A town without pity? Three stories of public exposure, print media, and family histories of madness in Western Australia

Abstract

It is sometimes easier to understand the chimeric experience of mental disorder by accessing individual episodes and incidents. This paper will review the lives of three strong-willed, charismatic individuals who all had influential and very public brushes with mental disorder in the small outpost city of Perth, Western Australia, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This opens up questions of retrospective diagnosis, the challenges of being mad in a small town, how print media has preserved these precarious individual narratives, and how individual histories of mental disorders can help to cast light on other aspects of mainstream Australian histories.

Keywords:

• Ellis
• Harcourt Whipple
• Davies
• Edward
• Shawcross
• Mildred

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

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9 Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England 1820-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

10 Philippa Martyr and Aleksandar Janca, ‘A Mad Mayor of Fremantle: The Mysterious Illness of Edward Davies’, Australasian Psychiatry 19, no. 6 (December 2011): 479–83. https://doi.org/10.3109/10398562.2011.620958; Philippa Martyr, ‘“The Cleanest Man on Earth”: Harcourt Whipple Ellis and the NLA Australian Newspapers’, Health and History 12, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 88–104. https://doi.org/10.5401/healthhist.12.1.88; Robert Cox and Philippa Martyr, Harcourt Whipple Ellis: An Outrageous Life (East Fremantle, WA: Robert Cox, 2013); Philippa Martyr. ‘The Shawcross Affair: Sex, Politics, and Madness in Western Australia, 1937–39’, Health and History 20, no. 1 (January 2018): 52–71. https://doi.org/10.5401/healthhist.20.1.0052.

11 John Coverdale, Raymond Nairn, and Donna Claasen, ‘Depictions of Mental Illness in Print Media: a Prospective National Sample’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 36, no. 5 (2002): 697–700; G. Carrà and M. Clerici, ‘Depictions of Community Care for the Mentally Ill in Two English Newspapers: A Pilot, Qualitative Study’, Giornale Italiano di Psicopatologia 19, no. 2 (2013): 109–13; Raymond Nairn, John Coverdale, and Donna Claasen, ‘What Is the Role of Intertextuality in Media Depictions of Mental Illness? Implications for Forensic Psychiatry’, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Law 13, no. 2 (2006): 243–50.

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14 Most serious mental disorders – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder – share heritable and environmental risk factors. However, the proportion of risk occupied by genetics alone varies across studies, and the most noticeable effects are largely restricted to first-degree relatives. Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium et al., ‘Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNP’, Nature Genetics 45, no. 9 (2013): 984–94. Jordan Smoller et al., ‘Psychiatric Genetics and the Structure of Psychopathology’, Molecular Psychiatry 24, no. 3 (2018): 409–20.

15 See, for example, Anthea Vreugdenhil, ‘“Incoherent and Violent If Crossed”: The Admission of Older People to the New Norfolk Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century’, Health and History 14, no. 2 (2012): 91–111; Peter Bladin, ‘Status Epilepticus, the Grim Reaper of the Mental Health System in Early Victoria’, Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 10, no. 6 (2003): 655–60.

16 Martyr and Janca, ‘Mad Mayor of Fremantle’.

17 Ibid., 481.

18 In early 1900 several local newspaper articles denounced ‘pro-Boer’ sentiment, which may have affected Davies, particularly an account of a Perth City Council meeting where the medical officer was accused of wishing to have Joseph Chamberlain shot, ‘Municipal. Perth Council. A Lively Meeting. Alleged Pro-Boer Official. Town Clerk’s Conduct Questioned’, Inquirer and Commercial News, 25 May 1900.

19 Martyr and Janca, ‘Mad Mayor of Fremantle’. See also Alecia Simmonds, ‘Courtship, Coverture and Marital Cruelty: Historicising Intimate Violence in the Civil Courts’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45, no. 1 (2019): 131–57.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Western Australia, Lunacy Act 1871.

24 ‘Mr E W Davies’, Western Mail, 30 January 1904.

25 ‘Insanitary Fremantle. Bungling bashaws. Tampering with typhoid’, West Australian Sunday Times, 7 July 1901.

26 Martyr, ‘“The Cleanest Man on Earth”’.

27 Cox and Martyr, Harcourt Whipple Ellis.

28 Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005), describes ‘Viscount Lascelles’s adventures in the NSW hinterland which have some similarities with Whipple’s adventures.

29 Ibid., 43–70.

30 Ibid., 57–61.

31 Martha’s story is not unusual. See Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002).

32 ‘Boulder Police Court’, Kalgoorlie Western Argus, 1 July 1902.

33 Cox and Martyr, Harcourt Whipple Ellis, 170–1.

34 Clare Parker, ‘Female Complaints and Certain Events: Silencing Abortion Discourse’, Lilith 19 (2013): 32–45.

35 Ibid., 71–101.

36 Ibid., 97–101.

37 ‘Peeps at people’, Sunday Times, 7 April 1907.

38 Supreme Court of Western Australia, case 4145, 1 June 1909, WAS 122, Cons 3473, Item 328, State Records Office of Western Australia, Perth.

39 ‘Peeps at people’, Sunday Times, 26 January 1919.

40 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia, 1935 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1935). https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPage/1301.01935?OpenDocument

41 Cox and Martyr, Harcourt Whipple Ellis, 155.

42 Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game (New York: Viking, 2016), 21, 39, 116.

43 ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics (version: 09/2020). https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en. ICD-11 is the system of mental disorder classification currently used in Australian hospitals.

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51 Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 12–4.

52 Sigrun Olafsdottir and Bernice A Pescosolido, ‘Constructing Illness: How the Public in Eight Western Nations Respond to a Clinical Description of “Schizophrenia”’, Social Science & Medicine 73, no. 6 (2011): 929–38.

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54 Western Australia. Mental Treatment Act 1917.

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56 Arch Ellis, Eloquent Testimony: The Story of the Mental Health Services in Western Australia (Crawley: UWA Press, 1984), 92–5.

57 Phillip Maude, ‘From Lunatic to Client: A History/Nursing Oral History of the Treatment of Western Australians who Experienced Mental Illness’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2001), 178–81.

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59 Jenny Coleman, ‘Incorrigible Offenders: Media Representations of Female Habitual Criminals in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Press’, Media History 22, no. 2 (2016): 143–58; Chris Goodman, ‘Nevertheless She Persisted: From Mrs Bradwell to Annalise Keating, Gender Bias in the Courtroom’, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 24, no. 1 (2017): 167–98. Lesley Hall, ‘“The Subject Is Obscene: No Lady Would Dream of Alluding to It”: Marie Stopes and Her Courtroom Dramas’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 2 (2013): 253–66.

60 James Dunk, ‘Work, Paperwork and the Imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 326–55.

61 Western Australia, Royal Commission on Mental Hospitals Administration, 1480, 1486, 50.

62 Martyr, ‘The Shawcross Affair’, 62–64.

63 Emmanuel Regis, A Practical Manual of Mental Medicine (New York: American Journal of Insanity, 1894); Lewis Bruce, ‘The Symptoms and Etiology of Mania’, Edinburgh Medical Journal 23, no. 2 (1908): 103–20.

64 Western Australia, Report of the Royal Commissioner Appointed to Inquire into the Heathcote Mental Reception Home and the Administration of Mental Hospitals Generally (Perth: Government Printer, 1938).

65 Martyr, ‘The Shawcross Affair’, 61.

66 Ibid., 63–64.

67 Ibid., 64.

68 Western Australia, Report of the Royal Commissioner, 10.

69 ‘Hot Time in Hay Street’, Mirror, 20 May 1922, 2.

70 Ellis, Eloquent Testimony, 185.

71 Ellis, Eloquent Testimony, 92, describes Shawcross’ examination briefly, but the files to which he refers are not in the State Records Office of Western Australia, and do not appear to have survived elsewhere.

72 The most notable are Rudolph Hein and Thomas and Georgiana Mable, the second of which resulted in a Royal Commission in 1921.See also Barbara Brookes, ‘Papering over Madness: Accountability and Resistance in Colonial Asylum Files: A New Zealand Case Study’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 356–74.

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