Wolston Park Hospital, 1865–2001
A Retrospect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600004761Keywords:
Wolston Park Hospital, 1865–2001, asylum, Aboriginal people, immigrant settlersAbstract
We know about the first day at Wolston Park from a report in the Brisbane Courier of 1865. On 12 January of that year, seven prison warders (two of them women) and ten police constables escorted 57 male and twelve female lunatics from Brisbane Gaol ‘to the new Asylum at Woogaroo’. Since 1859, Queensland's insane had no longer been sent to Sydney, but were lodged instead at the Brisbane Gaol. Now the asylum was ready, its residents were loaded into cabs and taken down to the river. There they boarded a steamer named Settler and were conveyed down the river to the landing point near Woogaroo Creek. The name of the asylum hinted at the reality that this was Aboriginal land: the word Woogaroo, so it was remembered in the 1930s, being a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning ‘to step over a person lying down’. Aboriginal people would be among the earliest inhabitants of the asylum, but not in great numbers. Instead, the institution was rapidly filled from its earliest days with the immigrant settlers who made up most of the colony's growing population.
References
Annual Report, 1935–36, 51.
Brisbane Courier, 9 February 1864: Queensland Legislative Assembly Papers, 1867, ‘Lunatic Asylum Woogaroo’, 22.
For other accounts of the development of the asylum and hospital, see R. Evans, Charitable Institutions of the Queensland Government to 1919, Brisbane, unpublished MA thesis, University of Queensland, 1969: Queensland Heritage Register, ‘Wolston Park Hospital Complex’, 2006, retrieved 18 December 2007 from www.epa.qld.gov.au/projects/heritage/indes.cgi?place=600340&back=1.
Circular from Secretary of State for Colonies, 14 January 1864 — Colonial Hospitals and Lunatic Asylums’ EXE/E10, 64/37, Queensland State Archives (QSA).
Executive Council Minute 13 August 1864, EXE/E10, 64/37, QSA,
For a detailed account of the history of the site and its buildings, see Queensland Heritage Register, ‘Wolston Park Hospital Complex’.
Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 14 October 1938, 941 (Mr Maher, MLA, West Moreton).
Queensland State Archives (QSA), EXE/E 10, Executive Council minute, 13 August 1864.
There is now a large international literature on the history of the asylum. For Australia, see especially Evans, Charitable Institutions of the Queensland Government; Garton, S., Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales 1880–1940 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1988); Lewis, M.J., Managing Madness: Psychiatry and Society in Australia 1788–1980 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988): C. Coleborne, Reading ‘Madness’: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1880 (Perth: Network Books, 2007). For a recent collection of international studies, see D. Wright and R. Porter, The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2003)
Annual Report, 1889, 1. The Annual Reports were published in the Parliamentary Papers of Queensland — their titles vary over the years.
See also Finnane, M., ‘The Ruly and the Unruly: The Uses of Isolation in the Management of the Insane’, in Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, eds A. Bashford and C. Strange (London: Routledge, 2003), 89–103.
For a different view, emphasising the continuity of public neglect and institutional ill-treatment, see R. Evans, ‘Flickering Insights: The Press, the State and the Asylum and Goodna Mental Hospital, Queensland, 1915', in Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum, eds Coleborne, C. and MacKinnon, D. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003), 97–108.
A/31781, February 1938, QSA.
See Annual Reports, 1908, 2; 1930–31, 7.
Annual Report, 1946–47, 88.
Annual Report, 1960–61, Table LXX.
See Cocks, E., Under Blue Skies: The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability in Western Australia (Joondalup, WA: Centre for Disability Research and Development, Faculty of Health and Human Services, Edith Cowan University, 1996); Wright, D, From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (London: Routledge, 1996)
A/31781, 13, 40, QSA; Annual Report, 1948–49, 94.
A/31781, 26, QSA.
A transition noted by many historians of the era — see, for example, Scull, Andrew, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (London, 1993), Ch. 6; Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1988), Ch. 8.
A/31781, 14, QSA.
Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Management of the Hospital for the Insane, Goodna, 1915, Evidence, qns. 15975, 16082.
A/31781, 37, QSA.
See Annual Report, 1950–51, 70.
For example, Annual Report 1944–45, 41–42.
A/31932/45/11768, 27 August 1945, QSA.
Courier-Mail, 30 May 1949; Courier-Mail, 27 May and 9 April give the background.
Stoller, Alan, Report on Mental Health Facilities and Needs of Australia, Canberra, 1955, 111, 167.
QSA, A/31782.
Annual Report, 1967–68, 43–44.
