IMAGE: The image shows a black and white aerial sketch of the ‘Rum Hospital’ along Macquarie Street and near to the Sydney Harbour foreshore. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.cat-vn1405202.
1850–1890 Charity and asylums
The 1850s were a watershed decade for the Australian colonies. The Port Phillip District, renamed Victoria, separated from New South Wales in 1851, and Queensland became a separate colony in 1859. Convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was terminated in 1853 and the colony (which had separated from NSW in 1825) was renamed Tasmania three years later. Each of the colonies, apart from Western Australia, achieved parliamentary government in the 1850s and, though the qualifications for both voting rights and membership of the legislature varied from colony to colony, this meant that each colony began to frame its own legislation. Only Western Australia swam against the tide. Just as convict transportation was ending on the east coast, it began in the west as a means of boosting the meagre labour force and continued until 1868. The Western Australian colony remained small in population in comparison with the other Australian colonies, and continued under the local control of a Governor representing the British Government until 1890, when it, too, finally achieved responsible government.
The discovery of gold, first in New South Wales and then in much larger supply in Victoria, at the beginning of the 1850s affected the colonies in a number of ways, most obviously, by attracting immigrants. Australia’s population rose by about 600 000 during the 1850s to reach over one million by the end of the decade.38 Victoria’s population increased sevenfold and by 1860 45% of Australia’s population lived in that colony.39 Not all of the newcomers to Victoria came from overseas. Many were inter-colonial immigrants. Although the impact of the rushes was greatest in Victoria, where Melbourne was transformed into a city and regional gold mining populations developed, it left its mark on other colonies too, as able-bodied men moved to the goldfields, often leaving wives and children behind. In Tasmania, from which many of the younger, able-bodied ex-convicts fled in search of gold, this created both a shortage of labour and a disproportionately high number of destitute elderly ex-convicts in the Tasmanian population. In other colonies, such as South Australia, the exodus of men to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s threw many women and children into poverty.40
Ideas, attitudes and beliefs
Gold rush immigrants were amongst the most vocal in their demands to democratise land ownership in colonies such as Victoria and New South Wales. From the mid-1850s miners’ associations demanded the government make affordable land available, leading to a series of attempts to legislate for settlement by small farmers in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia in the ensuing years. The philosophy that inspired both the pleas to ‘unlock the land’ and the ensuing legislation was the belief that with a modest landholding and hard work a man could independently support himself and his family. In reality many of those who selected land in the 1860s and 1870s struggled to pay off their selection and to make a go of it on the land.
Major trends and influences of the period
From the 1850s, cities such as Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide grew for reasons other than the increased migration of the gold rush years. As the immigrants of the 1850s settled down and married, the populations of some colonies, particularly Victoria, reflected a rise in the number of children proportionate to the whole population and for the first time in the colonies’ histories population growth was increased more by natural growth than by migration.41
Despite peaks and troughs in economic growth in all colonies, traditionally the period between 1860 and 1890 in Australia has been seen as a long boom of economic growth with relatively low unemployment. This period saw the rise in Australian membership of friendly societies – mutual support societies such as the Australian Natives Association and the Manchester Unity Order of Odd fellows – for those in regular employment who could afford to put away a small sum of money for sickness and funeral insurance, which were popular forms of insurance in Britain.42 However, these societies were of little use to workers who were not in regular and sufficiently paid employment. For many workers, male and female, work could be casualised, seasonal and poorly paid. Much rural work was seasonal and workers in rural industries often returned to cities in search of employment during off-seasons. Women could be especially vulnerable when out of employment.
Many were employed as domestic servants, living in at their place of employment. The loss of a job therefore also implied the loss of accommodation. Women who worked in factories were paid about half the male wage rate.43
Recipients of welfare
The events of the gold rush era exacerbated the growth in the numbers of some of those groups already identified in society as needing assistance in the pre-responsible government days. These included an ageing ex-convict population in some colonies. However the dislocation caused by the gold rushes and fresh waves of immigration also threw into relief new groups perceived to be in need of assistance – deserted and widowed mothers, single women and children. From the 1850s there was a new focus on children in many of the Australian colonies as the proportion of children in the colonial populations grew and all colonies passed legislation to exert greater state control over children in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Immigrants
Developing from immigration depots, where immigrants were housed temporarily on arrival in the colonies, immigrants’ homes, established by both government and private philanthropists, offered not only accommodation, but also sick wards and employment services to immigrants arriving in the colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century. Frequently the immigrants’ depots or homes were created in response to increased migration; sometimes they were established by private societies responding to perceived needs, as Caroline Chisholm had done in the 1840s in Sydney. Thus, although the Western Australian authorities had converted its immigrants’ depot to a poor house for women and children in the 1850s, when immigration to Western Australia began to rise again in the 1880s in the wake of gold discoveries, a new immigrants’ and unemployed women’s home was established in a former barracks in Fremantle.44 The South Australian Destitute Asylum similarly had its beginnings in the facilities offered to immigrants to the colony in the 1840s.
The numbers of immigrants arriving in Victoria in search of gold in the early 1850s prompted the formation of an Immigrants Aid Society by citizens and Christian clergy concerned at the plight of homeless and friendless immigrants, particularly women and their children. The society based its immigrants’ home in a motley array of buildings the Victorian Government was using to accommodate newly arrived immigrants near Princes Bridge on St Kilda Road. The society relied on government funds as well as donations from the public to provide dormitory accommodation, a free dispensary, hospital wards and a school for children on the site. Though it was meant to offer only temporary relief during a crisis, the immigrants’ home became a permanent fixture, changing its name to the Home for Houseless and Destitute Persons in the 1870s.45 It was not until the twentieth century that many of the buildings that comprised the home were demolished, by which time the resident elderly men and women had been moved to a former industrial school in Parkville or to the new benevolent asylum in Cheltenham.46 The Royal Park institution continues to be used for aged health care in the twenty-first century.47
Following its separation from New South Wales in 1859, Queensland’s Government actively sought to encourage migration to the colony over the next three decades.48 Queensland’s coast offered a number of ports at which immigrants could be landed and immigration depots were established in a number of these. Some immigration depots, such as that built at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane in the 1880s to replace an earlier, more rudimentary immigration depot, continued to function as immigration depots until after World War II.49 Less attention was paid to the welfare of the estimated 55 000 South Sea Islanders who were brought to Queensland as indentured labourers to work on cane fields and cotton farms in Queensland.50 Although Queensland legislation in the 1860s attempted to regulate the system of South Sea Islander labour and introduce contracts and wages, the islanders were generally exploited and paid meagre wages.51 Commonwealth legislation, introduced soon after federation at the same time as legislation to ensure a ‘white Australia’, put an end to Pacific Islander immigration and allowed for the deportation of those Pacific Islanders already resident in Australia, though many did remain.52
Most immigrants’ homes and depots operated as employment depots as well as offering temporary accommodation for newly arrived immigrants. In some, however, women who were between employment as domestic servants could find a temporary home. In New South Wales, where Caroline Chisholm had been able to close her Female Immigrants’ Home in 1842, the government opened a new home for female immigrants in 1848, in the former Hyde Park convict barracks. The female immigrants home operated here until the 1880s.
Destitute, invalid and aged
The aged or invalid poor remained a component of the population requiring support in the post-convict era. Indeed, in Tasmania, where transportation had lasted much longer than in other colonies, there was a residue of aged and destitute convicts, ticket of leave holders and Imperial Lunatics’ by the 1860s.53 The solution was to provide institutional, often barracks-style accommodation for these people. Though there were similarities in the solutions each colony offered for the plight of the aged or invalid in the nineteenth century, the differing contexts of each colony inspired some differences. In some colonies, such as Victoria and New South Wales, benevolent societies provided the impetus for the establishment of asylums for the destitute, elderly or invalid, though the NSW Government assumed responsibility for providing for the infirm and destitute in 1862, moving the destitute elderly out of the Benevolent Society’s asylum in George Street, Sydney into separate male and female asylums distant from Sydney at Liverpool, Parramatta and Newington.54 More often, the provision of shelter for the elderly was a government responsibility, acknowledged grudgingly and with no thought of providing for a ‘comfortable old age’.55 Illness and destitution, even in the aged, was regarded by many as brought on by ‘their own folly and criminality’. Yet there was an acknowledgement that ‘however blameable’ these unfortunate people were for their circumstances, ‘they must not be suffered to perish in the streets’.56
Many of the institutions in which the elderly or invalid found themselves initially accommodated a range of people in need of shelter. These included pregnant and deserted women and their children, immigrants who were out of work as well as invalids and the elderly poor. As specialised services were developed for members of many of these groups, benevolent or destitute asylums gradually came to serve only the elderly or invalid by the end of the nineteenth century. Benevolent or destitute asylums were designed to be seen as a last resort for the desperate and, in some colonies, such as South Australia, applicants for relief were first offered work for rations before a place in the asylum, to gauge just how desperate they were. A number of the institutions for the poor begun in the nineteenth century continued to serve as homes for the destitute elderly well into the twentieth century. Similarly, some immigrants’ homes, established to meet the needs of newly arrived and down on their luck immigrants, evolved to eventually cater mainly to the elderly. This was the case with the South Australian Destitute Asylum established by the South Australian Government in 1851 and with the Western Australian immigration home, which gave way to poor houses for men and women.
In 1849 the Melbourne Argus, reporting on the case of a vagrant brought before a magistrate and sent off to the police watch house, noted that ‘[t]he urgent necessity for a Benevolent Asylum in this district is becoming every day more apparent, from the many objects of charity who are almost daily brought before the Police Bench.’57 Vagrant and destitute people, as well as the mentally ill were regularly placed in the watch house by magistrates, there being nowhere else to place them. Victoria had only been settled by Europeans for less than fifteen years when the need for an asylum for the aged and infirm poor was identified. The Victoria Benevolent Society – composed of leading men from Christian denominations represented in Victoria – raised funds and made plans for an asylum, ably assisted by a ladie’s committee. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe was a member of the committee for the asylum and the government granted a ten acre site and was prepared to match donations and subscriptions pound for pound. In 1851 the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum opened in a purpose-built building on a ‘magnificent’ site in North Melbourne. With philanthropic aims, the Victoria Benevolent Society hoped that their asylum would also prevent ‘imposture, fraud and vagrancy’ on the streets of Melbourne and ensure that Melbourne remained a ‘flourishing community’.58 Though gold rush immigration meant that the new benevolent asylum would, in the short term, shelter the mentally ill, orphans, the blind and immigrants, eventually it focussed on the aged poor as had been intended.59 It remained at North Melbourne caring for these people until 1911, when it was transferred to Cheltenham on the southern outskirts of Melbourne and renamed the Kingston Centre. In the late 1850s benevolent asylums were also established in regional goldfields towns such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Beechworth, also operated by committees but receiving supplementary funding from the Victorian Government. The regional benevolent asylums remained in operation as aged care or health services in the 2000s.
Built as a landmark building, the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum proclaimed the city’s philanthropy to visitors arriving in Melbourne from north, south, east and west and was, pleasingly, visible to ships approaching Melbourne from Port Phillip Bay. Other institutions were less publicly visible. Queensland’s colonial government, forced by the rising numbers of benevolent cases occupying a ward in the general hospital in the 1860s to make provision for the destitute aged and invalid, found a solution to the problem by removing them to a former quarantine station on Stradbroke Island off the coast of Queensland. Although the move was meant to be temporary, the Dunwich Benevolent Asylum remained on the island until 1946, accommodating the aged poor, the blind, invalids, the disabled, as well as those suffering chronic disease, such as tuberculosis and leprosy.60 After the passing of the Inebriates Institutions Act 1896, alcoholics were also sent to Dunwich.61 On the island they were out of sight and mind.
South Australia’s Destitute Asylum, established by the government and administered by the Destitute Board, opened in 1852 in former barracks near Government House on Kintore Avenue, Adelaide and catered for more than just the destitute elderly at first. The Destitute Board, appointed by the Governor to oversee both the distribution of outdoor relief and the Destitute Asylum, was composed of representatives of four religious denominations and the manager of the South Australian Company. From the 1860s until 1887, the Destitute Board also had oversight of destitute children. Many applicants for relief from the Destitute Board were paid in rations if they lived in the country or in cash if they were able-bodied men who could work on such government projects as rock-breaking. Those who could not, found a place in the Destitute Asylum which was, over the decades, expanded over several buildings in Kintore Avenue. Life in the Destitute Asylum was well-regulated, with tasks to be completed by inmates and rules prohibiting alcohol, swearing and drunkenness. Residents needed a pass to leave the asylum and were allowed visitors only twice a week. Refusal to work or conversations with the opposite sex were causes for expulsion from the asylum. The Destitute Asylum remained on Kintore Avenue until 1917 when Magill Old Folk’s Home was opened.62
The rules were even more punitive at the ‘poor houses’ established in Western Australia in the 1860s for both women and men. Both ex-convicts and destitute immigrants occupied the first poor house, established in the immigration home on the corner of Pier and Goderich (Murray) Streets in Perth. In 1869, after transportation to Western Australia ceased, the Mt Eliza Convict Depot became the Mt Eliza Poor House for Men. The poor house for men ‘resembled a gaol’ with strict regulations, including the hours set aside for work, little freedom to leave the poor house, and the refusal of any visitors.63 But old and invalid men continued to live in the Mt Eliza poor house, on the shore of the Swan River, until a new Old Men’s Home (later known as Sunset Home) was built at Claremont in 1904. The women of the women’s poor house were moved in 1909 to the old convict-built Fremantle Lunatic Asylum.64
In Tasmania, the New Norfolk Invalid Depot, which had sheltered invalid ex-convicts and free immigrants from 1831, was given over completely to the care of mentally ill patients in 1848. From there the invalid men were pushed from pillar to post in recycled buildings. Most of those forced to leave New Norfolk were moved to a former invalid station at Impression Bay, Port Arthur. Some refused to go to the penal settlement and were left to make their own way in the world.65 But there were still 450 invalids ensconced at Impression Bay by May 1848 and it remained an invalid depot until 1857. An invalid home for women and men was also located at the Cascades former female factory from 1869. A second invalid home for men only was opened at the former Brickfields Hiring Depot at North Hobart.
Between 1874 and 1882 men and women from the Cascades and Brickfields depots were removed to the site of the former Kings Orphan Schools at New Town. Here the numbers of the aged peaked at 550 in the 1890s.66 The New Town site, which became known as St John’s Park, hosted a range of welfare – related agencies including, the boys’ training school, the New Town Infirmary and the offices of the Children of the State Department. During the twentieth century it also housed men and boys with intellectual disabilities. The invalid depot was eventually renamed St John’s Park Nursing Home.
In the north of the colony, the Launceston Invalid Depot opened in old military barracks in 1858 and was supervised by the Superintendent of the Launceston Penal Establishments. The Launceston Benevolent Society took over the management of the depot, renaming it the Launceston Benevolent Asylum in 1895.
It closed in 1912.67
Some aged care facilities were offered by religious institutes. In Melbourne, the Little Sisters of the Poor opened a vast home for the aged poor in Northcote from 1885. Other facilities attempting to offer a dignified and independent old age were provided by private philanthropy. In Victoria the Freemasons opened the first of a number of cottages for aged Freemasons in 1867 in Prahran. Known as the Masonic Charitable Institution, by the twentieth century there were two rows of cottages, a hall and a convalescent home on the site in Prahran.68 The Old Colonists’ Homes in North Fitzroy Victoria were founded by George Coppin and the Old Colonists’ Association in 1870 to provide homes for the necessitous poor, but initially only for those who had arrived in the colony before 1851. Except for the first two cottages, all the cottages in the development were funded by donations from prominent Victorian citizens. Cottages have been added to the complex in every decade since the 1870s, often designed by well-known architects. The Old Colonists’ Homes complex still provides homes for elderly Victorians.69 In South Australia the Adelaide Benevolent and Strangers’ Friend Society – formed in 1849 – did not specifically focus on the elderly, but aimed to build, buy or rent houses for people.70
Children
There had been orphaned or impoverished children in the Australian colonies since first European settlement and Colonial Governors had made various arrangements to care for these children. Those with mothers were often placed with them in gaols or female factories or in destitute asylums. In Tasmania and New South Wales orphan schools had catered for some children. The massive upheaval caused by the gold rushes exposed the plight of women and their children in the 1850s as men deserted families to go gold-seeking, sometimes even leaving them to travel far away to other colonies. In South Australia, in the early 1850s, destitute women and their children came to form a fair proportion of the clients assisted by the Destitute Board in the early 1850s and many children and their mothers were accommodated in the Destitute Asylum.71 In Melbourne, the Immigrants’ Aid Society, formed in 1853, soon found that the majority of those they were assisting at the immigrants’ home were women with children and destitute families.72
The evidence that there were children wandering the streets of Melbourne and Geelong in half-starved condition in the 1850s moved charitable societies to step in and offer care for these children. Almost simultaneously both Catholic and Protestant societies opened orphanages in both Melbourne and Geelong in the mid-1850s.73 The Melbourne Orphan Asylum and the Geelong Orphan Asylum were matched by St Vincent de Paul Orphanage and St Augustine’s Orphanage. Each of these institutions received grants of land and contributions towards the building of the orphanages from the Victorian Government, though government maintenance payments for children were conditional on the raising of equal or greater funds through donations and subscriptions. In New South Wales the Destitute Children’s Society established the Destitute Children’s Asylum at Randwick in 1856.74 The New South Wales Government fully maintained the children in this establishment.75 Queensland and Western Australia did not see their first orphanages opened until the 1860s. The Diamantina Orphanage in Brisbane was opened by a small committee of ladies and rapidly taken over by the Queensland Government in 1866.76 Shortly thereafter, the Sisters of Mercy opened a Catholic orphanage at Nudgee. The pattern was repeated in Western Australia in 1868 with the opening of Anglican and Catholic orphanages.77 For the Catholic Church it was important that Catholic children be raised within the faith of their parents. While some Catholic orphanages were initiated by lay organisations, such as the Friendly Brothers, a lay charitable association, many were opened at the request of local bishops and were staffed by religious sisters (and sometimes religious brothers) notably, the Sisters of Mercy, who had first arrived in Australia in 1846.
As the number of children as a proportion of colonial populations grew in the 1860s, all colonial governments (except Western Australia, which passed legislation in 1874) enacted legislation to exert greater control over them. This legislation would expand the number of residential institutions for children in all the colonies by introducing industrial and reformatory schools. Victoria was the first to move towards establishing industrial and reformatory schools for children judged to be ‘neglected’ or ‘criminal’. These institutions were not designed for orphans. They targeted children who might be tainted by association with thieves, prostitutes or life on the streets, as well as those already being supported in destitute asylums or immigrants’ homes and therefore at risk of becoming adult criminals. Reformatory schools were to hold youths convicted of minor misdemeanours and adolescent girls who were perceived to be in moral danger. The legislation in all colonies made provision for children to be committed to either industrial or reformatory schools (and therefore into the care of the state) via the courts or the police.
Parents could also seek to have their children placed in industrial or reformatory schools if they were ‘uncontrollable’ though they were liable to be charged for their maintenance if they could afford it.
In industrial schools the children were to be trained for future employment and turned into decent, industrious citizens. At a certain age (which ranged from 12 to 14 according to the colony) they would then be placed as apprentices with employers, which invariably meant domestic service for girls and farm work for boys. A number of colonial governments established their own state-run industrial schools and reformatories, as well as licensing charitable, private or religious institutions to accept these children and paying maintenance for them. The children who had been living in the destitute asylums in South Australia and Queensland, and the immigrants’ home in Melbourne were moved from these institutions into industrial schools. Some colonies, such as Tasmania, relied almost totally on licensed organisations to manage the industrial schools and reformatories.
Despite the rhetoric that children would be saved from immoral and ‘vicious’ surroundings by coming under the protection of the colonial government departments administering these Acts, there was evidence that many of the children entering care in these institutions were simply the children of the poor and that many parents, particularly deserted mothers, sought to use the industrial schools for temporary assistance during difficult times.78 More than half of the 486 children admitted to Victorian industrial schools in 1867 had living parents who could not support them.79 Many of these children were the children of widows or deserted mothers, but there was a smaller proportion of children of widowed fathers.
There was little to distinguish industrial schools and orphanages. They were often large, impersonal buildings with little personal space for children. Children slept in large dormitories and days were regimented. Many orphanages of the nineteenth century were constructed as imposing buildings. This was not just as a means of accommodating large numbers of children. Large and imposing buildings were intended to communicate the level of care offered to the children within the orphanage walls. Critics of this method of caring for children, however, labelled it as ‘barracks-style’ accommodation, not conducive to producing model citizens. They argued that children in the care of the state should be ‘boarded out’ or fostered with respectable families, preferably in the fresh air and wholesome surroundings of the countryside. The foster parents would be paid a small subsidy to care for the child.
In South Australia in 1866 Emily Clark suggested to the South Australian Government that it should board out destitute children. In the 1870s boarding out was introduced for children committed to state care in Tasmania and Victoria.80 In Tasmania this meant that the Queen’s Orphanage Schools, which had been established as the King’s Orphanage Schools in 1828, were finally closed, though a number of privately run (Catholic and Protestant) industrial schools and reformatories continued to accept children placed by the government. In Victoria, the introduction of boarding out meant that government-operated industrial schools, which had been overcrowded, unhealthy places, were closed. One, at Royal Park, remained as a receiving depot for children taken into the care of the Department of Neglected Children. New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland introduced boarding out via amended legislation in the 1880s. Nevertheless, a parallel system of religious orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories continued in most of the colonies. The religious sisters and brothers in charge of Catholic orphanages and industrial schools, for instance, particularly opposed boarding out, distrusting the standards of cleanliness, ability to impart a good Catholic upbringing and education and the motives of those people who volunteered to take children, perhaps simply to acquire cheap labour and to access the boarding out payment, however meagre it was, to supplement the family income.
One alternative to both boarding out and congregate-style care was initiated in the 1880s by Dr Arthur Renwick, Chair of the New South Wales State Children’s Relief Board. For those children unsuitable for fostering because of disabilities or diseases, he established cottage homes at Mittagong and Pennant Hills. By 1900 there were about 150 children at Mittagong, housed in about a dozen cottages.81 The Mittagong site eventually became a farm home for New South Wales wards of the state, only closing in 1994.82
Most of the colonies that adopted the boarding out system for children committed to the care of the state relied on voluntary committees of visiting ladies to monitor the children’s welfare within the foster homes. The success of boarding out in Tasmania, however, has been partially ascribed to the fact that the Secretary of the Neglected Children’s Department from the late nineteenth century, Frederick Seager, while also using volunteer visitors, kept a close personal oversight of the children in the department’s care.83 Benevolent administrators of neglected children’s departments in some colonies also began to recognise in the late nineteenth century that poverty alone was causing some families to seek the assistance of the state in supporting their children. In Tasmania, where the Charitable Grants Department was established in the 1870s, the first Administrator of Charitable Grants, William Tarleton, informally provided outdoor relief to families to keep their children with them, even as the boarding out system was developed.84 In the 1890s the New South Wales State Children Relief Act was amended to allow for the payment of boarding out allowance to ‘deserving’ mothers to keep their children with them.85 Informally, in the 1890s, the Victorian Neglected Children’s Department was also offering this form of assistance, which the Melbourne Orphan Asylum had been offering to some mothers since the 1870s.86
Women
Many deserted, widowed or single women had little choice but to commit their children to institutions or to the care of the state if they found themselves without male support or relatives to fall back on.87 The predominant form of paid work for working class women was in domestic service with low rates of pay and, even if they could support themselves through work, mothers often faced the dilemma of how to care for their children while they were at work. Although deserted or widowed women could claim to be deserving of assistance and, in fact, were legally able to apply for maintenance from deserting husbands through the courts, single women had no such safety nets. Two forms of institutions emerged to cater for single women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Servants’ homes, similar to immigrants’ homes, offered temporary refuge for domestic servants between employment and for those newly arrived in the colony. While in some cases governments operated these facilities, as in New South Wales and South Australia, in other colonies voluntary charities initiated servants’ homes. Apart from orphanages, the first privately initiated charity in Western Australia was the servants’ home established by the Ladies’ Friendly Society in St George’s Terrace, Perth in 1851. It was soon taken over by the Western Australian Government and combined with the Female Immigrants’ Home.88 Soon after arriving in Melbourne in 1857 the Sisters of Mercy established a similar home for the ‘protection of young virtuous girls who find themselves unemployed’.89 In Brisbane Lady Bowen, wife of the Governor, together with a committee of both men and women, opened the Brisbane Servants’ Home in Ann Street in 1865.90 Like most such homes, the Brisbane Servants’ Home was intended only for women ‘of good character’ and respectability.91 While their committees of management expected their residents to carry out domestic and laundry work within the institutions, this was framed as a way of training them so as to be better suited to go out into employment. The servants’ homes aimed to prevent women from falling into prostitution, but also to provide a supply of suitable servants for private homes.
Female refuges or rescue homes, on the other hand, aimed at rescuing and reforming women who were judged to have already fallen into sin through prostitution, vagrancy, adultery or through bearing illegitimate children. Through withdrawal from their environments and through hard work and prayer, it was felt that women had a chance to be saved. But female refuges often offered the practical assistance of shelter and food to women, especially single pregnant women, who had nowhere else to go. The first female refuges in Australian colonies were usually established by Protestant committees (though the first in New South Wales was opened by the Catholic Sisters of Charity in 1848) and first emerged in each colony as immigrant populations began to grow. For instance, Melbourne’s first refuge, the Carlton Refuge, was opened by the Anglican Archbishop in 1854 and operated by a private committee. While those of provincial Victorian towns followed in the next decade. Brisbane’s first female refuge, on the other hand, was opened by Ann Drew, initially in her own home in 1870.92
In each of the colonies a parallel system of Catholic rescue homes or ‘Magdalene asylums’, usually on a much larger scale than those opened by Protestant committees, was also established in the nineteenth century. Several of these were operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters. The Convent of the Good Shepherd at Abbotsford was established in 1863 just prior to the passing of the Neglected and Criminal Children’s Act (1864). Under this Act a girls’ industrial school and reformatory were established at the convent, existing alongside the home for penitent women. The scale of the Abbotsford convent, much larger than many of the Protestant refuges that preceded it, perhaps reflects the predominance of Irish women and girls amongst the single female immigrants who arrived in Australia in the nineteenth century.
Female refuges relied predominantly on the commercial laundry work of their residents to support the institutions. For many of the refuges that survived, this laundry work continued into the second half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century the refuges were rigidly run, with strict timetables and they sometimes imposed conditions on the women who entered them. At the Carlton Refuge in Melbourne, for instance, women were expected to stay in the refuge for a full year or risk forfeiting the right to new clothes or being readmitted to the refuge.93 While women who entered the Good Shepherd convents could theoretically leave, the girls committed to the industrial school or reformatory sections of the convent could not do so until they had left the oversight of the government. Many of the early refuges soon began accepting pregnant or recently delivered single women and thus eventually offered some form of temporary shelter for infants as well as for their mothers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century some of these refuges gradually transformed into maternity and babies’ homes, with less punitive regimes for the residents.
Private charity often lay behind the first provision of free hospitals for women. The New South Wales Benevolent Asylum, for instance, reverted to being a lying-in hospital in 1862 after the elderly aged had been moved to government institutions. This became the nucleus of the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington.94 Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital began as the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital in 1856, established by a group of women led by Frances Perry, the wife of the Anglican Archbishop.95 The Brisbane Lying-In Hospital, later renamed the Lady Bowen Hospital in honour of Lady Diamantina Bowen who played a part in the ladies committee that established it, began in 1864.96
People with a mental illness
In the second half of the nineteenth century purpose-built asylums for the mentally ill appeared in all colonies. Britain had passed a Lunacy Act in 1845 which led to the proliferation of asylums for lunatics across the country. At this stage Australia had only one purpose-built lunatic asylum, at Tarban Creek in NSW, to which lunatics form other colonies as well as other districts were transferred if they were not simply kept in gaols with other prisoners. Legislation in the Australian colonies generally ruled that two doctors had to certify that a person was insane before they were committed to an asylum and the same process was needed before the patient could be discharged.
Those lunatic asylums established in the Australian colonies rapidly became full and by the 1860s new asylums were being constructed in some colonies, particularly Victoria, which, by the 1870s had the highest proportion of population judged to be insane.97 This may have been a reflection of Victoria’s higher population compared with other colonies, or perhaps the fact that as more asylums were made available in Victoria people took advantage of them. Legislation governing the committal of lunatics to asylums allowed relatives and friends to take care of those judged to be insane, as an alternative to committal to an asylum, so long as they gave a ‘recognisance’ to vouch for the patient’s ‘peaceable behaviour and safe custody’.98 Perhaps the large numbers of people committed to asylums reflected a dearth of people willing or able to care for relatives afflicted with mental illness. Immigrants were overrepresented in Victoria asylums in the nineteenth century.99 One Inspector of Asylums in Victoria between 1863 and 1883 attributed the ‘more than ordinary amount of insanity’ in Victoria to the conditions of solitude, intemperate drinking habits and ‘sudden reverses of fortune’ experienced particularly by miners.100
Contemporary theories about the best care for the mentally ill in the nineteenth century stressed that the patient should be separated from his or her normal surroundings, thought to be the cause of the mental illness, and given activities to occupy his or her time. With some exceptions, purpose-built asylums in the nineteenth century were placed at some isolation from the general population and set amongst gardens.
Despite the best intentions of many of those interested in the care of the insane, this method of treatment was known as moral therapy.101 The rapid overcrowding of asylums, shortage of money and inadequate numbers of appropriate staff to care for patients meant that those asylums that were built in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century were more like prisons.102 Nevertheless, many of the asylums built in the nineteenth century reflected the prevailing view that patients of different sexes should be separated with dormitories for either sex separated by administration and communal areas.
South Australia’s first lunatic asylum, the Adelaide Asylum, had been erected between 1849 and 1852 in parkland overlooking the Botanic Gardens on North Terrace. When this institution became overcrowded and the locality too busy – by the mid-1860s – a Commission recommended constructing a new asylum modelled on contemporary views of asylum design. Parkside Lunatic Asylum opened in 1870 some four miles from Adelaide. Additions to the asylum in the 1880s reflected the development of the idea of providing ‘cottages’ for the mentally ill – secluded from the main asylum building and offering a more ‘domestic’ space.103 The Parkside Lunatic Asylum site, known after 1967 as Glenside Health Services, continues as a mental health and psychiatric hospital in 2015.
Several new lunatic asylums were built in Victoria in the 1860s and 1870s. The Kew Insane Asylum (later known as Willsmere) sought to supplement the crowded facilities at Yarra Bend Asylum, and was designed to accommodate 600 patients. It was a substantial and elegant complex of buildings, perhaps to indicate the benevolence of the Victorian Government towards the insane. It was located in extensive grounds isolated from the centre of Melbourne. Similar substantial asylums were built in the 1860s in the mining centres of Ararat and Beechworth, and the Industrial School at Sunbury was converted and extended to form an asylum in 1879. Though each of these institutions would undergo name changes and modifications to reflect changing views on the care of the mentally ill, further facilities would be constructed for the care of the mentally ill in Victoria in the twentieth century.
Perhaps reflecting their smaller populations, Western Australia and Queensland were the last colonies to make separate provision for the mentally ill. Western Australia’s first purpose-built lunatic asylum was constructed by convicts at Fremantle. Although ‘lunatics’ had been accommodated with immigrants and the destitute in a former warehouse at Fremantle from 1856, it was not until 1865 that the convict-built Fremantle Lunatic Asylum opened.104 Although it housed both convict and free patients, the British Government financially maintained the asylum at first. The Fremantle Asylum continued to house the mentally ill until 1909, when a new institution was built at Claremont.
The gaol was the home of Queensland’s ‘insane’ people until 1864.105 In that year the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum was established in fairly rudimentary buildings and provided conditions similar to a gaol. There was no hospital on the site, the windows were barred and the patients ‘slept on narrow bed boards on the floor’. Prison warders served as the initial attendants. The asylum was ‘curative in name only’ and its internal operations continued the culture and experience of a penal institution.106
As at many other asylums for the mentally ill in Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the experience of care at Woogaroo (later known as Goodna Asylum, then Goodna Mental Hospital and now the Park Centre for Mental Health) depended on the level of value the colonial government ascribed to it, but also on the management of the asylum. Dr H Byam Ellerton was appointed Medical Superintendent at Goodna and Inspector of Hospitals for the Insane in Queensland in 1909. He was to remain in this position until 1937, instituting changes to bring the asylum more in line with contemporary views of the appropriate care for the mentally ill. Ellerton placed much emphasis on the physical environment at the asylum, not only building more wards, but also replacing wooden fences with wire fences and turning the asylum grounds into gardens.107
In the second half of the nineteenth century a number of efforts were made to provide separate and directed efforts to accommodate and educate disabled children. One aim of these efforts was to ensure that disabled children were trained to live useful lives. The emphasis was on education. One innovation in Victoria in the 1880s was the construction of cottages for the care of intellectually disabled children in the grounds of, but secluded from, the Kew Lunatic Asylum in 1887. Prior to this these children had been housed with mentally ill adults in the asylum. This is thought to be the first time that the intellectually disabled were segregated from the mentally ill in Victorian institutions.108 Though there were high hopes that these children would be educated to be useful to society, subsequent overcrowding and inadequate staffing meant that by the early years of the twentieth century little had been achieved in terms of educating these children and the cottages reverted to being a repository where the children were locked away from society.109 Residential schools for blind and deaf people were established in each of the colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century by private charitable committees. Sometimes these catered for wards of the state as well as privately entered children.110
Aboriginal Australians
Some colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century moved to restrict Aboriginal people to missions and reserves. In Victoria, the Central Board for Aborigines, established in 1860, attempted to confine Aboriginal people to five reserves, some of which were conducted by missionaries. Some of the reserves were self-supporting, though rations were also distributed. Reserves were also established in New South Wales. Christian missionaries were largely responsible for administering South Australia’s Aboriginal reserves, established in the second half of the nineteenth century. They had negligible assistance from the colonial government.111 Not all Aboriginal people within these colonies lived on the reserves. In New South Wales, for instance, in 1880 about 80% of the state’s Aboriginal population supported themselves, largely through participation in the pastoral industry.112 Queensland Aboriginal people were largely confined to missions and reserves in the late nineteenth century.113 The Queensland Industrial and Reformatory Schools legislation of the 1860s sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal families from their families on the grounds of ‘neglect’.114
In the Northern Territory, which was administered by South Australia from 1865, most land had been alienated by pastoralists in the second half of the century and Aboriginal people supported themselves on subsistence wages or rations working on these stations.115 Only one mission, the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission, operated. In Western Australia the New Norcia mission had been established by two Spanish Catholic priests, Dom Jose Benito Serra and Dom Rosendo Salvado in 1847. Salvado, the first priest at New Norcia, established schools for Aboriginal children at the settlement. Elsewhere in Western Australia Aboriginal people worked on pastoral stations in the north of the colony and were increasingly dispossessed of their land in the south. Concern at atrocities committed against Aboriginal people in Western Australia led the British Government to establish an Aborigines Protection Board in 1886.116 The Chief Protector of Aborigines appointed under the legislation attempted to remove Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ children from their families, but, with little legislative power to do so, met with little success until new legislation in 1905 made the Chief Protector of Aborigines the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child under the age of sixteen.117
Providers of welfare
In the 1840s some Australian colonies had passed legislation placing the responsibility for maintaining relatives on family members.118 The NSW Deserted Wives and Children Act (1840) (which covered Queensland and the Port Phillip District) placed the responsibility for wives and children (legitimate or not) on husbands and fathers. The Maintenance Act passed in South Australia in 1843 also placed the responsibility for care of wives and children on husbands and fathers, but extended this responsibility to mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers and children of ‘poor and destitute persons’. The legislation allowed for Justices of the Peace to rule that relatives pay maintenance that they could ‘reasonably afford’.119 This legislation was further strengthened in the second half of the nineteenth century in some colonies. The belief that individuals were responsible for their own and their family’s support and that individuals often brought on their own misery through intemperance, idleness and bad habits underscored much of the thinking of both government and private philanthropists in the second half of the nineteenth century and coloured the ways in which relief from destitution was delivered. The fear of encouraging people to sink into ‘pauperism’ is said to have restrained governments in the Australian colonies from assisting the poor and destitute and instead saw them leaving this work to voluntary societies, which, though motivated by Christian ideas of charity, also employed means to discourage dependence on welfare. But it is not true that governments left the work of caring for those who needed help entirely to philanthropic and charitable organisations. The governments of all the colonies did provide services for the destitute aged, chronically ill, and orphaned and destitute children in the period between 1850 and 1890, though this assistance varied according to the circumstances in each colony. In New South Wales and Victoria much of the work of delivering relief from distress was left to voluntary benevolent societies or religious charities but the work, especially in New South Wales, was subsidised by government grants. In other colonies, such as Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, the state was the major provider of welfare services. This included providing ‘outdoor’ relief, in the form of rations or, as in the case of Tasmania, cash payments for those who ‘deserved’ it, but also ‘institutionalised’ support in immigrants’ homes, orphanages, destitute asylums and, in Western Australia, ‘poor houses’.
Private or philanthropic bestowers of charity also varied in the kind of ‘outdoor’ relief they offered. Crowds of up to 1200 lined up outside the Sydney Benevolent Society to receive weekly food parcels.120 In Victoria visiting societies such as the Melbourne Ladies Benevolent Society, of which there were several branches in the suburbs by the 1880s, used middle class volunteer women to assess the merits of each application for help through home visits. Small amounts of money, food orders for local shops, firewood or sometimes a recommendation for a child to be placed in an orphanage might be the result of one of these visits to a family in distress.121 The St Vincent de Paul Society, a Catholic lay organisation, also used home visits as a method of providing assistance.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century private charities, such as benevolent societies, sometimes followed the lead of the New South Wales Benevolent Society in establishing benevolent asylums for those in need of shelter. Most of these private charitable or benevolent societies operated on a subscription system. In subscribing funds to the society, members were then able to nominate a certain number of recipients to receive assistance from the organisation or be admitted to its institutions. While many of these benevolent societies were non-denominationally based they were underpinned by the Christian convictions of their members. Similarly, in some colonies in the mid to late nineteenth century, Christian values underscored the response by some individuals and emerging city missions to respond to the needs they perceived around them by providing temporary shelter for the homeless or unemployed, free medical treatment for the poor and refuges for women. Increased populations in the second half of the nineteenth century raised the number of adherents to some religions. Methodists, for example, who had formed a small proportion of the population in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled their proportion of the Australian population between 1851 and 1901.122 From the mid-nineteenth century the ability of Catholic bishops to persuade Irish and European religious orders to establish foundations in some of the Australian colonies, and the growth of the Australian-formed Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart enabled the Catholic Church to extend and develop a parallel system of education, welfare and health services in many of the colonies.
Period summary 1850–1890
By the end of the 1850s the colonies of Victoria and Queensland had separated from New South Wales and convict transportation was coming to an end. The discovery of gold caused a massive influx of migrants, with the population reaching over one million by the end of decade.
The massive increase and movements in population during the gold rush saw an increase in the number of those requiring care and a change it how it was provided. The exodus of men to the gold fields left deserted mothers and children dependent on government and charitable welfare at home, while those that travelled to the gold fields required care. New infrastructure was needed to provide
care for migrants. Immigrant’s societies were established and colonial governments built immigration depots where newly arrived migrants were provided accommodation, sick wards and employment services.
The large number of neglected or ‘criminal’ children in Melbourne led to the government establishment of industrial and reform schools. These schools reflected an approach to the care of children which focused on employment readiness and the separation of children from undesirable influences in society. Religious orders established orphanages or homes as places or refuge for women and children. The barracks style of care for children was criticised and an alternative ‘boarding out’ with families was proposed. Boarding out was introduced in the 1870s.
Consequently the institutions that previously housed children in care were closed or given over for the care of the increasing number of mentally ill patients and the aged and infirm, including ex-convict and ticket-of-leave convicts who had no other means of support.
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