Insanity, identity and empire

Immigrants and institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910

Catharine Coleborne

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719087240
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book examines the formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. Taking a large sample of patient records, it pays particular attention to gender, ethnicity and class as categories of analysis, reminding us of the varied journeys of immigrants to the colonies and of how and where they stopped, for different reasons, inside the social institutions of the period. It is about their stories of mobility, how these were told and produced inside institutions for the insane, and how, in the telling, colonial identities were asserted and formed. Having engaged with the structural imperatives of empire and with the varied imperial meanings of gender, sexuality and medicine, historians have considered the movements of travellers, migrants, military bodies and medical personnel, and 'transnational lives'. This book examines an empire-wide discourse of 'madness' as part of this inquiry.

CHAPTER ONE

Insanity in the ‘age of mobility’: Melbourne and Auckland, 1850s–1880s

Picture the city of Melbourne in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Its European character and population had begun to take shape in the 1850s with the Victorian goldrushes, and in subsequent decades there had been further waves of free immigrant settlers. The act of ‘settling’ had been brutal, rapid and charged with the imperial prerogatives for land and the preeminence of white settlement. Aboriginal peoples had to a large extent been forcibly removed from what was the centre of the city, and dispersed to the fringes of the colony of Victoria, but they were still visible in the city and surrounds.¹ The city was in many respects wealthy, promising opportunity, a centre of business, commerce, and a major port, a destination. The wide streets were imposing and gave the city a feeling of grandeur and space, although laneways and dark alleys provided spaces for lurkers and those people with nefarious purposes who were hiding from view. The European population, estimated at more than 200,000 in the 1870s, had swollen quickly from the 1850s, when it was around 20,000, as a result of the goldrushes.² And, as a corollary, it had a population of the needy, as social commentators always noted: there was, in fact, a pronounced and obvious poverty in Melbourne, if you knew where to look beyond the ‘magnificent’ streets described by contemporaries, such as the visiting writer Anthony Trollope, who was impressed by the urban grid and its symmetry.³ While Trollope noticed the Chinese and Irish city quarters, he did not dwell on these in great detail, and the overwhelming impression left by his account of colonial Victoria is his excitement about the energy of colonial mobility, in part because of his own status as a traveller.⁴

Now imagine the New Zealand city of Auckland in the same period. Auckland’s urban population was much smaller: in 1871, while it was not the largest New Zealand city in terms of its population, the province of Auckland boasted more than 62,000 people and in terms of its land mass, took up around one half of the entire North Island, with its boundaries drawn from the Waikato region to the far north.⁵ This population figure, though, excluded Māori.⁶ After the turn of the century the city grew fast, and the total North Island population overtook that of the South Island, with Auckland’s population 103,000 by 1911. The surge in population growth for New Zealand came in the mid-1870s, and specifically to the province of Auckland, with the Pākehā population of the colony increasing from 256,393 to 489,933 between 1871 and 1881.⁷ As the administrative centre of the region, and the seat of provincial government before 1876, Auckland was an important city. As Trollope wrote, Auckland was ‘the leading province’ of New Zealand, and, being an older city than the cities in the South Island, and the place where Europeans had first established significant relationships with local Māori from the 1840s, he regarded it as ‘the representative city of New Zealand’.⁸ It had two harbours and ports, making it accessible to inter-colonial trade and travel. It had its own versions of gold fever in the Thames and Coromandel areas, south east of Auckland, after the mid-1860s, as well as circulating populations of men working as kauri gum diggers in Northland.⁹ As for the city, Trollope wrote, ‘Auckland is redolent of New Zealand. Her streets are still traversed by Maoris and half-castes, and the Pakeha Maori still wanders into town from his distant settlement in quest of tea, sugar, and brandy.’¹⁰ For surgeon John Murray Moore, grateful to New Zealand for the ‘renovation’ of his health, this was a ‘Neapolitan-like city’, a ‘balmy Eden of the South Pacific’.¹¹

In order to understand insanity as one aspect of the imperial age, this chapter takes urban Melbourne and urban Auckland as two sites of imperial and colonial connection. Represented through images of new arrivals, as depicted in Figure 1.1, and busy colonial city streets, as in Figure 1.2, these places signalled adventure, excitement and success. For Trollope, and other writers, these places were imperial possessions, with writers often declaring their lack of doubt that England had a ‘moral right’ over these places, although some writers did doubt the rights of Europeans to assert violent power and take the lands of Indigenous peoples.¹² Their writings were part of the larger discursive process of rendering the colonies as a ‘coherent site’ for imperial readers, despite the apparent ‘instability’ of new colonies for those same audiences.¹³ These were colonial cities, where ships docked, and to which new immigrants flocked, as this chapter explains, but the cities are also situated in this discussion within their wider geographical and cultural locations to show how mobility was experienced across space and beyond urban centres. The colonies had significant rural populations, evidenced by the growth of towns and centres and the spread of the pastoral economy following the goldrush era. There were differences, too, between the colony of Victoria and the province of Auckland, which also highlight the role of geography and place, and the attitudes to place, in colonial invasion and settlement. However, this chapter places particular emphasis on the urban populations of these cities and their hospitals for the insane as institutions, given the metropolitan status of the specific institutions for the insane discussed here, while also suggesting that many people moved in and around the colonies and also spent time in different institutions, highlighting their vulnerability as mobile people as well as the role mobility played in social and institutional formation.

Colonial Victoria and the province of Auckland are brought here into the scholarly framework of the mobile imperial world. Local expressions of mobility shaped reactions to the movement of people, and therefore also formed colonial practices of the regulation of this movement.¹⁴ While Melbourne has been the subject of a vast amount of urban history, and is also more readily compared with other colonial cities in the British Empire, Auckland is not often drawn into this framework, though it can and ought to be. The ‘empire’ is not a single site, but a plurality of spaces and places for investigation, and therefore this chapter moves between cities and rural locations.¹⁵ This chapter also describes the populations of the mobile in these places: immigrants, sojourners, travellers and nomads and finally the immigrant insane.¹⁶

1.1 ‘Emigrants landing at the Queen’s Wharf, Melbourne’

1.2 ‘Queen Street, Auckland’, 3 October 1883

Migrants to colonial Victoria in Australia, and to the province of Auckland in New Zealand, traversed imperial and colonial spaces, including institutional spaces, as they ventured to the growing cities of Melbourne and Auckland from the 1850s (see Map 1.1). Their histories, many evoked in institutional records by the 1870s and the 1880s, provide a clear example of the way notions of ‘mobility’ were formed in the colonial context. While insights into the worlds of immigrants emphasise patterns of familial networks, or the lack thereof, with some exceptions, their very mobility, and the effects of this on their mental health, have not often been examined as a feature of their identities inside the imperial and colonial worlds they occupied during this period.¹⁷ The ‘chaos of humanity’ in early Melbourne matches the chaotic, lonely frontiers of New Zealand.¹⁸ This chaos would be the ‘enemy’ of the ‘ideal society’ imagined for colonial places. Migrants could become dissatisfied and broken by their poor luck.¹⁹

Map 1.1 Map of south-eastern Australia and New Zealand, showing major places mentioned in the text

The region of colonial Victoria is most productively explored alongside other colonies in settler jurisdictions which found their populations swollen after the goldrushes. Victoria, known as Port Phillip before 1851, when several districts were ‘settled’ by squatters and pastoralists, and coastlines exploited by sealers and others, experienced a flow of immigrant populations in the 1850s, which also severely affected the movement and livelihoods of Aboriginal peoples.²⁰

Auckland, meanwhile, was built from 1840 following the Crown purchase of Māori lands. In 1842 the plan of Auckland showed the military, colonial government and its institutions all situated south of Point Britomart around Commercial Bay.²¹ This act of ‘purchase’ came some five years after a failed purchase in colonial Port Phillip, where John Batman attempted to negotiate with local Aboriginal peoples in 1835 and came to an agreement about a land sale which was later disallowed by the Crown, as Batman did not represent Crown government. Nonetheless, in either place, the ‘sale’ of Māori and Aboriginal land was problematic: European entrepreneurs eyed parcels of land keenly and with a view to the later uneven distribution of its resources.

Mobility in the colonies

Forms of imperial mobility, with thousands of hopeful emigrants searching for new worlds beyond their experiences of early nineteenth-century Britain, took shape in the colonies of Australia and New Zealand soon after they became destinations for migration.²² Not only did these factors of a long sea journey and the prospect of a new life drive conceptions of population movement, but also internally colonies were imagining ‘movement’ across space, with migration and its attendant dimensions of seeking rightful places for this new ‘imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Founding Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Insanity, identity and empire
• 1 Insanity in the ‘age of mobility’: Melbourne and Auckland, 1850s–1880s
• 2 Immigrants, mental health and social institutions: Melbourne and Auckland, 1850s–1890s
• 3 Passing through: narrating patient identities in the colonial hospitals for the insane, 1873–1910
• 4 White men and weak masculinity: men in the public asylums, 1860s–1900s
• 5 Insanity and white femininity: women in the public asylums, 1860s–1900s
• 6 The ‘Others’: inscribing difference in colonial institutional settings
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index