‘Jingo Dingo insanity’ and Mafeking Day: articulating madness in Federation-era Australia

Abstract

In 1899, the Australian colonies sent military contingents to South Africa to support the British in fighting the Boer enemy. While some questioned the justice of the conflict, the public reaction to the war was akin to a ‘national insanity’. British victories in the first half of the war, particularly the relief of Mafeking in May 1900, saw noisy jingo crowds filling the streets of capital cities in celebration, resulting in public drunkenness and damage to property, behaviour typically deemed ‘mad’. Colonial society, faced with increases in lunacy rates, was not only in the process of comprehending madness, but also ideas about Australian nationalism in the period approaching Federation of 1901. These factors, added to popular involvement in a British war in South Africa, shaped political, police and press responses to the new manifestation of jingoism. The press, a site of both the production and advancement of public conceptions of insanity, drew upon the social language of madness to communicate the acceptability or unacceptability of specific jingoistic behaviour. This paper examines the metaphorical use of mad vocabularies by the colonial press during this period to explore the ‘arbitrary boundary’ between madness and sanity in Federation era Australia.

Keywords:

• Jingoism
• South African war
• madness
• nationalism
• Australia

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Ariel Gallardo for his skilled gathering of relevant primary materials for this article. Thanks also to Professor Catharine Coleborne and Dr James Dunk for the invitation to contribute to this special issue, and their very useful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 John H. M. Abbott, Plain and Veldt: Being Studies, Stories, and Sketches of my Own People, in Peace and at War (London: Methuen, 1903), 29–30.

2 ‘South African War. Patrols Skirmish. A Battle Impending. 300 Boers Killed’, The North Queensland Register, 23 October 1899, 18.

3 John A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 6, 18, 70, 73.

4 Ibid., 6.

5 Hugh Cunningham, ‘Jingoism and the Working Classes 1877-1878’, Bulletin: Society for the Study of Labour History, 19 (1969): 6, 8.

6 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971): 78; George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), 229–30.

7 Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy’, 78.

8 See Charles S. Blackton, ‘Australian Nationality and Nationalism: The Imperial Federationist Interlude, 1885-1901’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, 7, no. 25 (1955): 1–16; Barbara Penny, ‘The Australian Debate on the Boer War’, Historical Studies, 14, no. 56 (1971): 526.

9 ‘A Meeting in Sydney; Broken up by a Crowd’, The Argus, 13 November 1899, 7.

10 Chris Connolly, ‘Clan, Birthplace, Loyalty: Australian Attitudes to the Boer War’, Australian Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (1978): 214.

11 Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy’, 129.

12 Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9.

13 George A. Wood, cited in Ken S. Inglis, ‘The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872–1902’, in Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship, ed. A.F. Madden and W.H. Morris-Jones (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 34.

14 Elizabeth Morrison, ‘Newspapers’, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 470–2.

15 James J. Fenton, Victorian Year-Book, 1895-8 (Melbourne: Robert S. Brain, Government Printer, 1901), 1100.

16 Connolly, ‘Clan, Birthplace, Loyalty’, 210-1.

17 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 58–60.

18 Effie Karageorgos, Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Word from the Battlefield (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 28–9.

19 ‘Mafeking: The Scene in the Streets on Thursday’, The Prahran Telegraph, 26 May 1900, 3.

20 ‘Mafeking Day in Melbourne’, Leader, 25 May 1900, 40. See also, ‘Loyalty and Tyranny’, The Tocsin, 7 June 1900, 4; ‘The Relief of Mafeking: Rejoicings in Melbourne’, Western Champion, 1 June 1900, 4; ‘The Critic’, Truth, 21 October 1900, 1; ‘The City by Night’, The Age, 24 May 1900, 8.

21 ‘Rejoicings in Australia’, South Australian Register, 21 May 1900, 6.

22 ‘The Relief of Mafeking’, The West Australian, 21 May 1900, 5; ‘Mafeking Night: In Sydney’s Streets’, The Grafton Argus and Clarence River General Advertiser, 25 May 1900, 2.

23 Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1988), 37, 101, 123. See also See Brian Draper, ‘Dementia in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Health and History, 23, no. 1 (2021): 38–60.

24 Departure of the Fifth Contingent’, The Argus, 15 February 1901, 15; See also ‘Bystanders Notebook; “Patriotic” Demonstration’, The Worker, 12, no. 564 (1902): 3.

25 ‘Pretoria Day: A Tame Demonstration’, Advertiser, 10 July 1900, 6.

26 ‘Mafeking and Pretoria’, Morning Bulletin, 28 July 1900, 3.

27 ‘Mania for Sport’, Coolgardie Miner, 6 September 1899, 7; ‘Madness of Muscularity’, Mercury, 5 April 1899, 1.

28 ‘Football Barrackers’, Morning Post, 7 June 1899, 7.

29 ‘Melbourne Cup Comments’, Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative, 31 October 1901, 18; ‘The Betting Mania’, Australian Star, 11 March 1902, 4; ‘As Things Strike Me: The Melbourne Cup’, Williamstown Chronicle, 10 November 1899, 2.

30 See ‘Mad Melbourne: Runs Riot on War’, Daily News, 7 August 1914, 8; ‘The War Cloud: The Madness Which is Called Patriotism’, Socialist, 7 August 1914, 3; ‘The Melbourne Mania’, The Grafton Argus and Clarence River General Advertiser, 10 August 1914, 2.

31 ‘War Mad! Some Australians Run Amuck’, Sport, 7 August 1914, 3.

32 ‘War and the Public Hysteria’, Collie Miner, 11 August 1914, 3.

33 Dolly MacKinnon, ‘“Hearing Madness”: The Soundscape of the Asylum’, in ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003), 75; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 145–6; Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873-1910 (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2015), 65–6, 101.

34 Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2013), 53; Christian Borch, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5, 133.

35 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 20.

36 Garton, Medicine and Madness, 47.

37 See, for example, Vic, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Council 24 October 1899; Vic, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 10 January 1900.

38 Vic, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 3 July 1900; See also WA, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 7 June 1900; SA, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Council, 19 June 1900.

39 NSW, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 19 June 1900; See WA, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 7 June 1900.

40 Blackton, ‘Australian Nationality’, 351–2; John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009), 128.

41 See, for example, ‘Reception and Dinner of the Medical Professionals of N.S.W.’, Australian Medical Gazette, 20 May 1901, 203–5; See also C. Reismann, ‘Observations Made on Twenty-One Cases of Gunshot Wounds to the Chest’, The Australasian Medical Gazette, 20 August 1900, 302; R. Scot Skirving, ‘On the Spread of Enteric Fever during the South African War’, The Australasian Medical Gazette, 20 January 1901, 4–7.

42 Australian Army Medical Corps, PR84/301, Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

43 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 118.

44 Ibid., 118, 121.

45 Garton, Medicine and Madness, 47.

46 Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845-1914 (London: Routledge, 2008), 6.

47 Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860-1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3.

48 Garton, Medicine and Madness, 115.

49 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 2. See also Angela McCarthy, ‘Connections and Divergences: Lunatic Asylums in New Zealand and the Homelands before 1910’, Health and History, 14, no. 1 (2012): 12–3; Sally Swartz, Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century (Claremont: UCT Press, 2015); Rory du Plessis, Pathways of Patients at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890 to 1907 (Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2020) for similar themes within New Zealand and South African asylum histories.

50 Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter, Diagnosing Madness: The Discursive Construction of the Psychiatric Patient, 1850-1920 (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2019), 4; Robert Allan Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 230, 237; Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home : The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 93; Ann Goldberg, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness: The Eberbach Asylum and German Society, 1815-1849 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31.

51 James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019), 9; James Dunk, ‘Authority and the Treatment of the Insane at Castle Hill Asylum, 1811-1825’, Health & History, 19, no. 2 (2017): 21, 35.

52 Mark Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, History Workshop 20 (1985): 137–8; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 38.

53 Garton, Medicine and Madness, 17 ,19, 26.

54 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 31-32

55 See Catharine Coleborne, ‘Passage to the Asylum: The Role of the Police in Committals of the Insane in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1900’, in The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965, ed. Roy Porter and David Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

56 Garton, Medicine and Madness, 34-35.

57 Ibid., 28.

58 Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, 137.

59 See, for example, ‘Relief of Mafeking’, New South Wales Government Gazette, 21 May 1900, 3945. The New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime only mentioned crimes committed by Australians in South Africa.

60 ‘In and Through the Streets’, The Leader, 8 December 1900, 43.

61 ‘Rowdyism and the Police’, Evening Journal, 13 June 1900, 2.

62 ‘The Relief of Mafeking: Rejoicings in Tasmania’, Daily Telegraph, 22 May 1900, 3.

63 ‘Our Bendigo Letter’, Elmore Standard, 25 May 1900, 8; News of the Day’, The Age, 26 May 1900, 8; ‘Police Courts’, The Daily News, 21 May 1900, 2.

64 Rudé, The Crowd in History, 195, 198.

65 ‘Mafeking Day – Australasia Rejoices’, The Argus, 21 May 1900, 7.

66 Barbara R. Penny, ‘Australia’s Reactions to the Boer War – A Study in Colonial Imperialism’, Journal of British Studies 7, no. 1 (1967): 115; Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism, 122–3.

67 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS2105, Diary of Watson A. Steel, 29 February 1900; Australian War Memorial, 3DRL 7472, Letter by George Harris, 15 July 1900; See also Karageorgos, Australian Soldiers, 54–6; Simon Popple, ‘From “Brother Boer” to “Dirty Boers”: Colonizing the Colonizers Through the Popular Representations of the Boer in the British Illustrated Journal 1899-1902’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 147-8; Krebs, Gender, Race, 9.

68 Connolly, ‘Clan, Birthplace, Loyalty’, 211.

69 Coleborne, Madness in the Family, 69.

70 Ibid., 80.

71 Suzuki, Madness at Home, 26, 135.

72 Rory du Plessis, ‘Photographs from the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890-1907’, Social Dynamics, 40, no. 1 (2014): 23–4.

73 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 106; Barbara Brookes, ‘Pictures of People, Pictures of Places: Photography and the Asylum’, in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collection and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (New York: Routledge, 2011), 30.

74 Sam Glucksberg and Matthew S. McGlone, Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphor to Idioms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93.

75 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5

76 Ibid., 7, 159.

77 Ellen Bramwell, ‘Madness, Sanity, and Metaphor’ in Mapping English Metaphor Through Time, ed. Wendy Anderson, Ellen Bramwell, and Carole Hough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 161–3.

78 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 52–3.

79 Bourdieu, Language, 118, 121.

80 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New Jersey: Penguin, 1963), 163.

81 Rudé, The Crowd in History, 195, 198.

82 ‘Mafeking Day: The Melbourne Celebration’, The Age, 24 May 1900, 7.

83 Dion Georgiou, ‘Redefining the Carnivalesque: The Construction of Ritual, Revelry and Spectacle in British Leisure Practices through the Idea and Model of ‘Carnival’, 1870–1939’, Sport in History, 35, no. 3 (2015): 343, 349; See also Saheed Aderinto, ‘Empire Day in Africa: Patriotic Colonial Childhood, Imperial Spectacle and Nationalism in Nigeria, 1905-1960’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46, no. 4 (2018): 732, 747; Antoinette Burton, ‘London and Paris through Indian spectacles: Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siecle London’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996): 127–46.

84 Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 21–2; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 98, 146; Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 141; MacKinnon, ‘“Hearing Madness”’, 81.

85 ‘Writers in the Weeklies’, The Bendigo Independent, 30 May 1900, 1.

86 Matthews, Good and Mad Women, 21; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 98, 146.

87 Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy’, 115.

88 ‘Metropolitan Memoranda’, Mount Barker Courier and Southern Advertiser, 21 December 1900, 3.

89 ‘Current Jottings’, South Coast Times and Wollongong Argus, 12 May 1900, 1.

90 ‘Demonstrative Patriotism’, The Bunyip, 23 February 1900, 2; ‘Threatened Riot in Melbourne’, South Australian Register, 26 May 1900, 10; ‘Rowdyism and the Police’, Evening Journal, 13 June 1900, 2; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 94, 186.

91 Matthews, Good and Mad Women, 21–2.

92 ‘Comments’, The Sun, 24 June 1900, 6.

93 ‘Mafficking: A New Dictionary Word’, Southern Cross, 17 August 1900, 6; Jim Davidson, ‘Also Under the Southern Cross: Federation Australia and South Africa – the Boer War and other interactions’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 14 (2012): 186.

94 ‘More Mafeking Mania’, The Tocsin, 31 May 1900, 4.

95 ‘South Australia: A Rowdy Demonstration’, Daily Telegraph, 23 May 1900, 4.

96 ‘Demonstration against Charlick Brothers; All their Windows Smashed’, South Australian Register, 22 May 1900, 6; ‘South Australia: A Rowdy Demonstration’, Daily Telegraph, 23 May 1900, 4.

97 ‘Mr Charlick’s Explanation’, Evening Journal, 22 May 1900, 3.

98 ‘The Trouble at Charlick’s’, South Australian Register, 23 May 1900, 4.

99 Letter from Charlick Brothers to Chief Secretary’s Office, 23 May 1900, GRG24/6/474/1900, State Records of South Australia, Adelaide; ‘Charlick Bros and Compensation’, South Australian Register, 28 May 1900, 4.

100 ‘Riotous Scenes in Adelaide’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 May 1900, 8.

101 ‘Mafeking Rejoicings’, The Argus, 22 May 1900, 5; ‘The Relief of Mafeking’, The Argus, 28 May 1900, 5; ‘South Australia’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate, 23 May 1900, 4.

102 ‘Mafeking Rejoicings’, South Australian Register, 24 May 1900, 6.

103 ‘Scenes in Bourke Street’, The Age, 24 May 1900, 8; ‘Relief of Mafeking: Rowdyism in Launceston’, The Mount Lyell Standard and Strahan Gazette, 26 May 1900, 3.

104 ‘Pretoria Day at Broken Hill’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 1900, 8.

105 ‘Snap Shots: Mainly about Municipal, Musical and Military Matters’, Freeman’s Journal, 9 June 1900, 17.

106 ‘Rowdyism and the Police’, Evening Journal, 13 June 1900, 2; ‘Snap Shots: Mainly about Municipal, Musical and Military Matters’, Freeman’s Journal, 9 June 1900, 17; ‘Reported Relief of Mafeking: Loyalty and Vandalism’, Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1900, 3.

107 ‘Mafeking Day – Australasia Rejoices’, The Argus, 21 May 1900, 8; Snap Shots: Mainly about Municipal, Musical and Military Matters’, Freeman’s Journal, 9 June 1900, 17.

108 ‘Rampant Militarism’, The Tocsin, 13 December 1900, 4.

109 ‘News of the Day’, The Age, 26 May 1900, 8.

110 Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 120; Garton, Medicine and Madness, 101.

111 An Act for the Better Prevention of Vagrancy and Other Offences 1852 (Vic); An Act for the more effectual prevention of Vagrancy and for the punishment of idle and disorderly Persons Rogues and Vagabonds and incorrigible Rogues in the Colony of New South Wales 1851 (NSW).

112 Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism, 31.

113 ‘Hoodlum Hysteria’, Truth, 10 June 1900, 1.

114 ‘Police Intelligence: Sequel to Wednesday’s Rejoicings’, The Argus, 26 May 1900, 14.

115 ‘Larrikins of the Queen’, The Tocsin, 25 January 1900, 5.

116 ‘Society’, The Bulletin, 2 June 1900, 10.

117 ‘Relief of Mafeking: A Public Holiday’, Coolgardie Miner, 22 May 1900, 4.

118 Glucksberg and McGlone, Understanding Figurative Language, 93.

119 Coleborne, Madness in the Family, 80.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Effie Karageorgos

Effie Karageorgos is a historian at the University of Newcastle and Deputy Convenor of the UON Future of Madness Network. Her research focuses on histories of conflict, gender and psychiatry. Her monograph Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Words from the Battlefield, was published in 2016.