Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism: a political history of madness in New South Wales, 1843

Abstract

In a penal colony, replete with anxieties of liberty and mobility, admission to a lunatic asylum carried particular significance. This article takes up the trope of wrongful confinement – the institutionalisation of the sane in institutions for the insane – in order to explore the aims and methods of a new field, the political history of madness. Elsewhere wrongful confinement registered cultural anxieties of the loss of rights and social death, inflected along existing fault lines in the body politic. But in New South Wales, in the immediate aftermath of convict transportation and in the search for responsible government, the prospect of wrongful confinement was used to raise the spectre of colonial despotism. In November 1843 a group of reformers gathered around the Australian newspaper lent their support to a suit brought by Charles Robertson Hyndman against the visiting magistrate and superintendent of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum. Magistrates, lawyers and newly elected politicians, they first had Hyndman freed and then used his case to attack irresponsible power in the colony. A potent metaphor for colonial politics, here wrongful confinement is used to show the potential of the political history of madness.