Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum

By Catharine Coleborne And Dolly MacKinnon, St Lucia: UQP, 2003, 270 pages, paperback, . Reviewed by Kathryn Ferguson in the October 2003 issue.

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Emerging out of a 1999 conference on the history of medicine, this ground-breaking collection of eighteen essays offer a multidisciplinary range of approaches to the shifting history of the asylum in Australia between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth century. As MacKinnon points out in her introduction, 'Madness' in Australia fully recognises 'madness' or mental ill health as a reality, and is interested in 'the social and institutional responses to this, and in the ways that madness has been discursively defined and constructed' (p 5). To such an end, the contributors variously examine the Australian asylum as soundscape, workplace, logistical administration, architectural artefact, site of abuse and protection, therapy and threat, as memorial to wartime grief, as medical archive, as cultural heritage, as gendered and gendering institution, and as a flawed ideal. Despite the wide diversity of the essays, 'Madness' in Australia does not read as an awkward hotchpotch of isolated compositions, but rather as a coherent disentangling of some of the complex histories and meanings circulating around and throughout the Australian asylum.

Although colonial treatments of 'madness' were founded in British practice, the colonial asylum, particularly New Zealand and Australia's, has largely been elided from international studies. 'Madness' in Australia goes some way in addressing that elision and opening the arena for further studies. Dolly MacKinnon, one of the editors, acknowledges that, despite the scope of the collection, there are no examinations of the experiences of indigenous patients within the asylum, or of mental health nursing, and the collection does not 'cover every geographical corner of the country', but the collection does succeed in its aim to fill 'some of the many spaces yet to be explored in madness in Australia' (p 8).

To simply offer a brief inventory does little justice to the topics that are raised for discussion in the eighteen essays of 'Madness' in Australia. However, some idea of the range of this collection can be garnered from the section titles: 'Australian Trajectories'; 'Gender and Spaces'; 'Administration, Regulation, and Public Scrutiny'; 'Social and Cultural Histories of Madness and The Asylum'; and 'History, Memory and Cultural Heritage'. In the first section, Stephen Garton and Mark Finnane set out a broad historical context of the place of the Australian asylum in both academic and social realities. Garton reminds his readers that the 'history of mental illness and the history of lunatic asylums are not the same thing' (p 11), and goes on to convincingly argue, with a nod to Foucault, why we need a history of the Australian asylum that 'charts the institution as a complex political space of struggle over surveillance and discipline' (p 21). Finnane outlines a brief history of the laws and legalities that surround the acknowledgement of the insane as a distinct population. Originally emerging from an interest in property rights and criminal responsibility in the nineteenth century, laws surrounding the mentally ill are now turning towards advocacy of human rights and how to improve their status and dignity within the scope of a broader society. What is introduced in Garton's and Finnane's essays, and elucidated in the subsequent essays, is recognition of the largely unacknowledged force of the Australian asylum, specifically as an institution, in discussions of the mentally unwell. Not only was the asylum formed and reformed by the discourses of 'madness' that circulated around it, but also the asylum, in many important ways, was and is a shibboleth of those discourses.

In the era of deinstitutionalisation, when many of the asylums of the nineteenth century are being demolished or transformed into condominiums and conference centres, the need for a history of the Australian asylum is pressing. 'Madness' in Australia is a beginning. A landmark publication, this is one of those rare books that are picked up with the intention of reading one or two particular essays, and end up being read in their entirety and inspiring future scholarship.

Citation

• Kathryn Ferguson. 'Review: Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• These essays on the histories of asylum and 'madness' in Australia form the first interdisciplinary collection of its kind in Australia. The book reflects the development of ideas about Australian constructions of 'madness' and ongoing debates about psychiatry and mental health.
  
  Covering the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the essays discuss the history of the asylum system in different colonies; patient histories; cultures of work, gender and 'race' within the asylum; spatial constructions of 'madness'; recreation and therapies used in institutions; medical records; cultural heritage and policy issues in the reuse of former asylum buildings, as well as archives; and the display of psychiatric histories in museums.
  
  Contributions explore the intellectual frameworks offered by archeology, art history, cultural heritage, gender studies, history, legal issues, medical history, occupational therapies, ethics, mental illness and the law, investigative journalism, sexuality, museum studies, and archives and records management. This collection will interest historians and practitioners in the fields of heritage, museum studies, legal history, medical history, psychiatry, medical ethics, cultural studies and beyond.
  
  The perspectives offered in this collection are diverse and groundbreaking at a national and international level of scholarship, reflecting existing research trends as well as new directions in the field.

Visitors' Responses

• Review
  Thanks - it's a very good review - I wanted to point out that the Introduction is written by both Editors!
  Cathy (20/03/1023)

• Ferguson's Review
  An excellent review on a subject that can be challenging to 'unwrap'. Thank you. (20/05/1227)

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