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In January 1878, only weeks after her forced resignation, Gertrude Kenny moved from the colony's capital some thirty miles upriver to New Norfolk, a place familiar to her because of its vicinity to Bushy Park where the Crowthers had spent their holidays with the Blyths. In the last twenty years Gertrude had occupied many spaces: among others a steerage bunk on the Constance; servants' quarters; a bed, perhaps behind a screen, in a nursery; a marital dwelling place in the bush; and a bedroom and sitting room in the Girls' Industrial School. Here, at New Norfolk, a four-roomed cottage and a servant awaited her.

It was high summer when Gertrude Kenny returned to New Norfolk in 1878. She may have come by train and coach but I like to think she loaded her trunk onto the steamer,

Monarch,so that she, like the many day-trippers, could not only enjoy the landscape, but allow the coolness of water and breeze to give her temporary relief from the hot January weather.1 She was headed for a considerable advancement in her career and a salary almost three times the one she had received at the Girls' Industrial School. It was a mark of a change of status, from the equivalent of a senior housekeeper to one of an officer in the public service. The £150 was an acknowledgement of the authority expected in her new position.2 Gertrude Kenny had been appointed Matron of the New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane, commonly referred to as the 'Asylum'.

Like the gaols, the penal stations, the Orphan School and the Hospital, the Asylum was a capillary of the Imperial penal machine and had devolved only recently to the colony. The institution had begun as an invalid hospital fifty years before. Old, maimed, transported convicts, literally those who were configured 'invalids', with the stress on the middle vowel, measured against 'effectives' in a work-dependent penal system, were housed here in a military-type barracks. In 1832 a separate 'madhouse' was constructed on the site. These were bundled both nominally and physically as 'Imperial

1 _{Mercury, 23 January 1878. The Monarch proprietors offered a day trip to New Norfolk in}

addition to their normal services.

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lunatics'.3 In the 1840s, during the campaign to end transportation to the colony, the Asylum had begun to attract attention as a symbol of imperial oppression, a Bastille.4 There were no checks on what went on within its walls. The impetus behind the criticisms had stemmed less from concerns about the opacity of convict treatment at the Asylum, than from the treatment of colonial inmates. Like all the institutions built by the Imperial government, the Asylum was not intended for the use of those who had come free to the colony. But in the absence of a parallel local system, it was to this institution that members of the free population were sent if they were paupers or if their mental illness had become unmanageable at home.5

It was only in 1859, four years after devolution and the establishment of a Board, that the full horror of the institution was brought to light by the Catholic Bishop, the Right Reverend Robert William Willson, newly appointed as one of the Commissioners.6 Willson had spent many years on the board of management of the Nottinghamshire County Asylum and had also run a private asylum in his house. His assessment of the institution of New Norfolk placed it beyond redemption:

To expect that a fair proportion of cures should be affected in such a dismal place, fit only for a prison house for the worst class of felons, would be as unreasonable as to expect grapes on thorns. Gloomy prison yards, gloomy ill ventilated dark cells, (one division of which swarms with vermin, which, from the construction with planks of wood, cannot by any exertions be destroyed), no opportunity of classifying properly those unfortunate beings, the congenital idiot living in the daytime with the recently admitted patient; the noisy and offensive language with the silent, the delicate minded, and the tranquil; the drivelling imbecile with the scrupulously neat of habit and feeling; the violent

3 _{Miranda Morris, Paupers, Invalids and Lunatics, Port Arthur Occasional Paper, forthcoming}

2010.

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An editorial in the Mercury referred to its Bastille-like nature (17 December 1844) and the Colonial Times three years later picked up on this revolutionary language entitling an editorial of its own 'The New Norfolk Bastille' (10 December 1847). It was a term that in England was being used as a call to arms against the punitive workhouses built under the new poor laws (Scull, Andrew, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: madness and society in Britain, 1700-1900, Yale

University Press, New Haven, 2005, p. 332). A riot at the Asylum in 1844 could only be quelled by the intervention of the Chartist Zephaniah Williams, who as a political prisoner was employed as a convict constable. Hobart Town Advertiser, 25 April 1845; Colonial Times, 29 April 1845.

5 _{The financial wrangling between colonial and imperial governments about who qualified for}

Imperial funding, and how much should be paid for those who didn't, continued until well into the 1890s and convict pauper lunatics, in particular, were shunted between asylums at Port Arthur, Saltwater River, New Norfolk and Cascades.

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and morose with the timid and retiring, – are some of the evils which exist at this moment at New Norfolk.7

He pleaded that a new hospital for the insane should be built closer to Hobart, and designed according to the latest principles of humane treatment. But his fellow

commissioners, signatories of the majority report, had seen no need for such an outlay: It must be borne in mind that a large majority of patients heretofore confined in the Asylum have been of a convict class, the offspring of diseased parents, inheriting in very many cases a defective intellect, brought up from the earliest childhood in misery and vice, and leading in after years a life of sensual

debauchery and crime, resulting in enfeeblement alike of body and mind – a more hopeless class of subjects it would be almost impossible to collect together in one Institution. 8

Within Bishop Willson's criticisms lay the – by this time commonplace – assumption that, in contrast to the chaos of Bedlam, inmates, increasingly reconfigured as patients, should be categorised. At the New Norfolk Asylum, the initial determinant was that of inclusion and exclusion: imperial convicts were accepted and free colonials were not; invalids were accepted, effectives were not; - within the institution the only division was according to gender. As early as 1836, when the establishment was housing people with both mental and physical ailments, Dr Robert Officer, then Imperial Medical Officer for the district, was concerned that the crowdedness of the establishment meant that the inmates were mixed together 'without the least regard to the nature of their

7

Willson to Colonial Secretary, 8 March 1859, quoted in Gowlland, p. 53.

8 _{Tasmania. Legislative Council, 'Report of the Joint Committee on the Accommodation and Site}

of the Hospital for the Insane, New Norfolk', LCJ, 1859/32. Bishop Willson, apart from his twelve years on the board of the Nottinghamshire Asylum, was also an 'honorary member of a Voluntary Association, consisting of the Heads of Public Asylums in England, which met each year to investigate the best modes of improving the management of the Insane' (The Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, founded 1841, see Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, p. 232). Willson had visited the main institutions in France and Belgium, and also Austria and Italy (TLCJ, 1859/32, p. 10). The Director of Public Works, William Rose Falconer, had knowledge of asylums in Glasgow, Québec and Toronto (ibid., p. 12). Mr Service, an officer in the Comptroller-General's Department, had been the foreman of the therapeutic carpenters shop at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum where Dr Connelly revolutionised the treatment of the insane (ibid., p. 16). Henry Hunter, the architect, produced a sketch of the county asylum at Carlisle, currently being erected on the 'modern improved system', and had also examined the plans of the Essex Asylum which had been featured in The Builder (ibid., p. 17). The image in The Builder, 16 May 1857, is reproduced in Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, p. 283.

malady, or their varied constitution of mind'. Domestic comfort was, he wrote, 'a most necessary part in their treatment'.9

But the categorisation that most recently occupied the energies of those who had agitated against Imperial opacity was that of social class. Their concern had not been for all free settlers, but for those described as being from the 'upper ranks'. As Dr Officer put it: 'the richer classes of society should be provided for separately from those of a lower condition'.10 Minimal outlay was expended on the structures housing the convicts and the poor; the first new building to be ratified by the colonial government was a 'gentlemen's cottage', with its own 'pleasure garden' (as opposed to the airing yards provided for the general patients). The intention, although imperfectly realised at this point, was that there would be separate catering for the gentlemen which would, according to William Rose Falconer, be 'more like that of a private family.' 11

The concern for classification was focused initially quite clearly on the male division. Apart from the gentlemen's cottage there were three categories in 1859, classed by degrees of violence; to which was added, in 1871, a house for 'idiot boys'.12 The priority given to this last category may have been a response to the sexual vulnerability of these boys, especially considering the profile given to male to male rape in the anti-

transportation debate. On the female side, Falconer countered, there were only two classes, 'the outrageous Patients are in one part and all the rest in another, including Idiots, and those of different ranks of society'.13 Although he does not mention them, to

9

Dr Officer to Colonial Surgeon Scott, 27 June 1836, in Gowlland, p. 26.

10 _{TLCJ, 1859/32, p. 18.} 11

TLCJ, 1859/32, p. 12. This innovation appears more closely aligned with a French than an English model. In England the upper classes were housed in private establishments quite separate from the pauper asylums. (Scull, The Most Solitary..., 293, 356). In France

entrepreneurial Asylum keepers created microcosms of the outside world, providing a 'petit château' for the bourgeoisie, and creating what was called a 'colony' of pauper lunatics who were put to 'therapeutic' work as servants and farm labourers. (Foucault, Michel, Psychiatric Parlour: lectures at the College de France, 1973-74, Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 126). Foucault argues that this was driven by a lucrative economic imperative, wherein asylum keepers were both paid by the rich for their accommodation and care, and by the state which paid for the paupers. In Tasmania, though, the provision of separate accommodation and care for the so-called upper ranks within the grounds of the public asylum was, I believe, a combination of a pragmatic response to a colony too small for a private institution, and the class sensibility of those making the decisions.

12

TLCJ, 1859/32, p. 12; TLCJ, 'Hospital for the Insane, New Norfolk; appointment of Assistant Medical Officer', LCJ, 1877/40, p. 1; Tasmania. House of Assembly, 'Hospital for the Insane, New Norfolk; report for 1877', THAJ, 1878/6, p. 1.

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these need to be added the infants and small children who came to the Asylum with their mothers, or were born after their mothers' admission.

Willson was no longer on the Board when Gertrude Kenny's appointment was decided by the Commissioners, but several of the men were known to her. William Tarleton was the Police Magistrate who had heard her case against Major Cotton in 1859; He had chaired (and adjourned) the inquiry into the mutilation of William Lanne; and as Commissioner of Charities he had commended Gertrude for the efficiency with which she had run the Industrial School. Commissioners Dr Butler (MHA and Speaker) and Dr Agnew (MLC) had both been on the Committee of the Servants' Home. Dr Butler was the man who had offered to take on Bingham Crowther as a pupil when his father had been ousted as Honorary Surgeon from the Hospital, but who had also refused to sign William Crowther's application for a Fellowship to the Royal College of Surgeons. Recently Butler had provided medical care to Truganini until her death. Agnew, who had competed with Dr Crowther over William Lanne's remains, was now in the process of trying to obtain those of Truganini. His wife had been involved with the Girls' Industrial School until her death in 1868, and Dr Agnew had become involved again during the period that Victoire Crowther was not President. It was he Gertrude had to thank for the cow donated to the institution. The current President of the Board of Commissioners was Dr, now Sir, Robert Officer, who lived at nearby Hallgreen, and who had by now been involved with the asylum for over thirty-five years. His wife, Jamima, from her position on the Ladies' Committee of the Industrial School, had supplied Gertrude with one of her character references. 14

I try to imagine Gertrude's arrival at the New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane in January 1878; her entrance through the main gates and then, after passing the Surgeon-

Superintendent's office, being admitted to the Female Division, her new domain, by the gatekeeper Margaret Yeoland, an elderly Irish woman with whom she would have several altercations in the months to come. Her first view would have been of a quadrangle: on her immediate left, the stores – a wing of the old stone barracks; at

14 _{Kenny v. Huston, pp. 19-21. Several Commissioners lived locally: Alexander Riddoch, RM, MHA,}

on what had been the old government farm, now named Turriff Lodge; William H. Jamieson, Warden of New Norfolk and son-in-law of the Surgeon-Superintendent, Dr Huston, who lived at Glen Leith; Councillor Robert Cartwright Read, salmon breeder of Redlands, and Dr John Moore, also a Councillor. In addition there was Frederick Maitland Innes, MLC.

right angles to them the two-storey Female Hospital Ward; at right angles to the Hospital was the long low Refractory Ward, known unceremoniously as 'the cells'. Adjacent to the cells, but separated by its own gardens, was the recently completed Ladies' Cottage. To her immediate right was the outer wall of the Asylum, brick, surmounted by iron railings that allowed a view of the hills, but not a view of Frescati, the house of Dr George Huston, the Surgeon-Superintendent, that was set in its own landscaped seclusion just across the road. In a diagonal line from where Gertrude Kenny entered the Division, sandwiched in the angle between the hospital and the cells, was the Matron's Cottage, her new home.

But, although she may have obtained an impression of the general layout as she entered the Female Division, it is unlikely that it would have been the architecture that most drew her attention. Mrs Kenny's arrival was anticipated, she herself the object of curiosity. Over 120 patients, as well as a contingent of staff, would have been waiting to catch a first glimpse of the woman whose authority had the power to affect their daily lives. Apart from those confined in the cells or too frail to leave their beds, they would variously have pressed their faces against the windows, have pushed forward onto the rails of the verandas and spilled out onto the yard itself. And what Gertrude Kenny would have seen was an as yet indistinguishable group of women, dressed in something akin to prison garb. And even here, in the open air, the stench of unwashed clothing was compounded by soiled bedding laid out around the grounds to dry. It was here in this place and with these women that Gertrude's future lay.15

Nothing could have suppressed the emotionally charged atmosphere. Grief and fear underlay the lives of many of these women and for some there was no escape from it.16

15

Evidence of Martha Laland in Tasmania. Legislative Council, 'Hospital for the Insane, New Norfolk; report of the Select Committee', TLCJ, 1883/12, p. 46.

16

The words that both enable and mediate our imagining of these women are inscribed in the asylum case books. The process by which a woman was admitted included, for the most part, required certificates from two medical practitioners, or a court order (22 Victoria, No 23. An Act for the Regulation of the Care and Treatment of the Insane, Section 16). All citations in the following section, unless otherwise indicated, are from the case books. Admissions are

chronological and continuity indicated by folio number. Each volume is indexed but the volume numbers are not consistent with the archival referencing: AOT Royal Derwent Hospital, HSD 246 (1841-1854); HSD 52/1/1 (1854-1858); HSD 52/1/2 (1863-1872); AB 365/1/1 (1872-1881). These descriptions of the person and their observed malady were transcribed when they first arrived, and then augmented by the Surgeon-Superintendent. They were seldom elaborated in any detail during the period of incarceration. 'As above' is often the only monthly entry over several years and the main interruptions to this pattern are of physical ailments. The greatest attention after the initial entry was paid at the end with the details of the post-mortem. This final attention was not only about accountability, but also a way of strengthening medical monopoly over the

Helen Hadfield had a wild and frightened expression. Charlotte Graham cried and fretted 'without reason'. Catherine Mulvaney laughed and cried 'without cause'. Ann Morrison 'constantly cried', and was frightened by imaginary people. Jane Campbell thought her children had been destroyed. Margaret McCarthy suffered 'unreasonable grief' for the death of her sister; blaming herself, dreading the arrival of constables to arrest her for neglect, and knowing 'that after death she would be punished by being put into a great fire'. Amelia Patterson believed she would be crucified. Mary Jane Thomas believed one person wanted to put her down a well, another to chop her head off, and a third to drown her. Margaret Lewis was sure her husband was putting poison in her food. Catherine Landrigan said the chaplain put rats in her tea. Ellen Jackson and Ann Mackay, too, believed their lives were threatened by those around them. Catherine Baker feared not only people, but also animals, were attempting to murder her, and