|
|
|
Australian Asylum Architecture Through German Eyes: Kew, Melbourne, 1867
Elizabeth Malcolm
Kew Asylum in Melbourne, which by the 1890s was the largest in Australia, was planned in the 1850s, built on a prominent site in the 1860s, and opened in the early 1870s with accommodation for over 500 patients. Costing nearly £200,000 and visible for miles, it was hailed by some as a 'palace.' Yet, in terms of international asylum architecture, the building was already out-of-date when it received its first patients in 1871; within a few years it was being labelled 'backward.' Recently an article, published in a Berlin medical journal in 1867, has come to light that contains notes and a plan supplied by Kew's German architect. This enables us to study more closely the thinking behind the design of the asylum, the overseas models on which it was based and why it attracted so much criticism so quickly. Kew's problems reflect many of the fundamental shortcomings of mid-nineteenth-century asylum architecture in Australia and elsewhere.
|
|
|
| |
|
Introduction: Victoria's 'appalling' mental hospitals, 1950 | |
| In 1961 Dr Eric Cunningham Dax, chairman of the Mental Hygiene Authority of Victoria, published a study of the changes that had occurred in the state's provision for the mentally ill and intellectually handicapped since the passage of the Mental Hygiene Act 1950, which had established the body that he chaired.1 He began his account with a series of devastating criticisms of Victoria's mental hospitals, clinics, receiving houses, and colonies, as they had operated in the years before 1950. The seven mental hospitals were, he wrote, 'appalling': the wards were 'mostly very dirty'; unemptied chamber pots produced a smell that was 'abominable'; toilet and washing facilities were 'totally inadequate'; patients often slept on the floor on mattresses stuffed with 'filthy' straw; the food was 'revolting'; while hundreds of 'ill-dressed' patients walked up and down throughout the day in dilapidated airing sheds, presenting a truly 'distressing spectacle.' As for the staff, Dax considered it 'amazing' that so many stayed. Most lived in rooms off the wards, without proper washing facilities, with few if any sitting rooms and 'totally unsatisfactory' dining rooms. Moreover, their uniforms were such as 'to destroy their self respect.' Overall, these hospitals presented a 'dismal' and 'bleak' spectacle.2 |
1
|
|
Within this devastating overall picture Dax singled out particular institutions: some for a measure of praise, but most for blame. He noted that Victoria's first mental hospital, built in 1846–8 at Yarra Bend, just north of Melbourne, had been 'designed on the lines of a gaol.' In 1871–2 Kew Asylum had opened a short distance away, on the other side of the Yarra River. It was intended to replace Yarra Bend, yet it was not until more than fifty years later, in 1926, that the 'old Yarra Bend hospital was finally wrecked and the ground converted into a national park.' A rather similar story occurred at Kew. According to Dax, in 1886, fifteen years after the opening of the institution, a royal commission had criticised it severely; and by the 1890s the government was seriously contemplating its demolition. Yet Kew was still operating in 1950—like Yarra Bend—more than fifty years after it had been condemned as thoroughly inadequate and its closure strongly recommended.3 |
2
|
|
It is not the intention of this article to investigate the truth or otherwise of Dax's swingeing attack upon the pre-1950 Victorian mental hospital system. Rather the article will focus on Kew Asylum: its design and construction, and also its early years. Was Dax right to claim that the closure of the institution was being seriously considered by 1890, less than twenty years after its opening? The asylum had cost Victorian taxpayers the enormous sum of nearly £200,000, and during the 1870s and 1880s articles in newspapers and the medical press praised it as 'imposing' and 'handsome,' even a 'palace,' built upon a 'magnificent site.'4 It seems hard to believe that a government would propose abandoning such an expensive and impressive new institution.5 But, if this is so, where did Kew Asylum's problems lie? Was it poorly designed and badly built, or inadequately funded and incompetently managed? |
3
|
|
Rather unexpectedly, an article published in a leading mid-nineteenth-century German psychiatric journal helps throw new light on the building of Kew Asylum. The article, which is in German, was based upon information supplied by one of Kew's principal architects, Frederick Kawerau, and it offers a fascinating window onto the thinking behind the asylum's design.6 The article also reminds us that many nineteenth-century Australian asylums, and other medical institutions, drew heavily upon overseas models and were frequently planned and built by overseas born and trained architects. |
4
|
|
| |
|
Image 1: Kew Asylum, with the administrative block on the left, circa 1889–91 (Photographer Charles Rudd. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This raises a number of important questions. For example, were Australian asylums simply copies of those built in Britain, Ireland, Europe, or the United States, and, if so, can we detect in them evidence of some of the controversies and problems that beset asylum architecture elsewhere? If designs were largely imported from overseas, were they sometimes out-of-date by the time the buildings materialised in Australia? Or, did the planners of Australian asylums make serious attempts to adapt buildings to local conditions and, as a consequence, did they devise original and distinctive approaches to asylum architecture?7 |
5
|
| |
|
The Origins of Kew Asylum, 1848–72 | |
| Kew Asylum was planned amid much controversy in the mid 1850s; it was built in acrimonious circumstances in the late 1860s; it opened belatedly in the early 1870s; and, by the 1890s, it was the largest asylum in Australia. The size of Kew was not accidental. To put it bluntly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, lunacy was widely perceived to be rampant in Victoria. In his monumental four-volume study of hospitals and asylums of the world, published in London in 1891, Henry Burdett wrote: 'lunacy is more general in Victoria than in the other Australian colonies.'8 Burdett devoted an appendix to Victorian asylums, and the figures he presented revealed that Victoria during the 1880s had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation of any of the Australian colonies, with Tasmania and New South Wales following well behind.9 Indeed, on the basis of similar figures, Ephraim Zox, chairman of the 1884–6 Victorian Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate (the 'Zox Commission'), labelled the colony 'the maddest place in the world.'10 |
6
|
|
The decision to build an asylum at Kew, on high ground above the Yarra River about five miles (eight kilometres) north of Melbourne, grew directly out of the limitations of Yarra Bend Asylum. These were exposed as a result of the extraordinary population explosion occasioned by the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851.11 When it opened in 1848 Yarra Bend had accommodation for around twenty-five inmates; by 1851 it housed about seventy; but in 1857 numbers had jumped to 300 and in 1860 to 683; and by 1870 Yarra Bend had a population slightly in excess of 1,000.12 The gold rushes produced great wealth for some; for many, however, they spelt, not just material disappointment, but psychological disaster.13 Yarra Bend Asylum was ill prepared to deal with such a hugely increased demand for places. It was built by the clerk of works, Henry Ginn, and appears to have been designed in the Office of Public Works, £1,000 having been voted in 1845 by the New South Wales Legislative Council towards its construction.14 Much of the office's previous experience had consisted of building prisons, and this clearly showed at Yarra Bend, with its rows of small cells opening onto narrow corridors.15 It is probable that Ginn and his political masters expected many of Yarra Bend's inmates would be ex-convicts, as large numbers had been leaving Tasmania and New South Wales during the 1840s for what would soon become Victoria.16 But gold confounded such expectations. |
7
|
|
Most of the rapidly growing numbers of patients in the 1850s and 1860s, many of whom were new immigrants, had to be housed first in tents and then in hastily constructed wooden huts in the extensive grounds of Yarra Bend. Some historians have criticised such expedients, seeing the resort to tents and huts as retrogressive; others, however, have taken a more positive view, interpreting the dispersal of patients into small accommodation units as an advance over their congregation in large, single, barrack-like buildings.17 But other expedients were also resorted to, which were condemned at the time and have been comprehensively condemned since. Prisons and pauper institutions were used to house lunatics, and temporary asylums were established in the old jail in Collins Street, in a former convict stockade in Carlton and at the powder magazine in the Royal Park.18 Parliamentary enquiries in 1852–3, 1857–8 and 1861–2 all recommended the construction of a larger asylum—if not several—designed on more modern and less penal lines. The latter enquiry, according to Kawerau, led to the construction of Kew commencing, and also to the building of asylums in country Victoria at Ararat and Beechworth, both of which opened in 1867.19 |
8
|
|
| |
|
Image 2: Yarra Bend Asylum on the left, with Kew Asylum on the horizon, circa 1910. (J.D. Meade Postcard Collection. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
| In Britain, Germany, and the United States important new ideas about asylum architecture emerged during the 1830s and 1840s. As one historian has put it, there was a growing recognition that buildings were 'in themselves therapies.'20 Unlike those who had built Yarra Bend in the late 1840s, some of those involved in designing and building Kew Asylum in the 1850s and 1860s were obviously aware of such thinking. George William Vivian, who worked on the design of Kew with Kawerau, indicated that his main inspirations were the writings of John Conolly, William Ellis and Maximilian Jacobi; and, together with the first ground plan of Kew published in 1856, he included copies of the plans of the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell and the London County Asylum at Colney Hatch.21 Kawerau stressed in 1867 that Kew followed the 'best English designs' and that he had worked closely on the plans with an English doctor, Edward Paley,22 who in 1863 was appointed Inspector of Victorian Lunatic Asylums.23 But, although Kew was based largely upon contemporary English models, some of its features showed the influence of French Second Empire and Italianate domestic architectural styles, which were popular in late-nineteenth-century Australia.24 |
9
|
|
As Cheryl Day has pointed out in her study of the early history of Kew, the setting of the building on very high ground was striking and the building itself was large and imposing. Unlike Yarra Bend, Kew was a truly public building: it was meant to be seen from afar, and was intended to display both the progress of enlightened medical science and the benevolence of the newly established and newly wealthy colony of Victoria. However, the design was actually 'not innovative.'25 By studying Kawerau's 1867 explanatory notes and his ground plan of the building we can see more clearly what was derivative about it, what models it drew upon, and how such models were altered to accommodate Australian conditions. |
10
|
| |
|
Symmetry and asymmetry: Ordering and gendering the asylum | |
| Kawerau's plan26 shows a series of buildings that were largely symmetrical, but not completely so. According to early-nineteenth-century theories about managing mental illness, asylums were buildings in which order must prevail: in which troubled and confused minds were to be gradually restored to a calm and rational state. An ordered environment was considered essential to this task,27 and the very design of Kew Asylum, with its regular straight lines and symmetrical layout, was meant to foster a strong sense of rationality. Only the gardens outside with their circular paths, where the patients could 'promenade' and take the air, departed from the straight and narrow. Yet, even the gardens were landscaped: 'laid out in the form of parks,' according to Kawerau.28 They were thus highly artificial—the antithesis of the wild native bush beyond the walls of the institution. |
11
|
|
| |
|
Image 3: Ground Plan 1—Kew Asylum as planned by G.W. Vivian and Frederick Kawerau, 1856 (Source: Report on the Proposed Kew Lunatic Asylum by G.W. Vivian, Public Works Office, Melbourne, 6 August 1856, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1856–7, Volume 4.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Image 4: Ground Plan 2—Kew Asylum as planned by Frederick Kawerau, advised by Dr Edward Paley, 1867 (Source: "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," Allg. Z. f. Psychiat. xxiv (1867): 808–20.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kew was not completely symmetrical, however, as many overseas asylums built at this time were. The symmetry certainly reflected a desire to impose order, but it also reflected the rigid gender division that prevailed in all nineteenth-century asylums—or was intended to prevail. In a sense asylums were two institutions stuck together: a male facility on one side and a female on the other. Kew's departure from rigid symmetry was due to the fact that it was designed to house significantly more male than female patients. In this respect local Australian circumstances produced a modification of the overseas model. In 1861, when the asylum was still being planned, there were 155 men for every 100 women in Victoria; only Western Australia had a higher ratio.29 Thus the hospital was designed, as Kawerau's notes explain, for 540 patients, 318 of whom would be male and 222 female: a 60:40 ratio, which almost exactly reflected the balance of the sexes according to the 1861 Victorian census. Indeed, not until 1911 did the female population of Victorian asylums begin to exceed the male population.30 |
12
|
|
While there were fewer women, they were also treated differently, which again emerges if we look closely at the asylum's design. Men and women patients were to be kept apart and cared for by different people, certainly because of fears of what might occur if the sexes mixed, but, as well, there was a strong belief that female madness was different from male madness, and thus needed to be managed in different ways.31 |
13
|
|
Work was considered by all experts at the time to be a fundamental part of the therapeutic process. Thus all asylums included indoor and outdoor work areas. Reflecting nineteenth-century gender assumptions, women's work was perceived to occur largely indoors, while men were more likely to work outdoors. Kew had, as the plan shows, more indoor workspaces for women than for men, and this further compromised the symmetry of the design. Women's work was different, being largely composed of sewing, mending, washing, and cleaning. The work that women did was intended to make or save money for the asylum; and it was to be conducted well away from men. Kawerau's notes state that 'no male orderly or patient from the men's division need enter the laundry.' Moreover, there was a small dining room adjacent to the laundry so that female patients employed in washing could stay 'for the whole day and thus avoid large work interruptions.'32 |
14
|
|
Men, on the other hand, were expected to work in the extensive grounds of the asylum, which initially covered 340 acres (136 hectares) and included a farm and vegetable gardens, or in the workshops towards the rear of the complex, where, according to the architect, there were to be facilities for tailors, shoemakers, mattress makers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, cabinet makers, carpenters, and painters.33 There were also a brewery and a fire station planned in this area. Kawerau not only envisaged brewing, however, but also wine making, for he commented that the soil of the grounds was very suitable for the cultivation of grapes.34 Perhaps this was a particularly German touch. Men's work was clearly less physically restricted than women's; it was also more varied and more obviously intended to teach new skills.35 |
15
|
| |
|
The administrative block: 'Front and centre' | |
| According to Kawerau's notes, 'at the front and centre' was the administrative block.36 Although no panopticon-style asylums were built in Australia, the commanding role of the doctors was still reflected in the design. Burdett in the early 1890s was emphatic that the 'administrative department always ought to occupy ... a central position, the wards being arranged around it or on either side of it.'37 In the original 1856 plan, the Kew administrative block was intended to house the asylum's superintendent. Kawerau explained in 1867 that the 'director' was to have dwelt 'in the middle of the façade.' However, 'recently' it had been decided to locate his accommodation further to the front, but in a detached building at the south-eastern corner of the site. Nevertheless, the administrative block, containing doctors' offices, the pharmacy, visiting and meeting rooms on the ground floor and junior doctors' accommodation above, was located at the highest point of the asylum complex. Facing towards the south like many English asylums, it was some 180 feet (54 metres) above the level of the Yarra River.38 |
16
|
|
From here, and in fact from much of the first floor of the asylum, there were views over the surrounding countryside: south and west towards Melbourne city centre and Port Phillip Bay, and north and east towards the Dandenong mountains and beyond them the Great Dividing Range. The architect stressed that the asylum was located to command views and to benefit from 'cool, sea winds.'39 The wall around the building was thirteen feet (3.9 metres) high, but it was sunk into a ditch so that it was only three feet (0.9 metres) high at ground level, thus not impeding breezes or views, while still providing security against patient escapes.40 |
17
|
|
Clearly the intention was not to bury the patients behind a high wall that prevented them from seeing outside the asylum. The building was not meant to be a prison. This further highlights the reaction against Yarra Bend. Kawerau explicitly criticised Yarra Bend, which was only a short distance away across the river, for having the 'complete character of a prison.' He acknowledged that the population explosion caused by the gold rushes necessitated a bigger asylum, but it was also one that he said should be more 'respectable'—presumably he meant removed from the taint of the convict past.41 |
18
|
| |
|
The dining hall and the patients' rooms: Creating a community | |
| Behind the administrative block, again centrally located, was the dining hall. This was planned to accommodate 360 patients for meals, as well as to be used at other times for concerts and dances. |
19
|
|
Some of the numbers given by Kawerau tell us much about the thinking behind how the asylum was intended to operate. Kew was designed to house 540, but clearly it was not planned that all patients should eat together in the dining hall. There was space for exactly two-thirds of the patients in the hall. The architect referred to patients of both sexes dining together at midday.42 Presumably he assumed that one-third of the patients would be too ill and difficult to be able to eat communally. |
20
|
|
In criticising Yarra Bend, Kawerau was rejecting a prison model for Kew Asylum. For instance, he went to some length to explain that the locks to be installed in the asylum were 'Monks improved silent action asylum locks,' then 'used in all the newer mental asylums in England.' One of their major advantages was that 'their opening was inaudible,' so they would not draw patients' attention to the custodial nature of the institution.43 But it is Kawerau's stress on communal living and communal activities, despite the separation of the sexes, which is especially notable and clearly separates Kew from Melbourne's Pentridge Jail, which was also planned and built during the 1850s and 1860s, and which relied heavily on solitary confinement.44 |
21
|
|
Differences between Kew's 1856 plan and the plan published by Kawerau in 1867 show a marked increase in the communal nature of the institution, and as a consequence a move away from the original Conolly model that Vivian had identified as a prime influence in 1856. In the earlier plan there were to be separate small dining rooms attached to the various wards, but in 1867 Kawerau envisaged a single large space in which the majority of men and women patients could meet to eat and to socialise through music. In practice this didn't always happen,45 but it was certainly provided for in the asylum's design. Prisons at the time, following penitentiary principles, stressed the separation of prisoners from each other. Solitary confinement was fundamental to most prison regimes—and not just as an additional form of punishment.46 But asylums, like Kew, aimed to foster a community. The centrality of the dining hall as a recreational space in Kawerau's 1867 plan reflects this. Although, on a more practical level, it also probably reflects the fact that by the mid 1860s it was realised that significantly more patients were going to have to be accommodated than had been provided for in the original plan drawn up ten years earlier. |
22
|
|
The same thinking is clear in Kawerau's discussion of the patients' sleeping arrangements. His plan envisaged only 242 single bedrooms: thus 55 percent of patients would have been sharing rooms. The 1856 plan showed a bigger asylum, although with fewer patients, because more were to be accommodated individually, as Conolly had recommended.47 In the 1867 plan single rooms were intended especially for those patients the architect described as 'unclean' or 'anxious and agitated.'48 |
23
|
|
The mentally ill would be restored to health through interaction with others: with fellow patients, with their attendants and also with doctors. The asylum aimed to be a community, indeed, in many respects, a family. In their regulated communal sleeping, eating, working, and recreational spaces, separated by silently locking doors and cut off from the outside world by discrete walls, patients were being re-socialised, so that they could return to their communities and families outside the walls of the asylum and live in more harmonious and productive ways. |
24
|
|
This was the theory at least. But, in practice, as some at the time and many since have pointed out, a style of life modelled on an extended family is impossible in a huge institution housing up to 1,000 people in a single building. Carla Yanni notes that asylum builders and doctors in the late nineteenth century 'faced a paradox: they wanted their institutions to appear trustworthy, and thus monumental, but also homelike.'49 |
25
|
| |
|
The chapel: Religion 'in isolation' | |
| Another part of the central axis of Kew Asylum, formed by the administrative block and the dining hall, was the chapel, but it was to be at the back and, in fact, beyond the walls of the institution. The 1856 plan had showed the chapel in the administrative block, right at the front of the building. So why in 1867 did Kawerau locate it as far away as possible from the main buildings? |
26
|
|
Both Conolly and Jacobi had envisaged chapels in the asylum plans they published in the 1830s and 1840s. However, there was considerable controversy in various countries surrounding the role of religion in asylums. Whether or not there should be a chapel and where it should be situated were matters of sometimes intense debate. In places where religious conflict was a problem—Belfast is one example—some asylums tried to keep religion out altogether, not providing a chapel and even being reluctant, as Belfast was, to appoint chaplains.50 |
27
|
|
Burdett in proposing asylum models in the early 1890s, influenced by English circumstances where religion was a less contentious matter, came out strongly in favour of having the chapel in a central location, preferably over the recreation hall, as he argued more patients would be able to attend services than if the chapel was detached and removed from the main occupied parts of the building. Yet, while the chapel was to be central and communal, segregation was still to be maintained in that Burdett recommended separate entrances for male and female patients and also, if possible, for senior staff.51 |
28
|
|
But Kew had a detached chapel, which was to be used alternatively by Protestants and Catholics. The architect commented that it had been 'considered advisable to erect the church in isolation from all occupied divisions of the asylum, so that the patients' church route corresponds more closely to their earlier habits.' Here we have another indication that the architect aimed to keep the patients in touch with the world outside the asylum's walls. At home they would have attended a church removed from where they lived, so the asylum attempted to mimic this situation. However, it is possible that there was also a fear of sectarian tensions, which were certainly evident in Melbourne during the 1860s.52 Kawerau in his notes uses the striking term 'in isolation' to describe the chapel's location.53 Perhaps this reflects a desire to keep religion at arm's length from the everyday life of the institution as it might have caused division and disruption. |
29
|
| |
|
Conclusion: A 'backward' asylum, 1877 | |
| Despite his close involvement for at least ten years in the design and construction of Kew Asylum, when Kawerau's article appeared in Berlin in 1867, he had in fact left the project two years earlier and would shortly be returning to Germany.54 |
30
|
|
The contract for the asylum had been awarded in 1864 by the government to a builder named John Young, who had submitted the lowest tender of nearly £109,000. Kawerau's job was to oversee construction as clerk of works, while at the same time he was supervising work on the new Ararat and Beechworth asylums. Problems quickly emerged. There were complaints of inferior materials being used at Kew and of shoddy workmanship, and suggestions that Young was trying to economise as his quoted price was unrealistic.55 Kawerau was criticised for changing the contract specifications without the approval of his superiors, and a select committee of enquiry censored him in 1867 for 'gross negligence' in allowing Young to proceed 'in so disgraceful a manner.' But colleagues testified to Kawerau's honesty and expertise: one commenting that he oversaw work on all asylums because he 'had studied the plans for so many years of lunatic asylums.' However, Young's contract had been terminated in 1865 and in the process Kawerau lost his job at Kew. His health, which was not strong, appears to have broken down and he took extended sick leave from the Public Works Department.56 A new contractor was employed, Samuel Amess, whose original quote had been £124,000 and who gave evidence before the 1867 select committee critical of Young's tender. He completed the building in 1872, based upon the plans begun by Vivian and Kawerau in the mid 1850s and revised by Kawerau in the mid 1860s.57 |
31
|
|
Of course the asylum did not operate exactly as envisaged in Kawerau's 1867 plan and notes—far from it.58 As early as the late 1870s Kew was being attacked and labelled a failure by critics both in Australia and from overseas. F.N. Manning, the Inspector-General of the Insane for New South Wales, sent a report to a leading British psychiatric journal in 1879 in which he characterised Kew, and also the Ararat and Beechworth asylums, as 'resembling the English and foreign Asylums which were erected about 15 or 20 years ago, rather than the more modern structures.'59 In other words, only seven years after it had opened, Kew was hopelessly out-of-date. |
32
|
|
Kew did not lack for critics in Victoria either. The muckraking journalist, John Stanley James, known as 'The Vagabond,' published an exposé in 1876, based on information he had gathered while working for a month as an attendant in both Kew and Yarra Bend asylums.60 According to him, 'outwardly, and from a distance, like a palace, inside, it [Kew] is a workhouse or a jail.'61 In the same year a government enquiry, into allegations of staff mistreatment of patients at Kew, exposed significant problems in the design and management of the institution. In addition a royal commission, known as the Zox Commission, which sat during 1884–6 to examine facilities for the insane and inebriates in Victoria, also highlighted fundamental design problems in 'huge piles' like Kew.62 |
33
|
|
A Scottish asylum superintendent who visited Kew in 1877, only five years after it opened, was scathing in his comments, which were published in 1880 in the Journal of Mental Science, the leading British journal of psychiatric medicine. Kew, Dr A.R. Urquhart claimed, was 'full to overflowing,' with nearly 1,000 patients; a 'motley troupe,' their 'personal liberty' was 'much restricted' as 'many were extremely violent and excited'; the interior of the building was 'bare and empty'; the attendants were 'few, and preposterously over-paid,' so that discipline was 'impossible'; and morale of both staff and patients was low.63 All in all, Urquhart characterised Kew, as a 'backward' institution.64 |
34
|
|
Much of what Urquhart criticised was far from peculiar to Australia, however. For, if Australian asylums, like Kew, largely followed overseas models in terms of their design and operation, they equally shared in the major failings of these models that were becoming obvious to many even as Kew was being built in the late 1860s. Like so many asylums Kew became overcrowded—although perhaps more rapidly than most, as its population doubled in around ten years. As early as 1876 its superintendent conceded that 'modern opinion' had turned against large asylums and that smaller cottage-style institutions were preferable to huge barrack-like complexes such as Kew. In 1891 Burdett said of Kew's principal model, Colney Hatch, that it had 'no special feature beyond its great size'—it then contained 2,250 beds—and that there was 'nothing worth imitation in its design.'65 |
35
|
International asylum architecture changed significantly during the mid– and late– nineteenth century, reflecting changing theories about the nature of mental illness and how insanity should be managed. The 1830s and 1840s in Britain and America were decades of innovation and experimentation in asylum architecture, but the middle decades of the century largely saw a replication of earlier designs.66 From the 1870s, however, contrary trends emerged with, on the one hand, even larger new asylums being built in the pavilion style or older ones extended, while, on the other hand, there was a move towards the construction of smaller accommodation units in the form of cottages, villas, and colonies.67 Often asylums attempted a somewhat uneasy combination of the two modes.68 This was true of Yarra Bend. Its prison-like plan was antiquated when the asylum opened in 1848, yet, ironically, its resort to cottages in the 1850s and 1860s had put it at the forefront of advances in asylum design by the 1870s and 1880s. Kew, however, very much embodied English ideas that were new in the 1830s and 1840s, yet it took so long to build that it was already out-of-date by international standards at the time that it opened in the early 1870s. Manning and Urquhart were reflecting these standards when they summed it up as 'backward' in the late 1870s, because its design had been based on earlier and largely discredited models. Yet, despite this perceived backwardness in the 1870s, Kew was still operating in the 1940s in a building based on the thinking of the 1840s. Then, however, Dax saw it not just as backward, but as 'appalling.'
University of Melbourne
|
36
|
|
Notes
1. Ann Westmore, "Obituary. Eric Cunningham Dax (1908–2008): A Tribute," Health and History 10, no.1 (2008): 167–71.
2. Eric Cunningham Dax, Asylum to Community: The Development of the Mental Hygiene Service in Victoria, Australia (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1961), 19–20.
3. Ibid., 14–15.
4. Cheryl Day, "Magnificence, Misery and Madness: A History of Kew Asylum, 1872–1915" (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1998), 19. Large American asylums erected during the 1860s and 1870s also cost huge sums of money. For example, the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane at Poughkeepsie, New York, opened in 1867 for 600 patients, cost $2 million to build; while the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane at Morristown, opened in 1876 for 800 patients, cost $2.5 million. Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 111–22.
5. Day, 35.
6. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," Allgemeine Zaitschrift für Psychiatrie xxiv (1867): 808–20 ("The Melbourne Mental Asylum," General Journal for Psychiatry 24 [1867]: 808–20). The article, which includes a ground plan of Kew Asylum, appears to have been put together by the editors of the journal, rather than written by Kawerau himself, who in 1867 was still in Melbourne. The article is described at the beginning as being based on 'notes ... provided to us by Master Builder Kawerau.' I would like to thank Katie Sutton for her fine translation of this article and for her elucidation of some of the more obscure medical and architectural terminology that it contains.
7. Susan Piddock has recently produced a comparison between a group of sixteen county asylums built in England and Wales during the period 1827–73 and three Australian asylums: New Norfolk (1831–2) in Tasmania and Adelaide (1850–2) and Parkside (1866–70) in South Australia. She attempts to distil the essential elements of early-nineteenth-century asylum design displayed in the work of leading authorities, such as John Conolly, W.A.F. Browne, and Maximilian Jacobi, among others, and to determine how many of these features were evident in each asylum. Her choice of Australian asylums is, however, rather problematic. She finds, for instance, that New Norfolk and Adelaide had few features recommended by Conolly, while Parkside had far more. But, as New Norfolk was built before Conolly published his main work and Adelaide only shortly afterwards, this conclusion is hardly surprising. A study of the Victorian asylums, like Kew, Ararat and Beechworth, all built during the 1860s when Conolly's work was still influential, would have offered a better guide to the impact of his ideas on Australian asylum architecture. Susan Piddock, A Space of their Own: The Archaeology of Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylums in Britain, South Australia and Tasmania (New York: Springer, 2007).
8. H.C. Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, vol. I (London: Churchill, 1891), 311; see also Frederic Norton Manning, "Statistics of Insanity in Australia," Journal of Mental Science, new series xxv, no.110 (July 1879): 168, 173–5.
9. Burdett, I, 666–8. When assessing Burdett's claim, we should bear in mind Stephen Garton's warning that the 'history of mental illness and the history of lunatic asylums are not the same thing.' Stephen Garton, "Asylum Histories: Reconsidering Australia's Lunatic Past," in 'Madness' in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum, edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2003), 11.
10. Quoted in Richard Bonwick, "The History of Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Melbourne" (MMed thesis, University of Melbourne, 1996), 63.
11. The population of Victoria increased just over 200 percent in the three years from 1851 to 1854; by 1861 the population was nearly 600 percent greater than it had been only ten years earlier. Wray Vamplew, ed., Australians: Historical Statistics (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), 26.
12. In 1870, in his annual report, the Victorian Inspector of Asylums suggested that Yarra Bend, with 1,043 patients, was the eighth largest asylum in the world, after three in England (including Hanwell and Colney Hatch), three in France and one in New York. His calculations were astray, however, as, of the forty-seven county asylums operating in England in 1876, seven had patient populations considerably in excess of 1,000—Colney Hatch being the largest with over 2,000 inmates. Quoted in Bonwick, 46; see also Chris Philo, A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Spaces Reserved for Insanity (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 540–43.
13. In 1871, while those born overseas made up 51 percent of Victoria's population, they formed fully 96 percent of the population of the colony's lunatic asylums whose birthplaces were known. Dr Robert Bowie, medical superintendent of Yarra Bend during 1852–62, was convinced that 'excitement' associated with 'gold mania' was a major cause of Victoria's high rates of insanity. Richard Broome, The Victorians: Arriving (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1984), 126; Catharine Coleborne, Reading 'Madness': Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–88 (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 61, 167.
14. Sylvia Morrissey, "The Asylum and the Community: The Relationship Between Kew Asylum and the Suburb of Kew, 1854–79" (BA Honours thesis, University of Melbourne, 1988), 20. See also A.F. Willingham, "Ginn, Henry (1818–92)," Australian Dictionary of Biography, supplementary vol. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 142–3.
15. For a ground plan of Yarra Bend, see J.S. Kerr, Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Australia's Places of Confinement, 1788–1988 (Sydney: National Trust of Australia, 1988), 83.
16. In the late 1840s former convicts comprised around 25 percent of the adult male population of the Port Phillip district. In its early years not only were some of Yarra Bend's inmates ex-convicts, but so also were a number of its staff; and, indeed, at least one male attendant was an ex-patient. Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–61 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 4; Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 34, 48–9.
17. Janet Millman, in her account of the use of tents, wooden huts, and later brick cottages at Yarra Bend during the 1850s to house a rapidly increasing population, is generally critical of this 'makeshift accommodation,' although she acknowledges that the 'original building at Yarra Bend was already obsolete by December 1849.' Richard Bonwick, on the other hand, adopts a longer-term view of the forced resort at Yarra Bend to tents, huts, and cottages, seeing them as ahead of their time and as anticipating the shift towards cottage and villa type accommodation that was evident, especially in Germany and Austria, in the second half of the nineteenth century. He notes that in 1880 the Victorian branch of the British Medical Association considered Kew inferior to Yarra Bend partly because the latter was employing cottages while the former was not. It was not until 1887 that the first cottages were opened at Kew; they were built specifically to house mentally handicapped patients. Janet Millman, "The Treatment of the Mentally Ill in Victoria, 1850–87: a Study of Official Policy and Institutional Practice" (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1979), 21–4; Bonwick, 36, 49, 53–4, 57, 88–91.
18. Day, 30–31.
19. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 808.
20. Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture, 1660–1815 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 210. For important discussions of the therapeutic nature of asylum architecture, see Jeremy Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England, 1840–1914: Building for Health Care (New York: Mansell, 1991); Andrew Scull, "Moral Architecture: The Victorian Lunatic Asylum," in The Anatomy of Madness, edited by William Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, vol. 1 (London: Tavistock Press, 1984), 213–38; Chris Philo, "'Enough to Drive One Mad': The Organisation of Space in 19th-Century Lunatic Asylums," in The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, edited by Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 258–90; Markus Reuber, "Moral Management and the 'Unseen Eye': Public Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, 1800–45," in Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, edited by Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 208–33; Leslie Topp, James Moran, and Jonathan Andrews, eds, Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
21. 1856–7. Victoria. New Lunatic Asylum: Report on the Proposed New Lunatic Asylum, No.38-a (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1856),1–7. Vivian was referring to: John Conolly, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane (London: Churchill, 1847); William Ellis, A Treatise on the Nature, Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment of Insanity, with Practical Observations on Lunatic Asylums (London: Holdsworth, 1838); and Maximilian Jacobi, On the Construction and Management of Hospitals for the Insane, translated by John Kitching (Germany, 1834; London: Churchill, 1841). Conolly had been physician at Hanwell since 1839, and his ideas informed the design of Colney Hatch, which opened in 1851 and was considered by many at the time to be the most modern asylum in Europe.
22. Paley, who had worked in English asylums since 1853, was recruited directly from England in 1863, with the advice of John Conolly, so that in Victoria he was seen as representing current English thinking. For his less than successful twenty years as Victorian Inspector of Asylums, see Andrew Crowther, "Administration and the Asylum in Victoria, 1860s–80s," in Coleborne and MacKinnon, eds, 86–95.
23. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 809.
24. Morrissey, 32. Whereas the ground plans of asylums followed reasonably consistent models, the actual architectural styles in which the buildings were constructed varied enormously. In England styles included the neo-Classical, neo-Gothic, Italianate, Tudor, and Jacobean, while in the United States asylums 'occupied buildings ranging in style from Greek temples to medieval castles to Arts and Crafts cottages'—not to mention a 'boxy brick' American Colonial building and 'a massive Romanesque pile.' Jeremy Taylor, "The Architect and the Pauper Asylum in Late Nineteenth-Century England: G.T. Hine's 1901 Review of Asylum Space and Planning," in Topp, Moran, and Andrews, eds, 280; Yanni, 1, 14, 31, 36–7, 100, 112, 127.
25. Day, 31–2.
26. Sylvia Morrissey, who includes a copy of the 1856 plan in an appendix to her thesis, claims that this plan was 'retained through the 15-year-period of construction.' See Morrissey, 31. But Kawerau's plan published in Germany in 1867 is significantly different, and it more accurately reflects the finished building.
27. Barry Edginton, "A Space for Moral Management: the York Retreat's Influence on Asylum Design," in Topp, Moran, and Andrews, eds, 85–104.
28. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 813.
29. Vamplew, 11.
30. "Insanity in Victoria," Medical Journal of Australia 1, no.16 (21 April 1917), 345.
31. Catharine Coleborne, "Space, Power and Gender in the Asylum in Victoria, 1850s–70s," in Coleborne and MacKinnon, eds, 49–60. See also Joan Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1996).
32. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 812. For an interesting article that characterises the whole asylum as a metaphorical laundry, especially in a colonial setting, see Sally Schwartz, "The Great Asylum Laundry: Space, Classification and Imperialism in Cape Town," in Topp, Moran, and Andrews, eds, 193–213.
33. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 813. By 1879, according to Dr Paley's annual report, the 'quantity of goods made up and repaired by male patients in the workshops' at Kew was 'not very great,' although the 'returns from the female workrooms' were 'more satisfactory.' 1880. Victoria. Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums on the Hospitals for the Insane for the Year ending 31st December 1879. No. 27 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1880), 22.
34. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 809.
35. Piddock, 102–3.
36. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 810.
37. Burdett, II, 14.
38. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 814
39. Conolly had particularly stressed the need for views and good ventilation (Piddock, 63).
40. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 813–14. A similar method of sinking walls in a ditch had been used at the York Retreat (Edginton, 87).
41. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 808.
42. Ibid., 811.
43. Ibid., 817.
44. Pentridge included a panopticon and used solitary confinement extensively. Peter Lynn and George Armstrong, From Pentonville to Pentridge: a History of Prisons in Victoria (Melbourne: State Library of Victoria, 1996), 47–62.
45. It didn't always happen because, due to overcrowding, the dining hall was at times used as a patient dormitory. As early as 1879, for instance, it was accommodating excess female patients, although Dr Paley noted that in previous years large numbers of patients had attended balls and concerts there. 1880. Victoria. Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums, 20.
46. For the thinking behind the architecture of the prisons being built in Victoria during the 1850s and 1860s, see Kerr, 70–82.
47. Conolly favoured accommodation largely in single rooms, while Jacobi had recommended dormitories, except in the case of very difficult patients. In fact, during the 1860s, there was a move away from single rooms to dormitory-style sleeping accommodation in many new English asylums. Kawerau was therefore presumably aware of contemporary English trends, possibly through information supplied by Paley. See Piddock, 64, 193.
48. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 810. Kawerau explained in detail how difficult patients' single rooms were to be lined with a 'smooth covering of wooden boards' to a height of eight feet (2.4 metres), which he thought preferable to padding.
49. Yanni, 100. For a discussion of some of the implications of these problems for both patients and staff at Kew, see Monk, 154–6.
50. P.M. Prior and D.V. Griffiths, "The Chaplaincy Question: The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Versus the Belfast Lunatic Asylum," Éire-Ireland xxxiii, Nos 2 and 3 (1997): 137–53.
51. Burdett, II, 17–18. After the 1890s, as asylum complexes became more fragmented, debates about the exact location of a chapel were rendered largely obsolete. Taylor, "The Architect and the Pauper Asylum," 277–8.
52. Tensions between Protestants and Catholics were heightened during the 1860s by controversies surrounding the role of religion in education and by the activities of Irish nationalists, culminating in an attempt to assassinate one of Queen Victoria's sons in Sydney in 1868. Clashes between medical staff at Yarra Bend during the early 1860s were clearly accentuated by religious differences. See Margaret M. Pawsey, The Popish Plot: Culture Clashes in Victoria, 1860–63 (Sydney: Studies in the Christian Movement, 1983), 91, 94–6; Patrick O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, 3rd ed. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 102–3, 209–13.
53. "Die Irrenanstalt zu Melbourne," 814.
54. Kawerau, who was born in Prussia about 1818 and trained in Berlin, arrived in Melbourne in 1849. He joined the gold rush, but by 1851 he was in Geelong, where he entered into a partnership with Edward Snell, an engineer and surveyor. They worked on various buildings, including several churches, but in 1854 Kawerau left the partnership and joined the Public Works Department in Melbourne. He had come to Australia with his wife, Maria, and his younger brother, Carl Theodor, but he returned to Germany in 1869 without either and was living in Berlin during the early 1870s. I would like to thank Dr Dolly MacKinnon for supplying me with this information.
55. During the 1870s Young moved his business to Sydney, where he was very successful, playing a major role in the development of the inner city suburb of Annandale. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography blames Kawerau for the problems that occurred at Kew Asylum, although it concedes that Young was 'over-extended' in terms of the number of projects he had taken on during the early 1860s. Robert Johnston and Alan Roberts, "Young, John (1827–1907)," Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 6 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 454–5.
56. 1867. Victoria. Report from the Select Committee on the Lunatic Asylum, Kew, No.26 D (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1867), 12, 24, 36.
57. Ibid., 31–3. Amess served as mayor of Melbourne in 1869–70 and by the 1870s was the city's leading building contractor. J.A. Hone, "Amess, Samuel (1826–98)," Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 3 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 29.
58. For a discussion of how Kew and also Yarra Bend operated during the 1870s, see Coleborne, Reading 'Madness,' 121–41.
59. Manning, 174.
60. Six articles initially appeared in The Argus, between 22 July and 26 August 1876, and were re-published in 'Julian Thomas,' The Vagabond Papers: Sketches of Melbourne Life, in Light and Shade, series 1 (Melbourne: George Robinson, 1877).
61. Ibid., 159.
62. Day, 36–44. For the Zox Commission, see also Coleborne, Reading 'Madness,' 143–61.
63. For a discussion of some of the staffing problems at Kew during this time, see Monk, 202–4.
64. A.R. Urquhart, "Three Australian Asylums," Journal of Mental Science, new series, xxv, no.112 (January 1880): 485–6.
65. Day, 36–7; Burdett, II, 75.
66. Piddock, 97.
67. For the development of asylum cottages and villas in the United States and Europe, see Yanni, 79–104 and Leslie Topp, "The Modern Mental Hospital in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany and Austria: Psychiatric Space and Images of Freedom and Control," in Topp, Moran, and Andrews, eds, 241–61.
68. Sometimes convalescent patients, who needed less intensive supervision, were housed in detached cottages, but often class, gender, or race rather than illness determined the distribution of patients. At Ararat Asylum, for example, two types of cottage were built during the late 1880s: one plain type for 'working patients' and a more ornamented type for middle-class inmates not required to work. In the mid 1880s there were suggestions that Chinese patients at Kew should be 'isolated' from European patients. In an interesting American example, dating from the 1850s, two 'lodges' for black male and female patients were erected close to the main building of a new asylum near Washington, DC, which housed exclusively white patients. See Kerr, 125–6; Coleborne, Reading 'Madness,' 153; Yanni, 69–71.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|