Madness in the Family Insanity and Institutions in the
Australasian Colonial World, 18601914
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Also by Catharine Coleborne
READING ‘MADNESS’: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in
Victoria, Australia, 1848–1880
LAW, HISTORY, COLONIALISM: The Reach of Empire (edited with Diane Kirkby)
‘MADNESS’ IN AUSTRALIA: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (edited with
Dolly MacKinnon)
Madness in the Family
Insanity and Institutions in the
Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914
Catharine Coleborne
Associate Professor, University of Waikato, New Zealand
© Catharine Coleborne 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-57807-4
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For my own little family: Craig and Cassidy, with love
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Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Maps x
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 Colonial Psychiatry in the Australasian World 15
Psychiatry in the British colonial world 17
Colonial asylum environments 27
The medical superintendents 31
Patient populations 36
2 Families and the Colonial Hospital System, 1860–1910 43
Insanity and colonial society 44
Families ‘scattered about the colonies’ 51
Heredity and degeneration 54
Families and hospitals for the insane 59
3 Families and the Language of Insanity 65
Popular and expert understandings of madness 69
Marginal notes: family observations in patient case notes 74
Lay descriptions of insanity 76
Expert knowledge 82
First-hand accounts of mental breakdown 84
4 Writing to and from the Asylum 88
Traces of emotion in patient case records 94
Family and patient correspondence 99
The asylum as a ‘theatre of emotions’ for families 102
5 Tracing Families for Maintenance Payments 107
Asylum patient maintenance costs in the colonies,
1860s–1900s 109
Poverty, families and institutions 113
‘Tricks and subterfuges’: deceiving authorities? 116
Family economies: money and emotions 119
vii
viii Contents
6 Porous Boundaries: Families, Patients and Practices
of Extra-Institutional Care 122
Trial leave and leave of absence: institutional practices
across the colonies 124
Boarding-out 137
The After Care Association, New South Wales, 1907 139
7 Conclusion: Families, Insanity and the Archive 143
Exploring the archives 145
Locating families 150
Grappling with archival records: some conclusions 151
Appendix: Indications of Insanity Noted by Family and Friends
of Inmate Prior to Committal 154
Notes 156
Bibliography 196
Index 215
Figures
1.1 The garden, Hospital for the Insane, Gladesville,
W. H. Broadhurst Postcard, c. 1900. Reproduced
with the permission of the Mitchell Library,
State Library of New South Wales, Australia. 28
1.2 The Yarra Bend Asylum for the Insane, Illustrated
Australian News, 23 May 1868, p. 12. Reproduced
with the permission of the Pictures Collection,
State Library of Victoria, Australia. 29
1.3 Avondale Asylum, Auckland, erected 1878, circa
early twentieth century. Reproduced with the permission
of the Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, New Zealand. 30
1.4 Interior of women’s ward, Goodna 1913. Reproduced
courtesy of the State Library of Queensland, Australia,
image no APE-045–0001-0029. 31
3.1 ‘Sacking’ a Wife at Cape Schanck, Police News,
23 June 1877, Reproduced with the
permission of the Rare Books Collection,
State Library of Victoria, Australia. 66
3.2 Proof of His Sanity, cartoon by William Blomfield,
published in the New Zealand Observer and Free Lance,
8 October 1898, p. 3. Reproduced courtesy of the
Alexander Turnbull Library Wellington, New Zealand. 81
4.1 Hospital for the Insane, Gladesville, W. H. Broadhurst
Postcard, c. 1900. Reproduced with the permission
of the Mitchell Library, State Library of
New South Wales, Australia. 93
4.2 Superintendent’s residence, Goodna. Reproduced
courtesy of the State Library of Queensland,
Australia, image no 177592. 104
ix
Maps
1.1 Map of the Australian and New Zealand colonies featuring
main centres and areas mentioned in the text 24
1.2 Map of the Australian and New Zealand colonies
depicting the exchange of knowledge between places 26
x
Tables
1.1 Admissions and readmissions to all asylums in each
colony, c.1905 37
1.2 Admissions and readmissions for each of the four public
asylums, c.1905 37
6.1 Discharge, removal and death from all asylums in each
colony, c.1905 136
6.2 Discharge, removal and death for each of the four
public asylums, c.1905 136
xi
Acknowledgements
I first envisioned this research topic in Melbourne, Australia during
1997, and sketched out a plan for a project about the ‘empire of mad-
ness’; it would be a study of the different experiences of insanity in
colonial contexts, with a specific focus on families and their relation-
ships with institutions. Since then, my understanding of insanity and
families has been transformed and in the course of the research, I have
accrued many personal and scholarly debts to friends, colleagues and
institutional funds. I wish to acknowledge and express my gratitude to
all of them here.
This work would not exist without the Royal Society of New Zealand’s
Marsden Fund. Between 2004 and 2006, I was funded by a Marsden
Fast Start Grant to conduct travel for research, and the award also pro-
vided me with some teaching relief to enable progress on the project,
allowing me to undertake the extensive archival research upon which
this study rests. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University
of Waikato provided additional support for research assistance in this
period. Both funds enabled me to travel to international conferences
to present my preliminary findings. In 2008 I received a Harold White
Stipendiary Fellowship at the National Library of Australia in Canberra
to finish research for the project and continue writing first drafts of
parts of the manuscript. The University of Waikato also granted me two
periods of Study Leave to enable me to continue work on the project in
2005 and 2008.
My Associate Investigator on the project, Dolly MacKinnon, deserves
special comment for her amazing enthusiasm for history writing in
this and other fields of inquiry, and for always providing a burst of
energy and ideas in conversation at the right times. Her own part of
the Marsden project has been to trace the elusive histories of private
institutions in Australia, and her contributions to my part of the project
over time have always been very welcome. She has taken up some of
the aspects of her research in further projects funded by the Australian
Research Council.
Three students produced Masters theses related to this project and were
also funded through the Marsden Fund. Emma Spooner, Jenny Robertson
and Lorelle Burke (now Barry) researched and wrote high-quality and
perceptive studies about insanity and the archive, violence, families
xii
Acknowledgements xiii
and the asylum, and Maori patients and insanity in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Adrienne Hoult also wrote an excellent and important thesis about
intellectual disability at the Tokanui Hospital. Each thesis makes a sig-
nificant contribution to the field in its own right, and while I draw on
the students’ findings in this book, their work deserves separate publica-
tion. They have made enormous contributions to my overall intellectual
framework and its development during the life of the project.
My assiduous research assistants included Thomas Gibbons, who
located a number of the Auckland patient cases for me; Heather Duff,
who conducted preliminary research about colonial families and ill-
ness; and Meg Parsons, who continued valuable research about patient
maintenance payments at Gladesville in Sydney at State Records of New
South Wales. Their contributions have helped me to piece together the
vast range of materials necessary to plot the histories of families in
insanity in the Australasian colonies. Murray Frost conducted extensive
New Zealand newspaper research for me before many of the papers were
digitised for public access.
The staff of many archival repositories, libraries and research institu-
tions assisted me in my research work for this book. Librarians in the
University of Waikato’s New Zealand Collection have always been very
keen to assist my work. I thank the hard-working archivists in all of the
archives used for this study for their help and advice, particularly Emily
Hanna at State Records New South Wales. I also received permission
to publish from these materials and access to some restricted records
in different repositories was granted by various agencies. For their
help in navigating ethics proposals and permissions, I thank Jo-Ann
Priest (Queensland Health, The Park: Centre for Mental Health), Steve
Lewis (Ethics Officer – The Park: Centre for Mental Health) and Simon
Eve-Mcleod (New South Wales Department of Health).
I spent a wonderful research period at the National Library of Australia
in Canberra, 2008. I offer special thanks to Margy Burn, Gianoula
Burns, Russell Latham, Chris Mertin and Dereta Lennon for helping
me with both organisational and research issues. Particular thanks go
to Marie-Louise Ayres, Manuscript Librarian, and her staff, who made
my task so much easier.
Earlier versions of portions of this book were presented to a number
of different audiences, including a meeting of the Royal Australasian
College of Physicians in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, in July
2004; the ‘Medicine at the Border’ Conference, University of Sydney,
July 2004; the European Association for the History of Medicine and
Health/Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference in Paris,
xiv Acknowledgements
France, September 2005; the Australian and New Zealand Society for
the History of Medicine, Auckland, February 2005; the New Zealand
Historical Association Conference, Auckland, 2005; the Australian and
New Zealand Law and History Society Conference, Hobart, December
2007; and the Australian Historical Association Conference, Melbourne,
July 2008.
Two chapters are based on previously published articles. I acknow-
ledge them here: ‘ “His Brain was Wrong, His Mind Astray”: Families and
the Language of Insanity in New South Wales, Queensland and New
Zealand, 1880s–1910’, Journal of Family History (SAGE) 31: 1 (January
2006), pp. 45–65; and ‘Families, Patients and Emotions: Asylums for
the Insane in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, 1880s–1910’, Social
History of Medicine (Oxford University Press) 19: 3 (December 2006), pp.
425–42. Other material has appeared in a different form in ‘Families,
Insanity and the Psychiatric Institution in Australia and New Zealand,
1860 to 1914’, Health and History, 11: 1 (2009), pp. 65–82; and ‘Pursuing
Families for Maintenance Payments to Hospitals for the Insane in
Australia and New Zealand, 1860s–1914’, Australian Historical Studies
(Taylor and Francis), 40: 3 (2009), pp. 308–322.
Special thanks are due to my colleagues in the field of the history of
psychiatry for their ongoing interest in my research: Waltraud Ernst,
Mark Finnane, Stephen Garton, Jacqui Leckie, Jo Melling, Jim Mills,
Thomas Mueller, Andrew Scull, Akihito Suzuki and David Wright. In
Sydney and Canberra, Warwick Anderson, Alison Bashford, Stephen
Garton, Judith Godden, Pat Jalland, Ed McMahon and Hans Pols all
contributed ideas and feedback at different points of my project.
In the Department of History at the University of Waikato, several
people have been supportive of my work over the past few years includ-
ing Jeanine Graham, Anna Green, Janine King, Bronwyn Labrum,
Alicia Lasenby, Nepia Mahuika, Debra Powell and Rowland Weston
have been terrific colleagues, while Nadia Gush assisted with teaching
over summer in 2009, and in particular, James Beattie, Giselle Byrnes,
Peter Gibbons and Rosalind McClean have commented on drafts of my
work. Kirstine Moffatt (English) read an early book proposal for the pro-
ject and offered insightful comments and warm encouragement, and
many useful tips about rewards and treats to spur writing along. Max
Oulten (Cartographer, Geography) provided me with maps for Chapter
1. Aaron Hawthorn handled my requests for IT assistance with ease and
expertise. My friends and colleagues in New Zealand have listened and
helped in different and special ways: thanks to Julie Barbour (and the
‘baby ladies’), Tracy Bowell, Chris Brickell, Linda Bryder, Chris Burke,
