Professor Catharine Coleborne

Most investigations of foreign-born migrants emphasize the successful adjustment and settlement of newcomers. Yet suicide, heavy drinking, violence, family separations, and domestic disharmony were but a few of the possible struggles experienced by those who relocated abroad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were among the chief reasons for committal to an asylum. Significant analysis of this problem, addressing the interconnected issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity, has to date received little attention from the scholarly community. This international collection examines the difficulties that migrants faced in adjustment abroad, through a focus on migrants and mobile peoples, issues of ethnicity, and the impact of migration on the mental health of refugees. It further extends the migration paradigm beyond patients to incorporate the international exchange of medical ideas and institutional practices, and the recruitment of a medical workforce. These issues are explored through case studies which utilize different social and cultural historical methods, but with a shared twin purpose: to uncover the related histories of migration, ethnicity, and mental health, and to extend existing scholarly frameworks and findings in this under-developed field of inquiry.

Madness in the Family explores how colonial families coped with insanity through a trans-colonial study of the relationships between families and public colonial hospitals for the insane in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand between 1860 and 1914.

Historians have increasingly come to identify that there was considerable traffic between nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions and the world beyond, with official visitors recording details of their regular forays inside asylum walls, and sometimes family members visiting the institution to check on treatments, patients' progress and welfare. This chapter explores the broad array of experiences of asylum visitors in colonial Australia and New Zealand, focusing on families and their responses to the institution. It draws upon a range of materials to show that visitors found their way inside the hospital for the insane, both in their letters and through their actual physical presence. Through these glimpses, it suggests that the asylum itself should be unsettled as the focus of all the meanings of insanity and its cure.

Australia's European population arrived in 1788, transported from the British Isles to establish New South Wales as a penal colony. In the first few years of settlement, David Collins, legal advocate on the First Fleet and chronicler of the early history of the colonies, commented on the existence of insanity among convicts. Policies, legislation and practices surrounding insanity in the different Australian colonies developed over the next ten decades. Subsequent histories of the insane in nineteenth-century Australia, following the trajectory of British scholarship on asylumdom, have largely been explored through institutional records. Historians have been interested in exploring the broad concept of asylum committals, and have considered the relationships between agencies of the law, including police and the courts, families and asylums. The custodial character of the colonial asylum meant that 'public disturbances' could result in asylum committals, rather than imprisonment, for women and men. Colonial policing practices of detection and surveillance, and the policing of sex and race, were central to the apprehension of lunatics. Families negotiated with the police in many instances, and the police played roles as intermediaries between the asylum and the families of lunatics. This chapter examines the development of policing practices around lunacy and the asylum in the colony of Victoria in the nineteenth century. The history of the asylum in colonial Victoria was not unique, and is usefully compared to the histories of other Australian colonies and also the colony of New Zealand.

This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present.

This article reveals a set of formulations of masculine identity through the fragments of extant casebook evidence from nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions in Victoria, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand. It shows that some patterns in the identification of masculinity and insanity emerge, also highlighting the relevance of individual stories and 'cases' to fully understand how masculine identities were fashioned through medical institutional language.

This article draws on both published and unpublished private family writing to examine how European settler colonial families in southeastern Australia and New Zealand negotiated worlds of sickness and health between 1850 and 1910. It argues that personal writing is a neglected yet rich repository for shedding light on colonial cultures of health across families and households in colonial Australia and New Zealand. In examining challenges to well-being and gendered lay health care practices inside domestic spaces, we glimpse more than worlds of health and treatment. Through their management of health and illness in private domestic spaces, the sense of well-being colonial families created for their members tells us something both about their emotional lives and cultures of colonialism. © 2013 The Author(s).

This article examines how female immigrants were characterised inside the Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne, Victoria (Hospital for the Insane after 1905), once they slipped into the world of the institutionally 'hidden.' Forms of social difference inside colonial institutions for the insane were embedded in patient case records. This article argues that through a closer examination of cases of female immigrants, we might find out more about gender relations in colonial situations. In particular this article returns to ideas about women patients and constructions of these women through case records to uncover new interpretations of this material in the Australasian context. To do this, it sets out specific ways of reading patient cases and teases out the importance of these frameworks for making some kind of synthesis of the ways in which institutionalised people--already at the margins of society--were further marginalised inside institutional populations through specific practices. It examines immigrant women in the hospitals for the insane; the cases of women designated as living so-called 'loose' lives who also ended up inside the institution for the insane; and finally concludes with a commentary about the descriptive power of cases and the production of concepts of gender, class, and race difference within their pages.

This article examines Maori patients at the Auckland Mental Hospital between 1860 and 1900. We argue that the patient case notes reveal 'European' categories in which Maori were situated, and demonstrate the extent to which the authorities at the hospital grappled with their appearance, their language and their culture, all of which were elements of their ethnicity. We argue that the use of institutional case records is highly suggestive of some of the historical meanings of insanity for Maori, including the lack of detailed or sustained collection of information about patients' tribal affiliations, the interest shown in their rights to land in maintenance payment inquiries, the experiences of cultural alienation or mate Maori, and the sad outcomes for Maori. © The Author(s) 2011.

International historians have begun to challenge the view that the nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital was a place of horrors and custody, and have shown that families were sometimes intimate with the institutions of the past, often participating in the process of institutional committal. This article explores the state of historical inquiry into families and insanity in Australia and New Zealand. It asserts that by re-examining patient cases we might find fresh insights into the dynamic between families and mental health. Through a close examination of archival sources, the article argues, we can see the presence of families 'inside' the asylum in several ways. Overall, the article suggests that institutional archives present both opportunity and risk for historians intent on discovering 'what happened' to the insane and their families.

Family and friends made descriptions of the behavior of individuals at the time of their committal to institutions for the insane in Australasian colonies, including Gladesville Hospital for the Insane, Sydney, New South Wales; Goodna Hospital for the Insane, near Brisbane in Queensland; and the Auckland Mental Hospital in New Zealand's North Island, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These lay descriptions of insanity, gleaned from those close to patients by doctors during initial interviews at the stage of asylum committal, eventually became marginal notes in clinical patient cases. This article seeks to understand this interplay between lay descriptions by family and friends and the asylum 's use of these descriptions in its profiling and diagnosis of patients. It argues that patient case notes should be reexamined as rich sources of information about families, households, and, most importantly, the language used by ordinary people to describe mental states. © 2006 Sage Publications.

Historians have successfully challenged the social control thesis in relation to nineteenth century insane asylums in many different parts of the world. They have asserted that families were actively involved in committal. Their work has enriched the field, and provided new possibilities for historians researching in asylum archives. Yet despite the very 'emotional' content of these archives, historians have not often specifically examined the question of emotional relationships between the 'mad' and their families. This article examines correspondence and patient case notes, among other archival materials, from four hospitals for the insane in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and New Zealand from the 1880s to 1910. This was a critical period in the development of asylum management, and was also shaped by an emerging discourse of modernity expressed through new prescriptions for family roles. Drawing upon existing historical explorations of similar themes in other contexts, the article demonstrates the potential of this approach, to suggest both new paths for historians of psychiatry, families and the asylum, and to engage with histories of the emotions.

Health psychologists are being challenged by researchers to consider interdisciplinary approaches to health research, particularly around media representations. This article argues that the praxis and research of health psychology might benefit from strategic and interdisciplinary readings of media texts. It argues that insights from current documentary theory are important because they show us how documentary texts are structured and how medical documentary deploys techniques from medicine itself in order to effect certain persuasive discursive shifts in our wider culture. The article takes the BBC documentary series Superhuman as its example and explores this text as it involves media spectacle, medical surveillance of the body and of patients and the positioning of patient narratives of personal experiences with medical intervention. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications.

This article explores the historical meanings of a collection of psychiatric objects on display at the Porirua Hospital Museum, at Porirua, near Wellington, in New Zealand. Founded in 1987 to celebrate the original asylum's centenary, the museum commemorates the history of the institution. Its curators are former psychiatric nursing staff. Visitors to the museum include educators, researchers and members of the psychiatric community. This article asks why some people have preserved the 'relics' of past psychiatry. Such collections and museum exhibitions raise fascinating questions about the 20th-century experience of psychiatric institutions, and the role of the museum collection in people's lives. In talking about why and how former staff have struggled to preserve their private memories through collections of physical objects, and by interpreting history inside the space of the museum, the article suggests that historians can make a new contribution to the understandings of psychiatric institutions in histories of 20th-century psychiatry.