Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand. 1873–1910

Abstract

132 BOOK REVIEWS practice of yi, while acknowledging that it would require retraining of doctors and that it is not scientific in the western sense. Her book is argued in great detail, is provocative, and deserves to take its place in current academic debates about Chinese medicine, its transformation, and the socio-political developments in China that led to this change. ANDREW MURRAY RYDE, NSW Catharine Coleborne. Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand. 1873–1910, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). ISBN: 978-0-7190-8724-0 (HB). B&W illustrations and tables. xiv + 224pp. Consider the challenges of logging the 1897 admission of Jenny Ah Yen who arrives from the Chinese camp on the Castlemaine goldfields at the Yarra Bend Asylum, Melbourne, on one apparently unremarkable day. Jenny’s reputation as a prostitute accompanies her, as does her opium-smoking habit. She is run-down and heavily scarred, both physically and mentally. Her mental history includes a prolonged narcotic addiction and delusional thinking throughout the preceding two months. The official note-taker needs considerable skill in separating the facts about Jenny from the uncertainties that cloud her story, but there are few tools that allow him (or less likely her) to convey any disparities. In the end he writes her age as ‘36’, her religion as ‘Church of England’ and her inconclusive marital status as ‘single?’ Working with the words, punctuation marks, and gaps in Admission Warrants and Case Books is stock in trade for social historian, Catharine Coleborne, and central to Insanity, Identity and Empire. In it, she teases out the content and context of copious records made by colonial police, gaol warders, asylum note-takers, and welfare staff, to derive woven-together identities that are sufficiently elastic as to allow for some interpretation. In the case of Jenny Ah Yen, Coleborne speculates about whether she is a Chinese woman, or a European woman who has taken a Chinese name, and whether she is married or has resumed her single status. Official records about Jenny, together with those of nearly four thousand other patients admitted between 1873 and 1910 to the Yarra Bend Asylum, and to the Auckland Provincial Lunatic Health & History ● 18/2 ● 2016 133 Asylum in New Zealand, provide Coleborne with her chief primary source materials. She has contextualised these patient histories with contemporaneous records of welfare organisations including the Immigrants’Aid Society in Melbourne, the Melbourne City Mission, and the Auckland Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Drawing together these official records, she skilfully derives patterns of patients’ experience in order to explore ideas about how their identities pressed the boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as testing the limits of conformity to social norms and resistance to authority. This record-centred approach features in the last five of the book’s six chapters, having set the scene in the first with an examination of insanity and its institutions in the context of migration to Australasia from the 1850s to the 1880s. It was this period, this ‘age of mobility’, that has given rise to much scholarship about identity formation. In Chapters 2 and 3 she unravels the often travail-ridden histories of immigrants to the Victorian colony and the Auckland province, while Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the construction of gendered identities for the insane. Chapter 6 focuses on the identity formation of ‘others’, the non-white patients in colonial asylums, including Indigenous, Chinese, and so-called ‘half-castes’. While gender was a category that led to strict spatial segregation within institutions, Coleborne finds that the distinctions of class and race floundered to some extent in the face of official conceptions of mental illness. She comments that ‘Public asylums were places where “everyone” admitted was deemed “mad”, so there is also a sense in which these institutions collapsed differences between people, herding them into state care and confinement’(p. 86). Though non-white patients were sometimes identified according to physical characteristics like hair length (such as pigtails) and language, she found little in their records to suggest that European doctors used racial markers to distinguish their mental states from those of other patients. Coleborne also highlights...