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Exhibitions Reviews
'No Easy Answer': Displaying Mental Health Histories in Local Museums
| Tokanui: Footprints on the Land. Te Awamutu Museum. 135 Roche Street, Te Awamutu, New Zealand. 1 July- 26 November 2006. Visited 8 November 2006.
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| Tokanui: Footprints on the Land, curated by Stephanie Lambert, was held at Te Awamutu Museum, in the southern Waikato region of the North Island, New Zealand, between July and November of 2006. The exhibit told the story of Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital, a villa-style hospital located on a rural campus near Te Awamutu, which from 1912 until 1998 housed mentally ill, intellectually disabled and neurologically impaired patients. At its largest, in the late 1950s, Tokanui consisted of over 40 buildings accommodating over 1000 patients, and was a significant feature in the community and economy of the surrounding area. |
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Recently, Tokanui has been the subject of a number of studies and projects, including an ongoing oral history project. As the 100th anniversary of Tokanui's opening approaches, work has been started by John Graham of the Waikato District Health Board, in collaboration with the History Department of the University of Waikato and the Te Awamutu Museum, on the production of a written historical record of the Waikato Mental Health Services from 1910 to 2000. Footprints on the Land was one result of this collaborative project. |
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The exhibition consisted of a single, small gallery with material exhibits supported by thematic interpretive panels, a timeline displaying text and images from archival sources, and a collection of recent photographs by Trish Macky, documenting the now unused and deteriorating buildings of Tokanui. A photographic slideshow was projected on one wall and a television played a loop of a short Frontline documentary about the process of deinstitutionalisation and a group of patients who protested the hospital's closure. Two listening posts, playing excerpts from the oral history project interviews, were arranged around the gallery, though these were marred somewhat by poor audio quality. Additionally, the timeline functioned as a notice board, to allow visitors to add their own thoughts and reminiscences, reflecting and contributing to the ongoing nature of the wider Tokanui hospital history project. |
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With armchairs at the listening posts and a seat placed for viewing of the television and timeline, the gallery was arranged to provide 'a space for people to come to terms with the closure, which was still a fairly raw event in many people's minds.'1 This audience was a complex one. It included visitors such as former staff, former patients and local residents, and visitors with more limited knowledge of Tokanui itself or the wider issues surrounding mental health, a category in which Lambert included herself. In this regard the response to the exhibition outstripped the expectations of the curator. While Lambert was new to the museum and area, and 'didn't anticipate the depth of community feeling,' visitor reactions to the exhibition were intense:
many patients and former staff came to visit, often returning several times and staying for a couple of hours. It seemed to be a space where they could review their experiences, revisit the past, and maybe just feel at home.2
Though the reactions to the exhibit were largely positive, staff of Te Awamutu was prepared for negative responses to the exhibition, preparing crisis management measures with the aid of mental health professionals. Fortunately these measures were not required to be used. |
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The exhibit was divided into loosely defined themes, each introduced by wall-mounted text and graphic panels. The introductory panel suggested the nondidactic, broadly accommodating approach taken by the curators, introducing Tokanui to the viewer as 'a home, a refuge, a prison, and a workplace' with a history 'framed by the larger histories of settlement, land usage and mental health.' This panel also acknowledged the subjectivities at work in such histories, themselves 'informed by the memories, impressions, understandings and perceptions of those whose lives it shaped.'3 |
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The 'Old Settlements and New' segment described the acquisition of land for a new asylum to service the Waikato region. This panel reminded the viewer that 'there are local people to whom this is family land, a site where their ancestors extended hospitality' to travellers, and that the land is now the subject of a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal, a significant point to be made in a region saturated with Maori heritage and history, and in a museum which houses some of the most important taonga (treasures) of the Tainui iwi (the Waikato region's primary tribe).4 This panel also gently addressed one of the more enduring and controversial physical legacies of the hospital—the graves of 763 staff and patients, of which just one is marked. |
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The 'Communities' segment described the communities which emerged 'across professional roles, work group assignments, gender, race, family links and type of disability.'5 A bus stop sign represented the hospital's main meeting place—an important landmark in the social as well as institutional landscapes of Tokanui. Strong communities among Maori staff and patients encouraged the development of Te Roopu Awhina o Tokanui, a Maori patient support network, and the Whai Ora Maori mental health unit, whose handwritten 'house rules'—a collective agreement stressing patients' personal rights and responsibilities—were exhibited next to the more traditional doctor's coat and nurse's cape. Tokanui also saw the inclusion of Maori cultural ideas into new, holistic approaches to mental health treatment, as with the Kia Tukua 'therapeutic community,' which welcomed and supported patients of all races and backgrounds. |
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The 'Therapies' segment again demonstrated the curator's frank yet moderate approach. Describing the medicalisation of mental health treatment from a custodial, work-based approach, the text acknowledged the use, and controversial nature, of sedatives and other medications, and insulin- and electro-convulsive shock therapies. This segment addressed such issues with none of the morbidness that is often attached to representations of asylums and their practices. Pharmaceutical objects were displayed, but the most resonant item on display was a child's rocking chair manufactured in a hospital workshop. |
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The final segment, 'Buildings,' alluded to the geographic and architectural codes of the psychiatric hospital, such as the observation slits of acute wards which 'provoke our imagination.'6 A nearby case containing large keys, including the custodian's master key, reminded the viewer of the custodial nature of some of Tokanui's wards and the hierarchies at work within them. The rest of the items in this segment were from the hospital chapel, destroyed by fire in 1993, and alluded to the role of religion in the Tokanui therapeutic community. This segment's interpretive panel included a lament for the current condition of the hospital grounds and buildings, which have been ruined by nature, vandals and military training exercises. Such disrepair and desolation is visible, though not emphasised, in Trish Macky's photographs, which were evocative yet restrained examples of the often macabre 'abandoned asylum' genre of photography. |
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In addition to its value to the study of the provision of mental health care over almost one hundred years, and in particular Maori mental health, Tokanui hospital provides insight into much wider topics, such as patterns of Maori and Pakeha (European) land ownership, acquisition and use; institutional and rural geographies and communities; and public service restructuring. Footprints on the Land successfully accommodated this wide range of historical significance, but due to space and resource restrictions, was limited to doing so in a primarily allusive way, with single items or sentences pointing to significant wider issues. |
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Footprints on the Land was conceptualized with this wide range of significances and subjectivities in mind. The goal of the texts was to
[engage] people with some of the big debates—how the land was appropriated, the position of tangata whenua (Maori), unmarked graves, controversial therapies, work... They aimed to get people thinking for themselves. I hoped people might reach the point I came to—that there is no easy answer to the mental health dilemma. We can only really bear witness to our history.7
Exhibiting Tokanui demanded an accommodating and sensitive approach from the curatorial team, due not only to this abundance of historical meaning, but also the audience's geographical and emotional proximity to the hospital and their diverse, potentially conflicting, perspectives and expectations. Careful writing and exhibiting allowed the multivalence and resonance of the texts and materials in Footprints on the Land to tell multiple stories to a range of closely involved audiences. |
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| MICHAEL HEALY
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| UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO |
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Image 1: Footprints on the Land occupied the central gallery of the Te Awamutu Museum. Textual panels pointed to broadly defined themes, but the uncluttered exhibit layout encouraged a reflective, personal visitor experience. (Photograph courtesy of and used with permission of Stephanie Lambert, Te Awamutu Museum.)
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Image 2: View of the "Communities" and "Therapies" sections, with the photographic slideshow projected above and an audio listening post in the foreground. The "Therapies" section was especially moderate in its approach, with the key exhibit being a child's rocking horse made in a hospital workshop.(Photograph courtesy of and used with permission of Stephanie Lambert, Te Awamutu Museum.)
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Notes
1. Stephanie Lambert to Michael Healy, 25 April 2007, email conversation (hereafter Lambert Email).
2. Lambert Email.
3. Stephanie Lambert, Tokanui Exhibition Blueprint (hereafter Lambert Blueprint), April 2006, Te Awamutu Museum, Te Awamutu, 15.
4. Lambert Blueprint, 15–6.
5. Lambert Blueprint, 17.
6. Lambert Blueprint, 16.
7. Lambert Email.
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