Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MIGRATION, ETHNICITY, AND MADNESS – New Zealand 1860-1910” by Angela McCarthy (Otago University Press, $NZ45)

There are three photographs in Angela McCarthy’s Migration, Ethnicity and Madness which I find quite haunting and a little disturbing.

The first is the cover photograph, reproduced in sepia tones. It shows fourteen women, apparently dressed identically, standing on a lawn in front of what looks like a baronial palace. Their long white skirts make them resemble dolls. It could be something created by a surrealist photographer. In fact, it is a photograph, taken some time around 1900, of the female nursing staff of Dunedin’s Seacliff lunatic asylum.

The second (on p.67) reproduces a page from the doctor’s casebook of a woman incarcerated in the asylum in 1898. She believed herself to be a prophetess communing with God. The document includes a small photograph of her looking heavenwards with her arms upraised, obviously caught in the act of being a prophetess. One wonders what torments flooded her mind.

But the third is to me the most shocking. On p.31 there is a photo of the old Dunedin lunatic asylum, built in 1863 and then superseded in 1879 by the palatial-looking Seacliff. Not only does the old asylum of the 1860s look grim and barrack-like, but it is also large enough to make you wonder that there were so many certified lunatics in the very small town that colonial Dunedin was at that time.  Definitions of madness have changed. Perhaps some of the people who spent time there suffered from ailments that would no longer lead to their being institutionalised. Even so, it is a surprisingly large institution for such a small community. And Seacliff, consciously designed by its architect in a grand Scottish style, was much larger.

Angela McCarthy is Professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago. Most of her work has centred on patterns of Scots and Irish migration to New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Migration, Ethnicity and Madness is a book about those immigrants, between 1860 and 1910, who spent time in New Zealand lunatic asylums. In a way, then, its story of madness is a sub-set of the story of migration. McCarthy wants “studies of madness to be located within diasporic, transnational and comparative frameworks” (p.8) – in other words, she is concerned with how ethnic groups of the mentally-afflicted (Scots, Irish and others) interacted with their wider migrant ethnic community; with how doctors and superintendents in New Zealand exchanged ideas with those overseas; and with how the treatment of the mentally-ill in New Zealand compared with British, Australian and other experience.   

Migration, Ethnicity and Madness is the product of much research in British and New Zealand archives and in the surviving records of mental hospitals and psychiatric institutions. But the core research materials are the casebooks that were kept at Seacliff, many of them written by Frederic Truby King, medical superintendent of the asylum from 1889 to 1921. These casebooks comment on the origin of each patient, the supposed causes of the mental affliction, and sometimes the family history. They record the patient’s self-image, but also his or her ethnicity and background.

As McCarthy explains in her long introduction, there were then  “colonial discourses about racial difference” (p.8), which made “alienists” (asylum doctors) make assumptions about why people became insane. There were also competing theories about the causes of insanity among colonists.  One theory had to do with the ageing of the population:

“The consequences arising from the transformation of colonial society and the way in which migration from one place to another played a pivotal role in the admission of some patients to asylums … sparked [parliamentary] comment: ‘In the early years of our history we had no old people. All were young and buoyant. Now the pioneers are old, many of them prematurely, from exposure and other causes incidental to the life of colonial communities.’ Such causes included hereditary and congenital insanity, drink, masturbation and religion, and these were…. subject to statistical comparison across the various provincial asylums.” (pp.37-38)

Another theory considered the trauma of settling in an unfamiliar country:

 “Contemporary observers emphasised that the expectations held by migrants, many of whom ‘form the most extravagant anticipations of their new home, and are proportionately depressed by the result of actual experience’, may certainly have played a role in mental ill health.” (p.115)

After first considering the different legislation that covered lunatic asylums in England, Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand, and the way patients were admitted and discharged (Chapter 1), McCarthy moves on in Chapters 2 and 3 to the constant fear that lunatics were being deliberately shipped to the colonies to prevent their being a financial burden on British parishes. There is indeed some evidence of this, and also of families getting rid of insane relatives by shoving them across the globe. “Physicians…. suspected families of sending insane relatives abroad during lucid intervals.” (p.87) Colonial New Zealand immigration officials worried that people with hereditary diseases were slipping into the country. There was the constant puzzle of why the Irish were so over-represented among the certified insane. And every so often schemes would be mooted to repatriate undesirables back to Britain.

Some speculated that the long voyage out to New Zealand exacerbated insanity among the unstable, what with sunstroke, homesickness, loneliness or the death of a child. While separation from family and homeland may have caused some depression and instability, it has to be noted that other mental patients arrived in New Zealand with family and with a network of connections. Indeed, McCarthy is sometimes at pains to contradict Miles Fairburn’s “atomisation” theory of New Zealand colonial society by noting (Chapter 4) that insanity often flourished in a family context in New Zealand, and that members of a patient’s immediate family were often recorded as the patient’s most frequent visitors.

In Britain there were, consistently, more women than men in insane asylums; whereas in New Zealand there were more men than women. There is no mystery about this, however, as the gender imbalance in New Zealand hospitals reflected the gender imbalance in New Zealand as a whole at that time.

After dealing with the “transnational ties to home” (chap.5), both in doctors’ professional connections with overseas colleagues, and in patients who pined for Britain, McCarthy turns, in her last chapter, to those matters most closely connected with ethnicity. Despite the widespread “scientific racism” of the age, and despite the fact that British asylums were racially segregated, New Zealand asylums were open to all races. Nevertheless, New Zealand doctors were still very likely to interpret damaged mental conditions in terms of ethnicity and culture. McCarthy finds in doctors’ notes and casebooks frequent references to race when doctors are diagnosing Irish or Chinese or Scots patients.  There were comments on the food-choices of non-English patients and an assumption that the cultural background has aggravated a mental condition. No such ethnic notes are ever made about English or Australian patients. They are, in effect, assumed to be the “norm” of humanity.

It is clear that occasionally there were racially- and ethnically-based tensions between patients, with examples given of Pakeha violence against Chinese, clashes between Maori and Pakeha, and some clashes between Catholic and Protestant. However, McCarthy’s conclusion suggests that the worst thing New Zealand asylums did to non-English patients was to judge them as if their culture itself was a mental aberration.

Migration, Ethnicity and Madness is the first book-length study of this New Zealand topic and adds nuance to our history. It is only fair to warn, however, that this is an academic study and not light reading. It is concerned to verify and cross-reference information, and while lively anecdotes do appear (often in the quoted casebooks) they are not the book’s focus.

One thing I applaud heartily – the decision to present added information in footnotes rather than endnotes. It makes it much easier to check sources and related material.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books 

“FAR FROM ‘HOME’ -  The English in New Zealand” edited by Lyndon Fraser and Angela McCarthy (Otago University Press, $NZ45)

            At all times since New Zealand was first settled by Pakeha, the largest single group of immigrants has been the English. But the very dominance of the English strain in New Zealand has made it virtually invisible. If such a large portion of the population are of English descent, then English-derived customs and habits of thought are taken as the New Zealand norm, and therefore not worthy of special study. Irish-, Scottish- and other-derived customs and habits of thought are seen as deviations from this norm, and therefore of greater historical interest. The English strain is merely part of the landscape.

            Recently in our universities there has been an upsurge of interest in our Celtic forebears. History departments offer courses and papers in Irish and Scottish studies, and many academics have contributed to these studies, including Lyndon Fraser and Angela McCarthy. Fair enough. Older – and now superseded – history books tended to be very Anglo-centric in the judgements they made, often conveying uncritically ideas about English skills as colonisers and settlers in the Wakefield and Canterbury myths. But perhaps the pendulum has swung a little too far. Perhaps papers and monographs on West Coast Irish and Dunedin Scots have begun to give the impression that these were the only interesting nineteenth century immigrants to New Zealand. Maybe the time is right to say something, with real documentation, about specifically English immigrants and their experience.

            This, at any rate, appears to be the impulse behind  Far From ‘Home’, a collection of eight academic essays by various hands. From different perspectives, the essays look at the Englishness of immigrants between 1840 and the early twentieth century with, in some cases, briefer afterthoughts on the situation since then. In their introduction the editors make it plain that Far From ‘Home’ can hardly be the last word on the topic. Among these essays there is, for example, no systematic study of the religion that the English brought with them, unlike the way migrant studies of the Scots or Irish inevitably discuss their Presbyterianism and Catholicism.

            As I see it, the eight essays divide into two types – those that give the necessary documentation on English migration in general; and those that offer some quirky or individual perspective.

            Take the “necessary” essays first.

            Stephen Constantine’s contribution “In Search of the English and Englishness” is the inevitable demographic study making clear that of British emigrants to any part of the old empire, the majority were always English rather than Scots or Irish, but that majority was never as great a proportion of the total as the majority of English was in Britain itself. For example, by 1901, and judging from their points of departure, British immigrants to New Zealand were 54% English,  23% Scots,  21% Irish and 1% Welsh. In Britain itself, the English made up 74% of the total population, the Irish and Scots about 11% each, and the Welsh 5%. Even if the English were the largest group, therefore, New Zealand was proportionately more Scots and Irish than Britain itself was. To compound this fact, Constantine also notes that many immigrants listed as “English” in demographic records were people of Irish and Scots parentage who had settled in England only a short time before emigrating to New Zealand.

            Constantine’s study is empire-wide, and in discussing reasons for emigration it balances up need (pauperism; poverty etc.) with inducements (the imperial power’s desire to stock colonies with the British-born). In the matter of the ruling class in colonies (governors, premiers etc.) Constantine concludes that there were more English-born than Irish-born or Scots-born, but again English dominance was not as overwhelming as it was in Britain itself. Most intriguingly, however, Constantine considers the difficulties of defining “Englishness” in this empire-wide context. It is reasonable to see the Anglican church as English, but professing Anglicans were a minority in all major British dominions, and were never the majority that the English-born were. Many English people were, after all, Methodists, Baptists etc. Likewise, the playing of certain games (rugby, cricket) and social class are useless as demographic markers of “Englishness”. Judiciously, Constantine concludes:

            “Englishness, like other expressions of national identity in most peacetime circumstances, was usually a ‘soft’ force. It rarely predominated over a sense of self, prompted social behaviour, defined social interactions, determined a particular church allegiance, or constrained cultural interactions with others from the United Kingdom….there was not, in any case, a singular English identity, but many.” (Pg.38)

            Marjory Harper’s “Everything is English” deals in detail with how English immigrants were recruited, what areas of England they came from, and the preconceptions they had about New Zealand (fear of “cannibal islands” etc.). She considers such matters as how disappointed many were when prospects in New Zealand were oversold to them. In her conclusion she notes there was not one uniform system of emigration from England and she speaks of “the consistently contentious status of agency activity, manifested in internal jealousies, external rivalries and the complaints of disappointed immigrants.” (Pg.59)

            The contribution of  Lachlan Paterson “Pakeha or English?” raises the obvious question of whether the indigenous people saw any difference between the various strands of British immigrants. Ingarangi (England) and Ingarihi (English) tended to be used by Maori as synonyms for “Britain” and “British”. Drawing extensively on both Maori-language and English-language nineteenth century newspapers, Paterson argues that Maori also tended to see “English” and “Pakeha” as synonymous. Because the English were numerically the largest immigrant group from Britain, it was predominantly their culture which became the Pakeha norm in Maori eyes.

            As for the perspective of English immigrants themselves, David Pearson’s “Arcadia Reinvented?” differs from other essays in this book by being based on the twentieth century experience of living witnesses. Drawing on 82 long interviews with English immigrants who arrived between 1953 and 2007, Pearson attempts to reconstruct their attitudes and reasons for coming to New Zealand, and their attitudes towards both New Zealand and Britain after they had put down roots here. He sees some differences in attitudes between pre-1980s and post-1980s migrants.

            Thus far for the sensible, inevitable and “necessary” essays in a collection of this sort – an essay on demographics; an essay on how English immigrants were recruited; an essay on Maori understanding of immigrants; and an essay on English immigrants’ self-understanding. As source material they are valuable, but I admit to finding the remaining essays in the book – namely those that take a more unexpected aspect of the English influence – to be more readable and entertaining.

            Greg Ryan’s essay “ ‘Burton ale’, London Porter and Kentish Hops” concerns the production of beer and beer-drinking habits in New Zealand. Most beer consumed here was imported from England until the mid-19^th century. Ryan recounts such bizarre tales as brewers of inferior local beer in Dunedin seeking out empty bottles from England so that they could palm off their inferior local product as the real English thing. From his account it is clear that New Zealand-brewed beers were regarded as much inferior to imported English varieties right into early 20^th century and only gradually was a distinctive New Zealand beer standard established.

            Angela McCarthy’s “Migration and Ethnicity among English Migrants in New Zealand Asylums” notes that while the English made up the largest group of  inmates, they were not as over-represented in New Zealand psychiatric institutions as the Irish were. Her speculation on why this should have been so suggests how the “scientific racism” of superintendents’ notes on patients did not apply to English patients, whose ethnicity was not commented upon. In other words, English aberrations and eccentricities could be accepted as “normal”. Irish (and other ethnic) eccentricities and aberrations would be regarded as dangerous mental ailments.

            Lyndon Fraser’s “Memory, Mourning and Melancholy” concerns English attitudes to death and funerary customs as revealed in New Zealand cemeteries and other records. It is more diffuse and, dare I say it, more entertaining than some more tightly-structured essays in this volume. Fraser says much of his material comes from records in the more “English” settlements of Canterbury and Nelson, but he also quotes extensively from English imaginative literature. He considers the extent to which middle-class and upper-class funerals had been commercialised and become ostentatious in the nineteenth century, in a way that was often ridiculed by writers like Dickens and Emily Bronte; and that was later frowned upon in New Zealand.

            He considers the frequency of child mortality (“Death tracked birth like a bloodhound in the nineteenth century and, as the Christchurch registers show, exacted a terrible toll on infants and young children.” Pg.115 ). To his immense credit, Fraser enters into the spirit of the age he is writing about, and deals respectfully with the words of comfort – which can seem sentimental to us – which grieving parents had engraved on the tombstones of children. He also notes the real comforts of religion which nineteenth century mourners were given. In nineteenth-century New Zealand there was the habit, inherited from England, of carving up municipal cemeteries into denominational plots.

            There is a bizarre side to Fraser’s chapter when he deals with funerary portraits, trinkets, mementi mori and other keepsakes of the dead. Even more bizarre are his comments on the dangers of burial at sea for immigrants en route to New Zealand (sharks were likely to feed on “buried” corpses descending through the briny).

            If this chapter has a weakness, as far as the overall theme of the volume is concerned, it is a failure to point up the Englishness of it all by showing how these English mortuary practices differed from those of the Irish and the Scots.

            The final essay, Janet Wilson’s “ The ‘New Chum’ ”, examines “Writings of the English Diaspora in New Zealand 1860-1914”. It marches through that New Zealand-English poetry which is no longer esteemed (Alfred Domett attempting to transpose Victorianisms into heroic epic by the use of Maori names); and that which is still esteemed (Blanche Baughan). It does the same with novels and prose from Butler’s Erewhon, and the works of Lady Barker to Satchell’s The Greenstone Door. In each case, Wilson considers how much these writers expressed a certain dislocation in adjusting to a radically different climate and landscape, and how much they attempted to depict New Zealand according to established English literary norms.

            Wilson’s judgements are very much those of the current lit-crit “revisionism” (as in Stafford and Williams’ Maoriland) which refuses to see authentic New Zealand literature as beginning only in the 1930s, and which sees much literary merit in those colonial perspectives that were once regarded as passé. In other words, Wilson does not accept the “nationalist” idea of New Zealand literature which saw it as becoming more “authentic” the further it got from the colonial era. She posits that our literature will always to some extent be connected with that of Britain and ends with comments on the  (New Zealand-born, English-resident) Fleur Adcock; and (English-born, New Zealand-resident) Peter Bland.

            As you can see from these extensive comments, I have retreated into my common trick of summarising this book’s contents without passing too much judgement upon them. Of course Far From ‘Home’ will be a great source-book for researchers and other historians. Of course not all the essays are written with the same panache and style.

            Only two other comments need be made.

            First, I am still a little uneasy about the use of the term “diaspora” (“scattering” or “dispersal”), which is justified in the editor’s introduction and which is most clearly explained in Janet Wilson’s essay, where she says “migration” suggests going from one culture to another whereas “diaspora” suggests taking your culture with you and trying to implant it. Very well. I accept that in this sense the term can be justified of English emigrants. Nevertheless, ‘diaspora’ is still most commonly used for forced migration (as in the Jewish diaspora after the destruction of the second temple; or the Irish diaspora after the famine). I think it remains an inappropriate term for an English migration that was largely voluntary. To overuse the word is to drain it of any real meaning.

            Second, while some essays in this book do raise the problem of defining “Englishness”, I am not satisfied that all essays really tell us how distinctive English immigration to New Zealand was from Scots or Irish migration. As with the matter of English religious practice, this could mean that there is much more study yet to be done on this topic.