Dolly MacKinnon

Psychiatry and its institutions in Australia and New Zealand: An overview

In 1988, historianNancy Tomesmapped out a history of the Anglo-American asylum. She began by commenting that debate in the present era around the mental hospital, including decades of institutional closures, had led to a series of historical expositions of the nineteenth-century asylum (Tomes, 1988: p. 3). Some years later, historians are experiencing a renewed engagement with these questions, but from some different parts of the world, and from new perspectives. This article seeks to place the histories of psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand within the broad parameters of a postcolonial approach to mental health care provision. By ‘postcolonial’ we mean to interrogate the relationship between the beginnings of the psychiatric institution in former English settler colonies which made transitions to nationhood in the early part of the twentieth century, and the late twentieth-century system ofmental health care. We also comment upon contemporary postcolonial health care practices around mental health. We focus on sketching the chronological development of psychiatry in both places, but also introduce the themes of settler colonialism and psychiatry; indigenous peoples and institutions; mental hygiene and immigration; twentieth-century psychiatry; and institutional closures. This critical overview touches on new and emerging scholarship in the field and draws upon a range of existing histories of psychiatry and its institutions. Historians agree that psychiatric treatment as it developed in Australia and New Zealand was largely based on British practices (Kirkby, 1999: p. 198; Brunton, 1996: p. 4) and was part of a wider set of developments in the western or Anglo-American world (Garton, 1988). Yet unlike Britain and America, there was never a strong presence of private institutions in either nation. The colonies were slow to adopt the major reforms of the old world, although the discourse of ‘moral therapy’ crept into asylum practices (Garton, 1988: p. 17). Writing about the shared histories of psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand, historians have found both parallels and sharp distinctions (Cunningham-Dax, 1975; Coleborne, 2001: p. 110). The histories of psychiatry in each country have captured the attention of successive generations of historians with work ranging from institutional and professional histories to social histories of insanity (Brothers, 1964; Brookes & Thomson, 2001; Coleborne & MacKinnon, 2003; Garton, 1988; Lewis, 1988). The postcolonial history of health is still being defined. Warwick Anderson has recently provided a cogent description of the postcolonial history of medicine (Anderson, 2004). His insistence on moving beyond ‘national’ frameworks is addressed here by our pairing of two places which began life as multiple colonies. Extrapolating from Anderson, a postcolonial history most certainly involves an awareness of both the historical context of imperialism and colonisation, the tensions around any claim of ‘decolonisation’ in the case of white settler states, and the experiences of indigenous peoples in the present, including their negotiations with dominant health care provisions and their own strategies for health and well-being. In particular, it might address historical explanations for the poor state of indigenous health, ‘widely attributed to colonisation and its manifestations’ (Kowal & Paridies, 2005: p. 1347). In the case of former settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand, some attention to the historical experiences of newcomers or immigrants is also important. As Anderson writes, historians have paid attention to the way that cultural concepts of hygiene have been instrumental in the ‘disciplining, and even

Music, madness and the body: symptom and cure.

Building on Sander L. Gilmans exemplary work on images of madness and the body, this article examines images of music, madness and the body by discussing the persistent cultural beliefs stemming from Classical Antiquity that underpin music as medicinal. These images reflect the body engaged in therapeutic musical activities, as well as musical sounds forming part of the evidence of the mental diagnostic state of a patient in case records. The historiography of music as medicinal has been overlooked in the history of psychiatry. This article provides a brief background to the cultural beliefs that underlie examples of music as both symptom and cure in 19th- and 20th-century asylum records in Australia, Britain, Europe and North America.

‘That brave company of shadows’: gender, national identity, and the formation of children's British history in Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time

Alison Uttleys classic childrens novel, A Traveller in Time (1939), is the story of Penelope Taberners time travel back to the Protestant England of Elizabeth I and into the Catholic household of Anthony Babington, who is determined to rescue the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.1 This article analyses this overlooked work, and demonstrates how Uttley—using the past as a mirror for her present—offers children a complex anti-Whig historical narrative driven by issues of gender. Uttley challenged the masculine Whig tradition of British history through the genre of childrens historical fiction. This analysis redresses her absence from the existing historiography.

‘Jangled the belles, and with fearefull outcry, raysed the secure inhabitants’*: emotion, memory and storm surges in the early modern East Anglian landscape

The history of the disasters of sea inundation along the North Sea coastline and the pivotal role the emotion of fear plays in early modern life has not been a focus in and of itself. Using evidence from the landscape, place names, manorial archives, personal accounts, printed pamphlets and depictions of flooding, I demonstrate how fecundity, flood and fear are interconnected and embedded in the emotional repertoire of North Sea communities as an ongoing reality. Pushing the historiographical interrogation of the landscape further, I analyse the importance of the relationship between the coastline, sea and the emotion of fear that sculpts that landscape in different ways in response to inundations in low-lying early modern East Anglian and Dutch coastal communities.