¹⁰ Yet no matter what the recreation provided, medical justifications still managed to garner substantial government funds to provide purpose-built facilities indicating that recreation was considered a significant treatment at a time when there were no drug therapies, and little else but rest and regular employment available. In addition to the provision of recreation within the asylum during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the medical authorities also granted periods of leave to individual patients to attend recreational activities outside within the community.¹¹ Therefore inclusive studies of Australian recreational regimes within the institutional landscape, and the spaces that were created (either permanently or temporarily) to accommodate them, have a significant contribution to make to the history of psychiatry by providing a much more comprehensive understanding of the motivations for and links between medical practice and recreation—in all its varied official forms—that was intended to aid in the recovery of patients' minds and bodies.¹²

This article builds on existing work by investigating the medical rationale for the types of spaces set aside for the provision of gendered recreation in Australian psychiatric facilities from 1860 to 1945. I use evidence from diverse sources to demonstrate the range of official recreational activities that were provided to patients: written records, surviving material cultural evidence—that is recreational objects—as well as cultural heritage in the form of the built landscape. Within the records compiled and constructed for medical and administrative purposes, medical officials formally identified 'recreation'—that is religious services, music, dance, general exercise, and sport—as a category of classification used by Australian institutions to describe patients' activities during each twenty-four-hour period of observation within each ward.

From the late–nineteenth century onwards, first on loose pages and then as bound volumes, Day and Night books were kept by attendants and nurses for every male and every female ward in each Australian asylum. From individual ward books, head attendants then made gender-specific summaries in separate volumes, which in turn were then used by the medical superintendents to write up their annual reports. This was an Australia-wide practice that continued until at least after World War II, when a new record keeping system was employed, and mental health policy began to move towards adopting the principles and practice of deinstitutionalisation and the provision of community care.¹³

At the centre of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical regime of recreation, was the issue of access to and exclusion from recreational spaces that formed part of the dynamic power relations between staff and patients at the heart of institutional life. As Diana Gittins, in her study of Severalls Hospital in Essex, England, has observed:

Space, as [Michel] Foucault argues, is a metaphor for a site of power which usually constrains but can also liberate. The way in which space is organised, limits and divides can, and frequently did, oppress and repress. Class, gender and categorising of illness were literally built into the hospital infrastructure and thus operated as primary determinants of power relations and a way of life.¹⁴

Asylum spaces were created for gendered use but were also subject, by necessity, to multiple uses, as overcrowding continually plagued Australian asylums during the 120 years of their ascendency. Periodically, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the pressure on space was such that simply attempting to meet the most basic accommodation needs of patients, for sleeping and eating, relegated the recreation treatment regimes in purpose-built spaces to the status of optional extras. Further complicating these activities was how a patient was considered 'suitable' for the benefits of recreation. Patients gained access to these spaces because of a combination of good behaviour, favouritism, class, and gender. Yet purpose-built recreation facilities within the institutional landscape formed a link for patients, and staff, to the outside world. Recreational spaces were also the only spaces that members of the community could access within the institution.

This article looks very briefly at the medical justifications for recreational spaces, the creation of those indoor and outdoor spaces, and the gendered forms of recreation available in them, thereby filling a significant gap in the history of psychiatry. This article provides the framework of Australia's early history of recreational regimes for the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries from which first occupational therapy and music therapy, and much later sports psychiatry, would emerge.

Justifications for recreational spaces within the asylum landscape

The early nineteenth century saw a radical shift away from the practices of physical restraint towards more potentially beneficial treatment regimes in British and North American asylums, and this greatly influenced asylum administration and construction in the colonial world. As Monk has demonstrated for Victoria, by 1856, Sir James Palmer had outlined to the Parliament that in the 'modern system' the asylum 'was more humane, striving by care and kindness to foster, or call forth whatever remains of thought the unhappy patient might have left to him.'¹⁵ This change was aimed at combating what the American nineteenth-century reformer John S. Butler called "'the greatest evil of mental institutions"—monotony'.¹⁶ In Victoria, Palmer stated that this required the provision of 'games,' 'amusing occupations,' 'light reading,' 'walking exercise' and 'by a variety of plans' to 'exercise and strengthen' the patient's mind thereby restoring 'the whole mind to proper balance.'¹⁷ Australian psychiatric institutions from the 1860s onwards actively began to provide gendered recreation for select patients in order to combat the effects of institutionalisation.

Gendered forms of supervised recreation were used in conjunction with gendered forms of 'employment' in the asylum workshops, farms, kitchens, laundries, and gardens, offering the mentally ill a number of ways to reinstate a healthy mind and healthy body. Appropriate gendered forms of recreation included dancing to music—which could accommodate relatively large numbers of male and female participants— and also sports —such as cricket, tennis, fives, or football—intended specifically for men to play. Larger groups of male and female patients, not able to participate, were also considered to benefit from witnessing the 'spectacle' of recreation. Ultimately, individualised care was the best form of patient recreation, but one that was much harder to accommodate. In 1892 Sir James Crichton Browne's observations about the successes and failures of recreation in nineteenth-century British institutions identified the problem as 'instead of ... being carried out individually, as of course it ought to be, and adapted to each case, it is carried out in a wholesale way. Instead of being fine-hand painting it is slapdashery.'¹⁸ Still, limited recreation was better than none for 'amusements are provided, and crowds of patients sent to them' and 'on the whole, the effects of even this imperfect system are very beneficial; but the treatment is not carried out in true principles.'¹⁹

The nineteenth-century rationale for the use of recreation as a therapeutic regime persisted until the mid-twentieth century in North American, Britain, and Australia. In 1915–16 Dr Henry Byam Ellerton defended the use of recreation in Queensland 'asylums' in the Royal Commission using a justification that would have sat comfortably within the medical establishment sixty years earlier:

Recreation is most important, and that is where asylums differ from any other kind of institution. There is no kind of institution depends on recreation as mental hospitals and asylums ... in the matter of asylum management, the provision of recreation is essentially a fundamental element on the treatment of patients, and a matter of daily and hourly provision must be made, and without which an asylum fails in its purpose.²⁰

The key to the successful recreation was ensuring diversity and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Australian staff formed an integral part of the provision of this recreation. As the economic imperative for asylums was always one of self-sufficiency, where possible these activities were to be provided either as part of the terms of the employment of staff, or free of charge by volunteer groups from the community. When interviewing possible staff, medical superintendents were quick to determine if the applicants had any useful sporting or musical abilities that could be put to use for the benefit of both the patients and the budget.²¹ Australian asylums, like their overseas counterparts, were largely set in rural or semirural locations, and therefore relied heavily upon those skills available within the institution (staff and patients), and those from the neighbouring community.²² In 1880, at Ararat Asylum in Victoria, Dr McCreery was not optimistic about being able to establish an asylum band as 'there is a want of musical talent in a large proportion of the staff.'²³ Asylums also paid for the travel costs of Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen who provided divine service to suitable individuals, and groups of single sex patients on a regular basis.

Providing diverse forms of recreation to exercise the mind and body was considered a medical imperative that offered the broadest possible benefit to the greatest number of patients either by listening to and watching recreation—also termed a 'spectacle'—as audience members, or alternately, for a small number of patients, as a participant. Recreation formed part of the nineteenth-century treatment regime of 'moral therapy' that consisted 'of the wholesome discipline of the well-regulated household, regular hours of food and for sleep, manual employment, reading, lectures, and other various recreations and amusements, both within and without' the asylum.²⁴ Spirituality, divine services, and music in the form of hymn singing (especially for women), formed part of the regular features of the 'godly household,' and were in keeping with texts such as the Reverend H.R. Haweis' Music and Morals (1871) which by 1898 was in its eighteenth edition.²⁵ The success of moral therapy, as one nineteenth-century commentator observed, lay in its ability 'to win back the patient to the regular and useful habits and practices of his [or her] former life,' or in some cases to instil these habits for the first time.²⁶ In addition popular music (including classical music) was considered equally as beneficial as sport because each offered particular recreational benefits for different sorts of patients. The Inspector for the Insane in Queensland, H.B. Ellerton concluded:

I believe in having as good music as I can supply for the patients, just as I believe in letting them see a good game of cricket. Music and Recreation are part of the work of the institution, and constitute an important element in the scheme for the beneficial treatment of patients. There are many patients who can appreciate good music, and there are many others who can appreciate good cricket, and who like to see good players.²⁷

Therefore, between the 1860s and circa 1945 the provision of recreation for Australian psychiatric inmates came from three main sources: paid professional groups, volunteers (from both inside and outside the asylum), and the asylum band. Asylums made continuous and strenuous efforts to include the community in many of these activities. Those who did volunteer were publicly thanked in the annual report for their efforts by the medical staff. The medical superintendent of Gladesville Hospital in New South Wales, in 1886, thanked those who 'who kindly gave entertainments, theatrical performances and concerts.'²⁸ Members of the community, alert to the boredom of institutional life, also provided gifts of magazines and newspapers, fruit, plants and cuttings as pastimes for patients, and Australian institutions relied heavily upon these gifts.²⁹ In 1876–7 the Gladesville Asylum, thanked the proprietors of twenty-four newspapers from across New South Wales for 'a copy of each issue throughout the year free of charge.'³⁰ The Queensland colonial secretary, Arthur Hodgson, in 1870 'presented' a 'handsome bagatelle board and table' to the Woogaroo Asylum.³¹ But 'for want of a suitable room to place it in' patients were not able to make use of it 'for if placed in the ordinary wards, it would soon be destroyed.'³²

This study shows that a constant feature of the provision of recreation for patients in Australia was the ebb and flow in levels of voluntary contributions and staff efforts, and the difficulty in providing and maintaining suitable recreational spaces. Institutions depended upon the abilities of their staff, patients, and community volunteers, which proved particularly difficult during the economic depression of the 1890s and 1930s, as well as during the two world wars.

Indoor recreational spaces: Creating spaces within the asylum

Medical staff increasingly called for the creation of specific recreation spaces within the asylum, namely chapels, halls, and sports grounds. Until the rise of purpose-built facilities from 1870 onwards a lack of designated space had hampered the provision of recreation within these institutions. In Western Australia, one of four convict settlements in Australia, the mentally ill largely came from the prison population. When Fremantle Asylum opened in 1857 the 'removal of' the 'lunatic prisoners' to the asylum was seen as a great improvement as 'they can enjoy the invaluable advantage of air, exercise and amusement.'³³ At Fremantle Dr Attfield ensured that 'all rational amusement and indulgence that is possible under the peculiar circumstances of this asylum' were provided.³⁴ Some amusements were provided in the wards, while others were provided in the airing yards. Some recreation was provided during the day and other forms at night, and was administered along gender lines. For example, it was reported that 'books are regularly supplied, and a good proportion of the men read daily,' and Dr Attfield indicated that 'several games at ball, such as fives or cricket' were part of the recreation for men, activities which must have taken place either in airing yards or on open ground outside the asylum under staff supervision.³⁵ Men also had access to 'draughts in the evening.'³⁶ Women with a hope of recovery were given access to books for recreation, but a poor medical prognosis ensured that those women who were considered 'most probably all incurable' and 'hopelessly imbecile [sic]' were excluded from recreation, and were relegated instead to 'the chief employment for women' at Fremantle Asylum that included 'washing, sewing, and housework.'³⁷

Initially, by 1870 space for divine service was requested in Australian asylums as this was considered essential in the moral treatment (especially for women) of the mentally ill as 'something is wanted even with insane people to mark distinctly the Sunday, and without such an adjunct as this to the institution the attempt at a line of demarcation will ever be impossible.'³⁸ Asylums used existing spaces, such as dining halls or day wards, to hold divine service for select supervised patients either in single sex groups or more rarely in mixed groups. Mixed groups created problems when men had to be taken into female wards and visa versa to access the space for recreation, as was the case at New Norfolk, where a lack of a suitable recreation hall prior to 1937 resulted in entertainments being held in the female section, and 'only the best behaved male patients' were ever 'admitted.'³⁹ In Victoria and Queensland institutions had travelling chapel kits that would be used in wards when necessary.

As the nineteenth-century Australian asylum population grew, and asylum complexes expanded, purpose-built recreation halls and sports grounds, including cricket pitches and football ovals, as well as golf courses, were constructed. Medical beliefs understood the provision of suitable entertainment as a positive endeavour, and one ultimately aimed at combating the ill effects of institutionalisation for both sexes.

Even when a purpose-built recreational space, such as a chapel or recreation hall was constructed, patients attended, largely, in single sex groups. The chapel and/or recreation hall was usually placed in the centre of the institution and was accessible from both the male and female sides of the asylum. The recreation hall was the bridge that linked either the male and female divisions together, or was a space that sat outside the gendered plan, functioning instead, as a bridge to the broader community. A plan for Kew Asylum, dating from 1856–64, published in a German journal of psychiatry in 1867 showed the 'the church' was constructed 'in isolation from all occupied [male and female] divisions of the asylum, so that the patients' church route corresponds more closely to life outside the institution. The Kew chapel was 'to be used alternately by Protestants and Catholics.'⁴⁰ Many chapels survive today in institutions across Australia

The religion of each patient was recorded on their admission to the asylum. The religious diversity to be found within the asylum walls included Christian (that is Roman Catholic and Protestant, including non-conformists), Muslim, Hindu, and inmates referred to as 'pagan.' The limited official religious services provided stands in sharp contrast to the religious diversity within the Australian asylum population. As I have said elsewhere, for those who were not Protestant or Catholic, such as Muslims, private recreation time had to be used to practice their religion.⁴¹ A Queensland inmate, between 1915 and 1939, who was described as a 'Mohomedan' and 'wears a white scull cap,' used to 'make hammocks' and use 'the proceeds from the sale to purchase and prepare his own food.'⁴²

An extension of, or in some cases an alternative to, divine service within chapels and temporarily commandeered single sex wards, was hymn singing which was considered especially beneficial for women in Australian institutions.⁴³ From the late nineteenth century onwards Sacred Songs & Solos: Revised and Enlarged with Standard Hymns 1200 Pieces (London, no date), compiled by Ira D. Sanky, was in use in at least two Australian institutions: Ispwich Mental Hospital in Queensland and Kew Cottages, Victoria. Australian institutions mirrored European practices in providing hymn singing for certain patients; in nineteenth-century Germany the Illenauer Asylum had published its own book of special hymns—Illenauer Liederbuch—that became the standard hymn book in use in psychiatric asylums throughout the country.⁴⁴

In addition to chapels, Australian medical superintendents requested recreation halls. At Parkside Asylum in South Australia in 1876 for example, the 'concert-room' located at 'the south end of the front' of the building was 'a large room 45 feet by 21, in which is erected a small proscenium, where, at expected intervals, eagerly longed for during the year, the soothing strains of music or the diverting influences of the histrionic art serve to "minister to the mind diseased", and to make the poor unfortunate sufferers from the nonce forget their look of sadness or their settled gloom.'⁴⁵

But there were often considerable delays before even the government approval for funding could be obtained, let alone the construction commenced. The sums of money involved were not inconsiderable. For example in New Norfolk Asylum, Tasmania, concerted efforts over a twenty-year period up to 1919 had been made to build a suitable recreation hall, but to no avail.⁴⁶ In Queensland, the Ipswich Mental Hospital's recreation hall was built at a cost of four thousand pounds during World War I, and is testament to the persuasive arguments of medical staff.⁴⁷ It is important to realise that the Ipswich hospital catered predominantly for chronic cases with little hope of recovery, and yet recreational facilities were sought and granted. When, during WWI, the Ipswich Mental Hospital got its recreation hall it could only seat a maximum of 224 people, which was only one third of the total number of inmates.⁴⁸ Even in Goodna Hospital for the insane, the largest Queensland psychiatric facility, housing 1381 (male and female) inmates in 1910, the recreation hall, when it was in use, could only accommodate one sixth of this number.⁴⁹ Australian recreation halls and sporting facilities, like overseas institutions, were never intended to accommodate the entire institutional population.

Purpose-built recreation halls were clearly delineated and defined spaces, but this did not mean that they were continuously used for the therapeutic function for which they had been built. Recreational space could be used either by staff and patients, or exclusively by staff. The South Australian Observer noted that at Parkside Asylum, South Australia in 1876, in the 'men's department' they found 'the billiard-room ... though unoccupied, it was doubtless designed to enable the medical officers and their friends to while away the somewhat monotonous life which they necessarily lead.'⁵⁰ At Kew Asylum, Victoria, the billiard room was constructed for and available to male patients.

These specific recreational spaces were not precluded from acts of administrative necessity that regularly saw their periodic appropriation as workrooms, or even dormitories to accommodate asylum overcrowding, as was the case at Kew Asylum in Victoria in 1879.⁵¹ The purpose-built recreation halls at Goodna and Toowoomba built in the 1890s in Queensland were not used as recreation facilities until at least two decades after their construction: Toowoomba in 1910, and Goodna, after further extensions at a cost of two thousand pounds, in 1913.⁵² But despite these setbacks, and although never as grand as their overseas counterparts, Australian recreation halls continued the medical tradition of building communal recreation spaces into the gendered asylum landscape.⁵³

The medical significance of chapels and recreation halls, as well as the outdoor recreations, was also championed in the media as evidence of the potential successes of modern treatment regimes. In 1903 the Sydney Mail (NSW) ran an illustrated article entitled 'Callan Park: A Great State Institution,' and included pictures of the 'Church and Concert Hall.'⁵⁴ Keen to try to dispel the notion of the asylum as isolated from the community, the Towoomba Chronicle reported in 1908 that at Willowburn Asylum, Queensland, when the Austral Band played 'on the lawn' that 'a large number of townspeople also went out.'⁵⁵ In 1933 a picture of patients attending a fancy dress ball appeared in the Toowoomba Chronicle demonstrating links between the institution and the community through the therapeutic benefits of recreation.⁵⁶ The asylum sports teams (cricket and football) from the 1890s onwards also appeared in the community sporting fixtures in local newspapers across Australia.

Any evidence of the benefits of recreation to those select patients allowed to participate were closely monitored, and all successes were diligently reported in great detail in the annual reports. For example, in 1879 at Goodna Asylum, Queensland, a piano had been made available as a therapeutic outlet to certain women and with great effect:

[O]n the opening of the new female ward, the Asylum piano was placed in it, with the view of inducing a melancholy patient, who had been a professional pianist, to play. The attempt was successful, and the result was that she not only played every night in the ward to the patients, but also at entertainments. She ultimately recovered and went home to England, and there is no doubt that the piano in no small degree contributed to her recovery. One of the nurses, as often as other duties permit, worthily takes her place at the piano, in the evening, in the wards, as well as at entertainments. As far as music is concerned, we are now less dependent upon help from outside [the asylum].⁵⁷

The common-place occurrence of pianos in former recreation halls and wards within Australian institutions also provides evidence of this universal practice. The surviving 1878 Steinway & Sons grand piano at Baillie Henderson (formerly Toowoomba) Hospital, Queensland while intended for the recreation hall, may also have been moved to individual male or female wards when necessary, as the surviving male and female graffiti on this instrument suggests.⁵⁸

The most well-known indoor musical entertainment was the iconic asylum ball. As I have published elsewhere the asylum ball was a public relations exercise where the select patients who attended demonstrated the success of the medical regime. Asylum balls were also significant places for obtaining pledges of volunteer support and also donations of money or goods to assist the asylum. In 1868, the Collingwood Ball, Victoria, was part of the regular dances held on 'alternate Thursdays' that were 'well attended by those living in the neighbourhood, and the best behaved of the patients' were 'allowed to join' in the proceedings.⁵⁹ At the Woogaroo Asylum, Queensland in 1873, these balls were held on a weekly basis with 'an extra entertainment ... at Christmas,' and 'an exhibition of performing dogs and monkeys.'⁶⁰ Woogaroo's success demonstrated the medical superintendent's concerted efforts to rectify the dismal efforts of the previous year, when in 1872 entertainments 'have generally dwindled into a perfect parody' as there was 'no piano, ... no band in existence, and the dancers have to do their best to the strains of a concertina.'⁶¹ Institutions did provide much of their own entertainment through staff efforts and the asylum band.

In Australia, band members were predominantly, but not exclusively, male. In 1910 the Goodna Asylum band, Queensland comprised male attendants, the medical superintendent, and one nurse, and met 'twice a week to practice between 2 and four o'clock, and they play[ed] at all the dances.' The medical superintendent observed that while there was 'one [nurse] in the band ... generally the nurses do not play anything outside the piano.'⁶² For Toowoomba and Goodna asylums in Queensland musical programmes were printed in the local press.⁶³ Community and professional groups also provided entertainments, and arrangements were often but not always made to cover their travel costs. Not all entertainment was offered with the best of intentions, however, as some visitors refused to provide the mentally ill with even an adequate standard of entertainment. In 1903 the Salvation Army Brass Band simply rehearsed rather than performed for patients. The asylum staff, clearly not impressed, took the opportunity in the annual report to thank the band members for their 'disinterested efforts.'⁶⁴ Whether due to lack of effort or some other reason, in 1885 the 'Magic Lantern Exhibition' at New Norfolk Asylum was described as 'the most miserable exhibition ever given in the Hall.'⁶⁵

Technological advancements not only improved the quality of music provided, but also the flexibility with which it could be administered. For example, the gramophone provided a superior and consistent quality of recorded music, and brought the sounds of the outside world inside the institution. Recorded music removed the reliance on the staff band that, through rehearsals and performances, took staff away from their normal duties. Surviving 78 (revolutions per minute) gramophone records held in institutional collections demonstrate that the strains of works by Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) and Antonin Dvo�ák (1841–1903) were heard by patients at Beechworth, while 'Me and my shadow' and 'Lullaby of Broadway' from the Warner Brothers' film Gold Digger (1935) were heard in Toowoomba.⁶⁶ They were played both in the wards and at dances.

From 1910 onwards, film and radio (while subjected to censorship) were also considered beneficial for patients as they created an interactive and realistic link to the outside world. New technology was eagerly embraced. The installation of cinematographs in Australian institutions after World War I meant that films could be easily shown, and that the capital investment in this new technology was justifiable because of the benefits to certain patients. The only silent film that we know was shown in an Australian asylum is Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's The Butcher Boy (1917), which also starred Buster Keaton.⁶⁷ After the invention of 'talkies' with an inbuilt soundtrack, there was no longer a need for either a staff member or patient to provide live piano accompaniment. Philanthropy saw the Herald newspaper in Melbourne present Mont Park Hospital with a Krupp film projector complete with Cinesound enabling them to show, each Friday night, 'talkies.'⁶⁸

The early 1930s saw wireless radio installed in Australian general and mental hospitals.⁶⁹ In 1931 the Ipswich Mental Hospital in Queensland 'chiefly raised [funds] through the voluntary efforts of staff and their friends' to install a wireless system, which brought music and news of state and national sports into the gendered asylum wards.⁷⁰ Some of the patients also expressed their willingness to subscribe a few shillings towards this fund, which was also the case regarding the installation costs of over ?447 at Goodna Hospital, Queensland, in 1935.⁷¹ The Victorian Psychiatric Institutions Collection contains a 'large, dark brown, oval shaped Bakelite electric radio' with 'two missing control knobs, one for volume and one for station selection.'⁷² We must ask if, in this highly regulated environment, these two controls were accidentally lost or purposely removed either by staff to control the contents and volume of the recreation, or, in an act of defiance by a patient?

Outdoor recreational spaces: Cricket, football, tennis, and golf

Set in large grounds, many institutions, though not all, had room for tennis courts (see Image 1), cricket/football ovals, as well as gardens, many of which were set out by patient labour. The 'employment' of patient labour in the construction of such facilities was seen to be both medically important and economically expedient, and was considered just as important to these institutions as the value of the completed outdoor sports grounds. The plans for Kew Asylum, Victoria, dating from 1856–64, stated that 'the field for ball games will be placed on the outside of the lower wall' of the asylum.⁷³ Again, like the chapels and recreation halls, the surrounding sports fields formed separate spaces, removed from the physical gendered divisions built into the landscape. Sport allowed the institution to participate in the broader community through the highly competitive local cricket and football seasons. The advantages of offering a range of outdoor recreational activities were stressed at Woogaroo Asylum, Queensland, in the 1860s:

[W]eather permitting, a game of cricket serves, at least for some, to while away for an hour or so the weariness of life. The bagatelle and draughts fail to inspire either a lively or general interest; cricket is held in greater esteem, less perhaps for the pleasure of the game than the chance it affords for a passing glimpse of the outer world.⁷⁴

Cricket provided one of the better means of integrating the asylum into the community, as through exhibition matches as well as hospital teams, institutions became part of the fixtures of community cricket matches played on these asylum ovals. Kew Asylum, Victoria, even made cricket balls and footballs in the male workshop, and the Victorian Psychiatric Institutions Collection includes a handmade brown cloth ball which was 'found under [the] floorboards of one of the oldest buildings (1880s) at Caloola Training Centre' in Sunbury, Victoria.⁷⁵

Image 1: "Kew Asylum Lawn Tennis Court." (Source: The Illustrated Sydney News, February 1890, 26.)

These sports teams, up until the early 1930s, were predominantly made up of staff. This reinforced the institutional hierarchy that openly and contentiously allowed certain staff time away from the arduous work on the wards, at the expense of their workmates. Where teams included patients, institutional favouritism determined which patients would participate or watch these matches. By 1875 the medical superintendent at Gladesville, New South Wales stated 'The new cricket ground, which the drought rendered quite useless last year, has this season been in excellent order, and afforded a great amount of play.'⁷⁶ Patients, where possible, were included in these teams. In 1932 in Queensland, cricket (like football and tennis) was supplied as 'spectacular and partly where possible for the patients to participate.'⁷⁷ In the 1930s in Victoria, visiting cricket teams came to Mont Park Hospital to play social games against the staff and patient team.⁷⁸ Competition to get into the hospital team was extremely intense when a match involved the Carlton and United Brewery team, as the 'team always brought a nine gallon keg of beer' to the game.⁷⁹

Sports grounds could also provide a perfect spot for the 'annual picnic' for both women and men, as was the case when in Victoria in 1909 the picnic 'was successfully held in the cricket oval instead of as hitherto in the paddocks, and with marked advantage' to the patients at Kew.⁸⁰ At Goodna Mental Hospital, Queensland, in 1931 the 'patients' sports, and athletic sports days organised by the patients for the patients' were 'a great success.'⁸¹ The patients' sports had been an annual event 'for some four years or more' and 'may firms and businesses in Brisbane supply the prizes.'⁸² Photographs of asylum and hospital sports teams are common extant material culture objects. Surviving sporting trophies also pay tribute to the strength and professionalism of the hospital teams in District competitions. Amongst the Beechworth Asylum trophies is a small shield inscribed with three successive seasons of victories between 1929 and 1932: 'ASYLUM/CRICKET CLUB/PREMIERS/SEASON 1929–1930 ... 1930–1931 ... 1931–1932.'⁸³

From the early–twentieth century Australian institutions also constructed golf courses, and that at Gailes next to Goodna Mental Hospital, Queensland, in 1924 is one such example.⁸⁴ Its creation was the brainchild of Dr Henry Byam Ellerton, Inspector for the Insane, and also medical superintendant at Goodna Mental Hospital. Like Goodna, the Ipswich Mental Hospital golf course was laid out on part of the hospital grounds by patients, and the 'Golf Club comprised staff, local residents, as well as some patients who 'have taken a great interest in the game and some play.'⁸⁵

But criticism was often levelled at institutions regarding exactly who benefited from these recreation facilities—staff or patients? There was a fine line between official staff duties and staff liberties. Dr Attfield at Fremantle Asylum, Western Australia, in 1859 noted that an attendant who was accused of playing draughts with a patient 'considered it part of his duty to amuse the patients' but Attfield stated he had 'been told that he must in future overlook, but not engage in anything of this sort.'⁸⁶ But staff did initiate and participate in much of the recreation for patients, and the fine line between the patients' benefits and staff enjoyment was often crossed. When the Western Australian Sunday Times ran a series of articles on the Claremont Hospital during 1911 they tested the 'staff regulations' against the practices of the institution and found them wanting. 'The rules state that ... Epileptics must always be under observation, yet some time ago the Chief Attendant gave a nightly magic lantern entertainment, at which about 270 patients, many of the class [epileptics] referred to, were present, and for an hour at a time the place was in total darkness.'⁸⁷ The Sunday Times also perceived favouritism to be a failing of the hospital workplace, reporting that 'the favoured ones [attending staff] are toadies of the Chief Attendant,' which resulted in an unequal access to leave, as well as a greater access to the less arduous tasks such as recreation.⁸⁸

Conclusion

Gendered and highly regulated entertainment and recreation (either indoor or outdoor) formed an important part of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century institution's public relations with the broader community. Recreation was a constant feature of contemporary annual reports, and local newspaper articles because of its therapeutic benefit to patients. Recreation was one of the few asylum activities that attempted, albeit in a highly regulated way, to encourage patients to respond and interact in appropriate ways in a social, physical, as well as an emotional sense. Thus surviving recreation buildings and grounds for Australian institutions constructed between 1860 and 1945 form part of a larger narrative about the role of recreation in the treatment of the mentally ill. The history of recreation after World War II, and the development of specific therapies, such as occupational therapy and music therapy, from the 1950s in Australian psychiatric institutions are yet to be written. What is clear though is that the surviving evidence comprising archives, material culture objects, and the cultural heritage landscape of former psychiatric sites provides an echo of the noisy and lively recreational activities of past asylum patients, staff, and visitors.

University of Melbourne

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Professor Mark Finnane and the participants of the 'Remembering Goodna' Symposium held in Brisbane, Queensland in November 2007, where a version of this paper was first presented. This research forms part of a large Australian Research Council Grant (2007–09) with Professor Elizabeth Malcolm and Dr John Waller to write the history of psychiatric institutions and community care in Australia. I would also like to thank the Department of Parliamentary Services as part of this research was completed during my Victorian Parliamentary Library Fellowship in 2008. My thanks also to Katie Sutton for the English translations of German texts, and Dr Lee-Ann Monk and Dr Yvonne Ward for the Kew Asylum 'lawn tennis' illustration.

Notes

^1.� Dolly MacKinnon, "Entertainment and Recreation in Australian and New Zealand," in Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting (Clio Medica/The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine), edited by Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz (London: Wellcome Institute and Rodopi, forthcoming), 267–88.

^2.� Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 42–4; Dolly MacKinnon, "'A Captive Audience': Musical Concerts in Queensland Mental Institutions c.1870–c.1930," Context: Journal of Music Research 19 (Spring 2000): 43–56; Catharine Coleborne, "Space, Power and Gender in the Asylum in Victoria, 1850s–1870s," in "Madness" in Australia, edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (St. Lucia, QLD: Queensland University Press/API Network, 2003), 157–68; Catharine Coleborne, Reading Madness: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1888 (Perth, WA: Network Books, 2007), 99–104.

^3.� For recreation as a theme see Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales 1880–1940 (Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press, 1988); Coleborne, Reading Madness; and Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (Clio Medica/The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine) (London: Wellcome Institute and Rodopi, 2008).

^4.� Dolly MacKinnon, "Music, Madness, and the Body: Symptom and Cure," Special Issue, History of Psychiatry 17, no.1 (2006): 9–21.

^5.� See MacKinnon, "Entertainment and Recreation," 266–88; MacKinnon, "Music, Madness, and the Body," 9–21; Dolly MacKinnon, "'Hearing Madness': The Soundscape of the Asylum," in Coleborne and MacKinnon, 73–82; and Dolly MacKinnon, "'Jolly and Fond of Singing': The Gendered Nature of Musical Entertainment in Queensland Mental Institutions c1870–c1937," in Coleborne and MacKinnon, 157–68.

^6.� Ray Osborne, "Asylums as Cultural Heritage: The Challenge of Adaptive Re-use," in Coleborne and MacKinnon, 217–29.

^7.� Leslie Topp, James E. Moran, and Jonathan Andrews, eds, Madness, Architecture, and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (New York: Routledge, 2007). Also absent from this collection is any consideration of the Canadian or Australasian asylum architecture.

^8.� Steven Cherry and Roger Munting, "'Exercise is the Thing'?: Sport and the Asylum c.1850–1950," International Journal of the History of Sport 22, no. 1 (2005): 42–58; Neil Brimblecombe "Asylum Nursing as a Career in the United Kingdom, 1890–1910," Journal of Advanced Nursing 55, no. 6 (2006): 770–7.

^9.� MacKinnon, "A Captive Audience," 49.

^10.�Ibid., 47.

^11.� MacKinnon, "Entertainment and Recreation," 267–88.

^12.�Ibid.

^13.� See Health & History, Special Issue: Histories of Psychiatry after Deinstitutionalisation: Australia and New Zealand 5, no. 2 (2003): 1–149.

^14.� D. Gittins, Madness in its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital, 1937–97 (London: Routledge, 1998), 5.

^15.� "The Estimates," Argus (Melbourne), 28 February 1856, 5, as cited in Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness, 84.

^16.� John S. Butler, as cited in E. Harris, "Beginnings of Psychotherapy in America," American Journal of Psychotherapy 18 (1964), 287.

^17.� "The Estimates," 84.

^18.� Sir James Crichton Browne, as cited in Henry Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, vol. 2 (London: Churchill, 1892), 182.

^19.�Ibid.

^20.� Minutes of the evidence taken from the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into and report upon all matters connected with the management of the Hospital for the Insane, Goodna, and the treatment of patients therein ... Queensland (1915), 582–6.

^21.� Minutes from the Royal Commission, 719

^22.� See David Nichols, Dolly MacKinnon, and Keir Reeves, "Rural Asylums and the Goldfields Civic Project," in Deeper Leads: New Approaches in Victorian Gold Fields History, edited by Keir Reeves and David Nichols (Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Series, 2007), 39–62.

^23.� MacKinnon, "Entertainment and Recreation," 274.

^24.� E. Harris, "Beginnings of Psychotherapy in America," American Journal of Psychotherapy 18 (1964), 287.

^25.� MacKinnon, "A Captive Audience," 45–9.

^26.� Harris, 287.

^27.� Minutes from the Royal Commission, 719.

^28.�Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales (hereafter JLCNSW), (1885–6), vol. xl Part III, Inspector-General of the Insane Report 1885, 648.

^29.�JLCNSW, (1876–7), vol. xxvii Part I, Gladesville Report 1875, 909.

^30.�JLCNSW, (1876–7), vol. xxvii Part I, Gladesville Report 1875, 890.

^31.�Queensland Votes and Proceedings (hereafter QVP) (1870), Lunatic Asylum Woogaroo Report, 44.

^32.�Ibid.

^33.� British Parliamentary Papers, 1859, vol. 8, 89, as cited in A.S. Ellis, Eloquent Testimony: The Story of the Mental Health Services in Western Australia 1830–1975 (Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1984), 18.

^34.� British Parliamentary Papers, 1862, vol. 8, 120, as cited in Ellis, 19.

^35.� Ellis, 19

^36.�Ibid..

^37.� Ellis, 19–20.

^38.�QVP (1873), Lunatic Asylum Woogaroo Report 1872, 1306.

^39.� MacKinnon, "Entertainment and Recreation," 271.

^40.� "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," Allgemeine Zaitschrift für Psychiatrie (1867): 808–20 ("The Melbourne Mental Asylum," General Journal for Psychiatry 24 (1867): 808–20), 814.

^41.� MacKinnon, "Hearing Madness," 78.

^42.�Ibid.

^43.� MacKinnon, "A Captive Audience," 43–56; MacKinnon, "Jolly and Fond of Singing," 157–68; evidence based on author's visit to former Kew Cottages Chapel in January 2009 with Ray Osborne, Heritage Victoria, and staff from the redevelopment company for this the site.

^44.� Cheryce Kramer, "Soul Music as Exemplified in Nineteenth-Century German Psychiatry," in Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, edited by Penelope Gouk (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 140.

^45.�Observer (South Australia), 29 January 1879, as cited in 1870–1970 Commemorating the Centenary of Glenside Hospital (Naracoorte, South Australia: The Griffin Press, 1982), 21.

^46.� R.W. Gowland, Troubled Asylum: The History of the Invalid Barracks, New Norfolk, Colonial Hospital, New Norfolk, Madhouse, New Norfolk, Her Majesty's Lunatic Asylum, New Norfolk, Mental Diseases Hospital, New Norfolk, Lachlan Park, New Norfolk ... Royal Derwent Hospital (Tasmania: Gowland, 1981), 144.

^47.�QPP, (1916–1917), vol. 1, 1400.

^48.�Ibid.; Elizabeth McRobert, Challinor Centre: The End of the Line. A History of the Institution Also Known as Sandy Gallop (Queensland: Queensland Government, 1997), 48.

^49.�QPP, (1911–1912), vol. 2, 1911–1912 Annual Report Goodna, Table VIII, and Table IX.

^50.�Observer (South Australia), 29 January 1879.

^51.�Victoria Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly and Papers, (hereafter VVPLAP) (1880), Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane, 1879, Kew, 20.

^52.� Minutes from the Royal Commission, xx.

^53.� J. Taylor Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England 1840–1914 (London: Mansell, 1991), 35.

^54.� "Callan Park: A Great State Institution," Sydney Mail, 12 August 1903, 409–12.

^55.�Toowoomba Chronicle, 3 May 1908, 3.

^56.� For image, see Dolly MacKinnon "'The Trustworthy Agency of the Eyes': Reading Images of Music and Madness in Historical Context," Health & History 5, no. 2 (2003), 138.

^57.�QPP (1879), Annual Report, Goodna Asylum.

^58.� MacKinnon "Jolly and Fond of Singing," 167.

^59.� "Collingwood Lunatic Asylum Ball," Illustrated Melbourne Post, 12 October 1868, 159. See also MacKinnon "The Trustworthy Agency of the Eyes," 123–49.

^60.�QVP (1873), Lunatic Asylum Woogaroo Report, 4.

^61.�QVP (1873), Lunatic Asylum Woogaroo Report, 1306.

^62.� MacKinnon, "A Captive Audience," 50. See also Gittins, Madness in its Place, 173–4, 176–7.

^63.� See MacKinnon "A Captive Audience," 43–56.

^64.�QPP (1903), Annual Report (Goodna), 13.

^65.� Gowland, 198.

^66.� Elizabeth Willis and Karen Twigg, Behind Closed Doors: A Catalogue of Artefacts from Victorian Psychiatric Institutions Held at the Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 1994), 229, Registration Number 717.2; MacKinnon "Jolly and Fond of Singing," 157–68.

^67.� Letter from Paramount Pictures (Sydney) to the Medical Superintendent, Goodna Asylum, 3 February 1919. (Private collection).

^68.� I. Bircanin and A. Short, Glimpses of the Past: Mont Park, Larundel, Plenty, (Campus Design, 1995), 15.

^69.� "Wireless in Hospitals: Its Uses and Advantages Toowoomba's Appeal," Toowoomba and Darling Downs Gazette, 12 October 1926, 8; and "Wireless in Hospitals: Its Beneficial Aspects Appeal for the 'General'," Toowoomba and Darling Downs Gazette, 12 October 1926, 3.

^70.�QPP (1931), vol. 1, Annual Report Ipswich, 842.

^71.� Queensland State Archives, A/31775 Correspondence, 26 June 1935 and 5 March 1935.

^72.� Willis and Twigg, 229, Registration Number: 719.1.

^73.� "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 814.

^74.�QVP (1869), Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum Special Report, 905.

^75.� Willis and Twigg, 234, Registration Number 775.1.

^76.�JLCNSW (1876–7), vol. xxvii Part I, Gladesville Report 1875, 890.

^77.�QPP (1932) vol. 1, Annual Report Toowoomba, 788.

^78.� Bircanin and Short, 14.

^79.�Ibid.

^80.�VPP, (1910), vol. 2, Hospitals for the Insane, Report of the Inspector-General, 1909, Kew, 912.

^81.�QPP, (1932), vol. 1, Annual Report 1931–32 Goodna, 775.

^82.�Ibid.

^83.� Willis and Twigg, 235, Registration Number: 664.1.

^84.� Gailes Golf Club, Wacol, Queensland, established in 1924 by Dr Henry Byam Ellerton http://www.gailesgolf.com.au'gailes_History/H000_history.htm (accessed 30 April 2008).

^85.� Queensland State Archives Z3641, QPP, 1923, Vol. 1, 1029, as cited in McRobert, 79.

^86.� "Journal of the Fremantle Asylum 1858–1860" in Bignold, "Lunatic Asylum 100 Years Ago" Medical Journal of Australia 21 September (1963), 506, as cited in Ellis, 190.

^87.�Sunday Times (Western Australia), 26 February 1911, 13a, as cited in Ellis, 56.

^88.�Sunday Times (Western Australia), 30 April 1911, 9 c & d, as cited in Ellis, 58.

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