'The Mind Is Thoroughly Unhinged': Reading the Auckland Asylum Archive, New Zealand, 1900-1910

Abstract

The very materiality of the 'asylum archive 'contributes to the meanings of the sources that comprise it. In this article I examine two key themes in the interpretation of asylum records: the physical descriptions of patients, which reveal much about discourses of insanity; and the ways in which sounds of the asylum were recorded. Patient records are analysed here as constructions or representations, rather than reflections, of patient identities, uncovering new ways for reading these archival records. Within the cool, air conditioned space of the Auckland branch of the National Archives, and beyond the archive's ordered computer equipment and complex systems of categorisation, lie the stories of those who challenged and deviated from order, calm, and categorisation. The records of patients who were confined in the Auckland Lunatic Asylum between 1900 and 1910 are among the sources held at the archives. The casebooks of the Auckland Asylum contain traces of people during their fleeting, or lengthy, brushes with colonial administration. These casebooks, and the patient identities that they contain, make up an important part of the 'asylum archive.'1 This article examines this archive and patients' collisions with asylum authorities, and seeks to make a contribution to asylum historiography by examining casebooks as archival artefacts. The analysis is centred around three key points. First, the archive deserves consideration as a physical space, and the very materiality of the archive to some extent contributes to the meanings of the sources that are held within it. This point has not been made by many historians in relation to asylum history.2 Second, as historians have already argued, asylum casebooks should be read for their