Abstract
As Catharine Coleborne points out in her new book, colonial psychiatry has usually been discussed in the historical literature as a problem arising in the governance of non-white populations in India and Africa. Drawing on the historiographical turn in studies of race and empire towards the problem of ‘whiteness’, she seeks to explore the ways in which the diverse population of asylum inhabitants in the settler colonies of Victoria and New Zealand provoked an uneasiness with the character of developing societies characterized by high levels of immigration and internal mobility. Although it is never entirely clear how disturbing the presence of the immigrant insane was to local societies and politics, or indeed how indifferent, this focus is a stark reminder of the dark, even desperate, side of social life in the colonies.
Coleborne’s analysis draws on a sample of case records drawn from the Yarra Bend (Victoria) and Auckland (New Zealand) asylums, with the demographic characteristics of the sample outlined mainly in Chapter 3. The treatment of a large sample (over 3000 in the Victorian case) as a single data set when it covers in fact some four decades of experience raises questions about the inferences that may be drawn from such data. At the beginning of this period, the adult population in each place was as likely to have been born outside the colony as to be ‘native-born’; but on the eve of World War I this was no longer so. Increasingly, as touched on briefly (pp. 39–43), this transition was reflected in a rising concern about the health status of incoming immigrants, resulting in controls over the entry of those considered of poor quality for new societies. Coleborne’s focus, however, is less on the politics of this health and society question. Rather, her focus is on the social identity of colonial populations in an age of high mobility across the empire, something she picks up again in considering medical debates about the ‘hybrid insane’ (pp. 174–7).
The valuable exploration in Chapter 2 of the intersections of insanity provision and the nugatory welfare systems of colonial cities draws attention to the porous boundaries between these institutions. So this material also reminds us of the vulnerability of those in the fragile colonial economies of Victoria and New Zealand. We still lack conclusive research about the status of subject populations in colonial institutions, but Coleborne notes how rare it was to find Aboriginal inmates in the Victorian institution, in contrast with the more numerous Maori in the much smaller Auckland asylum. The chapters that follow give details of what is known about the asylum population on the basis of the sampled records. The demonstration of great variety within this population is, nevertheless, hampered by questions about the relative population base for the various factors being considered (marital status, birthplace, religion, occupation) as well as the changes over time. Coleborne is on more secure ground in the following chapters when she turns to consider the experience of first men, then women, then colonial ‘others’ – in all cases finding, in the experience of those hospitalized, many examples of the way colonial social life constructed individual identities.
Coleborne’s generous acknowledgement of the now extensive literatures on the history of psychiatry, colonial urban history and the history of the British Empire is reflected in frequent in-text references to and extended footnotes on these works, a tour de force of meticulous scholarship. In my opinion, this comes at some cost to the project of discovering the potential of the archives she has mined. Other stories will be worth developing from this one. An important example might be that of mobility in and out of the asylum. Considering briefly the outcomes of hospital confinement, Coleborne calculates (p. 105) that a third of patients died in the institutions – although her table suggests that the aggregate was closer to a quarter. Importantly, the data suggests that a greater proportion of men than women died in the asylum, and that up to half the women inmates were, in fact, discharged. From this perspective the asylum became, for many patients, some kind of halfway house; we need to know more about those journeys out of the asylum as well as into it–another dimension of mobility. What this might mean for considering whiteness and colonial identity in the age of empire is not immediately clear, but it would certainly be a story that belongs to the world of the asylums whose place in colonial social history Coleborne has been mapping.