Migration, Ethnicity, and Insanity in New Zealand and Australia, 1860-1910

Professor Angela McCarthy
Marsden Standard Project, 2009-2011

Committal to a mental hospital was but one possible outcome of dysfunction, despair, and social and economic hardship experienced by foreign-born migrants in nineteenth-century Australasia. Yet comparative analysis addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity has yet to be attempted in the Australasian sphere. This three-year project will therefore examine the difficulties that migrants underwent in adjustment abroad through a focus on asylums for the insane in Dunedin, Auckland, and Melbourne between 1860 and 1910. A range of sources, including institutional patient casebooks, will be utilised in conjunction with qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The findings, situated within comparative, longitudinal, and transnational perspectives, will be disseminated in monographs, theses, journal articles, chapters, an edited collection, and public presentations. Beyond enhancing the history of medicine, migration, and ethnicity in Australasia, the study will have international significance, contributing to the history of migration and ethnicity, and British, Irish, and European social history. Moreover, historians can contribute to current understandings of how migrants are affected by social change through migration by considering key factors of social isolation such as language and cultural misunderstandings; addressing issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity in the past therefore has contemporary relevance and social value in the present.

The project team comprises Professor Angela McCarthy (researching issues of migration, ethnicity, and heredity), Dr Catharine Coleborne (researching issues of medicine, gender, and hybridity), Elspeth Knewstubb (an MA student at Otago exploring medicalisation, religion, and gender), Maree Dawson (a PhD student at Waikato exploring puerperal insanity and congenital idiocy), and Chris Burke (Research Assistant).