Australian Asylums and Their Histories: Introduction

Abstract

Australian Asylums and TheirHistories: Introduction Mark Finnane More than othermodern medical institutionsmental hospitals, where they survive at all, labour under the burdens of their histories. The lunatic asylums of the nineteenth century, the great age of social experiments, survived well past theirfounding conditions of existence tobecome places of acute social conflict by the mid-twentieth century. The generations-long struggle to jettison a shameful and shaming past by emancipating the confined and recognising their citizenship has left the asylums with a very mixed historical legacy. An exhibition held at the Museum ofBrisbane between November 2007 andMarch 2008 was theoccasion for a seminar (sponsored also by the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University) which produced the papers included in this issue of Health and History. 'Remembering Goodna: Stories from a Queensland Mental Hospital' (expertly curated by Jo Besley of theMuseum) explored the history of that state's original asylum, founded almost at the beginning of thecolony ofQueensland's separation fromNew South Wales, and having a continuous history until its formal closure in 2001 (the conclusion of a long transformation discussed inFinnane's paper here). Located at the very heart of the state's metropolis, theMuseum of Brisbane was an appropriate location for such an exhibition, bringing back to the city the stories which ithad literally and metaphorically expelled in 1865. In thatyear the insane confined in Brisbane's gaol were shipped up the river to the new asylum, constructed under the imperial mandate that spawned the colonial institutions of mid-Victorian Empire. Over the four months of the exhibition more than 60,000 visitors encountered not only the archival record of fabric and human stories, but also the video record of vibrant, witty, but frequently painful stories told by those who experienced the recent decades of the hospital?patients, staff, and families. I emphasise this context for the papers presented here. The seminar was primarily intended to provide for a general audience an overview of the rich contributions to the history of asylums and mental hospitals which have been and are continuing tobe made by 6 Health & History, 2009. 11/1 Australian Asylums and Their Histories: Introduction / Australian historians. That context explains themode of address as well as the range of subject matter. In convening the seminar we wished to connect an interested public, which included past and present mental health patients/consumers as well as professional and institutional staff, with the results of the deep inquiries that historians undertake into the origins, functions, rationales, experiences, and memories of institutions like Goodna. We wanted to identify the complexity of those histories which made asylums and their successor hospitals less than theymight have been and also the ways in which theymight from some perspectives have been other than we might expect. A less explicit but tomy mind vital element was to exhibit through the range of papers the variety of sources, methodologies, and perspectives that now characterises work on the history of these institutions. The seminar was focussed explicitly on institutional histories. This was not theplace to explore the histories of madness, or the broadening agenda of the history of psychiatry and mental illness, particularly its very welcome recent directions into noninstitutional experiences and perspectives. Rather, we sought to understand the institution thatembodied for so long the dominant social provision and response tomental illness and intellectual disability. The collection of papers expresses these objectives in a variety of ways. The asylum was an expression of a particular imagination that saw a specific architecture as a desirable framework for accommodating thementally ill.But as Elizabeth Malcolm explores inher study of theKew Asylum the translation of this vision across the seas and in the constrained conditions of a colonial economy diminished the possibilities imagined by the visionaries. In spite of the criticism faced almost de novo by theasylum, it was from thefirst (as Catharine Coleborne shows) not simply a receptacle for people deposited by police but a place towhich individuals were brought by families, an institutionwhose social functions and rationale was shaped by those well beyond itswalls. In a quite differentway the asylum and mental hospitals were shaped by another, and little studied, population?their workforces. The institutionswere labour intensive and...