In April 1923 the Sydney Evening News published a story entitled ‘Lunatic Immigrants’ in which it offered a number of significant points regarding border control. The country did not fear the ‘obviously lunatic’, it suggested, but those ill-equipped to ‘battle with Australian conditions’. Immigrants whose insanity rendered them visible were, the writer overstated, ‘promptly detected and returned’. More problematic were those who did not meet the required level of ‘economic efficiency’—the fiscally and behaviourally undesirable types who passed through immigration controls undetected. 1 The same year, Australian Director-General of Medical Services, Sir Neville Howse, similarly linked a lack of productivity in assisted immigrants with their mental fitness. After investigating those who deteriorated after entering the country, Howse concluded that while many had ‘sufficient mental equipment’ to live successfully in quiet English villages, this did not translate to managing the ‘arduous conditions of life in Australia’. 2 On the challenges of identifying such types, Howse conceded that medical examinations were unlikely to prove effective in this regard. 3 Across the Tasman, New Zealand experts agreed that immigrants with ‘a degree of feeblemindedness’ evaded border controls, and would likely continue to do so. Instead they took solace in their geographic isolation, believing it to have a ‘selective influence on quality’. 4
Admitting that it was near-impossible to exclude the ‘mentally inefficient’ followed a half-century’s worth of bureaucratic attempts in these regions to prove otherwise. This book examines the border controls in New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia designed to deal with, in legislative parlance, ‘insane immigrants’. Using a policy versus practice comparison these operational challenges are shown to be more than diagnostic in nature. Legislators had to negotiate a number of commercial and moral dilemmas in their attempts to tighten health-related immigration controls. The temperate Australian colonies, and New Zealand in particular, were imagined as ‘better Britains’ where working families would prosper. Furthermore, as methods of transportation improved, these regions were extolled as invalids’ paradises, where wealthier tourists could recuperate from illness. 5 A paradox is evident throughout each distinct phase of border control considered in this book. Subsequent political administrations accepted the need to exclude the ‘insane’ yet struggled with the ethics and practicalities of rejecting predominately British and Irish immigrants and simultaneously curtailing the all-important tourist trade. Those new arrivals who failed to succeed as good colonists at the furthest reaches of the British world became the antithesis to the ideal white healthy settler. However, despite the view expressed by the writer in the Evening News, ‘detecting and returning’ lunatic immigrants was not so easily done.
In the period examined, the language, methods and location at which a migrant’s mental suitability was checked went through a series of transformations. Concurrently, shipping companies were made increasingly responsible for financially maintaining the ‘insane’ they carried. Migrant recruiters, port officials and ships’ doctors were powerless to prevent those who appeared ‘perfectly sane before they left England’ from travelling. Health and customs officers at the receiving port had to determine the fate of those whose state of mind deteriorated en route. None of these officials were trained, nor equipped to be, psychiatric gatekeepers. Those operating in the port microcosms focussed on balancing the prevention of infectious disease with ensuring that shipping traffic flowed unhindered. Determining the fate of individuals who presented as insane rested more on their likely indigency than intellectualising someone’s predisposition for mental illness.
Studying the origins of those whose state rendered them institutionalised was the realm of asylum officials—a theme which features strongly in the study of migration and insanity. As evident from the titles in this field, historians are often concerned with health and migration from an ethnic, regional or diasporic viewpoint. 6 Much of this work is informed by the richness of asylum records found in a range of geographical regions, in which Australasian locales figure strongly. 7 Such in-depth analysis is made possible due to medical institutions maintaining extensive quantifiable data. 8 In contrast, border health statistics were scant, incomplete and un-standardised.
This book equates the lack of operational visibility with the practical challenges involved. It considers insanity and immigration from the viewpoint of border control, the legalities of which have remained largely under-recognised, or at the very least, under-investigated. 9 After highlighting the need to consider restrictionist health legislation in New Zealand’s immigration history, Angela McCarthy has investigated a number of salient themes. 10 In Migration, Ethnicity and Madness, New Zealand, 1860–1910, she recognises how a number of officials were charged with assessing a person’s mental suitability throughout the overall ‘migration experience’. 11 Additionally, McCarthy discusses the implementation of the 1873 Imbecile Passengers Act and provides some evidence of its contested operations up until the end of the nineteenth century. 12 Others have noted the role of asylum reformers in influencing debates about degeneration and immigration control, Maree Dawson and Catharine Coleborne in particular. 13 While researchers have acknowledged that migrants were not always institutionalised, their studies are, however, foregrounded in the study of the asylum. 14
Beyond the Asylum
This book moves the study of migration and insanity beyond the institutional setting by viewing it through a bureaucratic lens. The need for this fresh approach was emphasised in Marjory Harper’s collection Migration and Mental Health: Past and Present. 15 Using political, procedural and immigration department records, this book unpacks the operational detail of border control. In doing so it accounts for how the policy and practice evolved over a lengthier period than examined elsewhere. The stories of migrants who were not institutionalised are found in administrative or journalistic commentary. This use of this broader evidence base is important. While asylum officials sought to influence practice and nomenclature, standardisation was not pursued at the same pace by border controllers. The dispersed port officials held different skills, priorities and importantly, comprehension, of the terms used to describe the evolving spectrum of mental illnesses and disabilities. The rise of eugenic thinking widened this gulf. In the white settler colonies degeneration became a broad cultural movement because it fed into the concern about public funds supporting the unworthy and incapable. 16 The mentally incapable were not always obvious to port officials, or if their ‘oddness’ singled them out for attention, it was not enough to render them institutionalised. While Australians and New Zealanders actively sought to protect their population from internal and external threats, repelling the latter proved most the most challenging. 17 The Commonwealth of Australia took the lead in legislating against the eugenically undesirable. In both regions, however, border controllers struggled to match the policy’s intended outcome.
Furthermore, regulating migration was not only rooted in colonial ports. This book looks at the dual aspects of border control—the pro-active systematic emigration schemes and the re-active immigration restrictions. These methods created an uneasy balance between attracting the sound-minded and repelling the insane, the use of which fluctuated according to demographic requirements. Immigration statutes were essential to the nation-state building exercises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This legislation and their variants into the 1920s form the cornerstones of this book: New Zealand’s 1873 Imbecile Passengers Act and 1899 Immigration Restriction Act, and the Commonwealth of Australia’s version of the latter enacted in 1901. Across the period surveyed, bureaucrats in both regions faced common setbacks in their attempts to establish and consolidate a robust legal framework. Three key bureaucratic challenges are evident throughout: using repatriation as a form of border control; placating the commercial aspirations of the tourist and shipping operators; and, in an era in which degeneration theories and eugenics came to the fore, how to codify insanity in immigration statutes and their operational provisions. As the details of the immigration cases show, establishing that someone was mentally unsound was subjective. The term insanity was used to refer to ‘unhinged’ or ‘dysfunctional’ behaviour, inherent ‘defects’, and all those who fell in between.
Mapping Border Controls
By foregrounding immigration policy as the main theme, this book examines specifically what Alison Bashford refers to as medico-legal controls. 18 It does so by focussing on their design and results, an approach which, as shown by Jean P. Smith, highlights the broader consequences and conflicts of the intended policy. 19 Analysing these operations means, as Becky Taylor has done with the British 1920 Alien’s Order, considering the dynamics between governmental agencies and the officials who dealt with migrants in person. 20 These encounters were not always transparent, nor captured. In her focus on South African ‘frontier guards’, Rachel K. Bright found these officials to be mainly anonymous, despite holding much discriminatory authority to decide a migrant’s fate. 21 Records are scant, Bright explains, because the specific individuals making decisions were not the focus of the bureaucratic gaze, but instruments of it. 22 The same is true of the Australasian frontier guards, whose actions, but not personal recollections, were recorded in immigration case notes and newspaper accounts.
Furthermore, contact between those deemed undesirable and local officials did not always have a medical context. Other regulatory bodies were involved in the management of disordered individuals, leaving an archival paper trail from which to track their fate. As Will Jackson has pointed out, using non-medical bureaucratic records are essential in this regard. 23 As multiple local authorities attempted to decipher the confused legal framework on a case by case basis migrants were left in limbo, experiencing what Gopalan Balachandran has termed a ‘thwarted arrival’. 24...