In June 1857, Dr Alfred Yates Carr wrote to his wife and young sons back in England from the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, to which he had been committed three months before. Convinced of his own sanity and believing himself falsely imprisoned, he gave Louisa the latest news on his efforts to secure his freedom and return home. Before sealing the letter, he scribbled on the inside of the envelope “Keep up your spirits and do not despair, once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum. AYC”.
Aside from a series of short escapes and releases, he would spend the rest of his life – 37 years – at Yarra Bend and Ararat lunatic asylums before he died, aged 73, in 1894. He never saw his family again.
Carr appealed about his fate to members of the Victorian parliament and visiting doctors – who did not believe that he had a wife and children, thought that this was all part of his delusion. After all, he was clearly mad when he claimed that his mother had been murdered by his brother. Clearly mad when he claimed that the bouts of theft and violence that resulted in his committal were due to poisoning by Indian Hemp, which had been surreptitiously introduced into his tobacco by a longstanding foe. Clearly mad when he claimed to have been viciously beaten by asylum attendants, or kept in solitary confinement for three days without water.
It was to provide for his family back in England, Carr said, that he put in a claim against the government for non payment for his medical services in the aftermath of the Eureka rebellion. He had been the first doctor to reach the stockade after the guns had fallen silent and the cries of dying men were the only sounds carrying through the smoky air. Some thought it was treating the wounded here that had driven Carr mad, for what he found was a carnage of gunshot and bayonet wounds, horrible burns, one man still alive despite his brain being visible through his opened head. The government eventually paid up – but still not believing in the existence of Carr's family, chose to hold the money in trust for him rather than send it home.
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It wasn't Eureka that unhinged him though: the peculiar obsessions and delusions that assailed and finally overwhelmed Carr were in evidence years before. He had seen madness from both sides. In England he had been the resident physician at a small, private, rural lunatic asylum at Hunningham –a “mad doctor”, in the parlance of the time. In the Antipodes, he found himself a patient, his mind turned upside down.
At Hunningham he worked for the proprietor, James Harcourt, who sought to bring the patients back to health through 'moral treatment'. The asylums of the past had relied on mechanical restraints such as shackles and straitjackets to control or punish patients: the 'moral treatment', pioneered at the Quaker run York Retreat around 1800, and popularised in the new government asylums by John Conolly, sought instead to treat patients not as wild beasts in need of taming, but as human beings, to be encouraged back down the road to sanity through the example of moral and rational behaviour.
An article in the local paper just before Christmas 1848 described the excellent work being performed at Hunningham House and the number of cures effected there. “Every testimony we have heard of the mode of treatment pursued in the above asylum concurs in expressing the constant kindness and attention of the proprietor, Mr HARCOURT to the unfortunate inmates; as also to the skill and unwearying attention of the resident physician, Dr Alfred CARR, in ministering to that most deplorable of all afflictions, a mind diseased.” The encomium may have carried more weight had it not been written by Carr himself.
All may have continued well had not Carr and the proprietor's wife Susannah detested one another. A series of petty disagreements blew up one chilly morning at the breakfast table. Carr joined the couple in the parlour and dragged his chair across the wooden boards directly between Susannah and the fire, blocking both warmth and light. Exasperated, she threw down her sewing and looked at her husband, who was moved to remark on Carr's "ungentlemanly" behaviour. Well, said Carr, Mrs H was certainly "no lady". She in turn called him a sneak, a mean, impertinent and insignificant fellow, and made some disparaging comment about his boots. Harcourt called him a liar, at which point Carr rose from the table and, as Mrs Harcourt fled the room, picked up his chair and threw it at his employer. With the aid of an attendant, Harcourt wrestled Carr to the ground, while Mrs H stood in the doorway encouraging her husband with cries of “That’s right, Harcourt, give the fellow some more, he richly deserves it”.
Harcourt pressed assault charges. The magistrate, hearing both sides of the story, judged it to be an “unpleasant affair” that “does not amount to much”, and fined Carr one shilling plus costs.
3 Carr exacted his revenge by writing a long letter to the Commissioners in Lunacy and the Official Visitors of Lunatic Asylums in the County of Warwick outlining multiple cases of patient abuse at Hunningham, and calling down on Harcourt’s head an official inquiry.
His claims rehearsed the full gothic repertoire of charges that were increasingly levelled at unregulated private asylums during the early nineteenth century. Neglect: dying patients left overnight without assistance. Abuse: patients left naked in unheated rooms as a form of punishment. Grotesquerie: a female attendant giving a patient a black eye whilst attempting to rub her nose in her own excrement. Violence: Harcourt striking patients with a dog whip and a stick.
There was little evidence to support the charges, and the commissioners sensed that Carr's motives had "not been altogether actuated by a sense of duty", adding that he was himself "by no means free from the charge of improper treatment of Patients and in particular of subjecting them to repeated shower baths by way of punishment for slight inattention to his orders and acts of disrespect to himself”. Harcourt was almost completely exonerated, Carr humiliated.
The Hunningham affair was later described as the first attack of Carr’s illness. Whilst on the face of it this was a story of clashing personalities, a brief flare of rage and violence and a vindictive and drawn out plan for revenge, there are elements of this shabby drama that were to recur throughout Carr’s life. He was always quick to kindle a sense of injustice, that the world had done hardly by him. Unable to weigh the true importance of matters and act accordingly, he turned his private grievances into public affairs, played out his internal conflicts through committees of inquiry, sought validation from others that he had truly been wronged. Devoting weeks of his life to seeking revenge against Harcourt shows the cracks in his personality that were ultimately to become wide enough for his sanity to disappear into.
His appearances before a magistrate at his assault trial and at a public inquiry into asylum abuses were his first performances in a role he regularly reprised – the Witness. He took the stand a dozen times in the next 15 years, both as accuser and defendant. Hunningham was the first rehearsal for his final and most influential performance, as the cause celebre in a nine day libel trial in 1862 in which he testified to the abuses carried in a very different lunatic asylum – in Yarra Bend, Melbourne.
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Bowie vs Wilson is a nine day legal wonder, playing to a full house in the Supreme Court gallery, with almost verbatim transcripts of lawyer’s speeches and witness statements published in the newspapers, ultimately reprinted as a pamphlet running to 120 closely spaced pages. On trial,
4 apparently, is the seventy four year old Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Doctor Robert Bowie, and his management of the institution over the last decade. But Bowie is in fact the plaintiff, suing the editor of the Argus newspaper for libel following three articles the previous year. Yes, they were stinging, and made serious allegations: of patient abuse and neglect, indecency, mismanagement. The first began Events occur now and again painfully reminding us that in the picturesque bend of the Yarra, from which it takes its name, there still exists, with all its horrors, as far as the public knows, the lunatic asylum, and, with all his weakness and incompetency – to use the mildest terms we can call to mind – the manager Mr BOWIE
For Bowie they are no doubt the last straw in a long running feud with the colony’s Chief Medical Officer William McCrae. For nearly ten years they have wrestled for control of the asylum, arguing over their widely differing views on its proper location and the treatment and condition of its patients, cultivating political support, testifying before parliamentary committees. Dr Bowie had taken charge of Yarra Bend during the gold rush. In his long career as a surgeon in London he had been described as an “indefatigable friend of the very poor”; assisting with the founding of benevolent asylums for the homeless, campaigning for improved sanitation, and working for the General Board of Health in tracking cholera cases and inspecting workhouses. His attention also turned to assisted emigration schemes, and in 1852 he sailed for Australia as ship’s surgeon on one of Caroline Chisholm’s emigrant vessels, the Athenian . On his arrival in Melbourne the government was seeking a new Superintendent for the Asylum after several scandals had led to the removal of the previous administration. At a time when new arrivals were flocking to the goldfields rather than staying in Melbourne, they would have been delighted to find and appoint someone of Dr Bowie’s medical experience – despite his having little direct exposure to lunatic asylums. And initially Bowie’s steady and humanitarian approach significantly improved conditions at Yarra Bend. It was only with the arrival of Dr William McCrea, an energetic and reformist Irishman, that Bowie’s methods were exposed as, well, somewhat old fashioned.
Had Bowie continued to steadfastly ignore any questioning of his methods or management, perhaps his feud with McCrea would have dragged along as a matter of no great consequence. But by displaying yet again his peevish sensitivity to any form of correction or criticism, Bowie has made a disastrous mistake in providing a public forum where every detail of his management of the Asylum can be held up and examined in the most critical possible light.
5 He is well represented though, as the parties settle in to the courtroom before Chief Justice Stawell on the morning of Wednesday 28 th May 1862, by none other than the Attorney General, Dick Ireland, ably supported by Mr Fellows and the appropriately named Mr Billing. For the defence, Argus editor Edmund Wilson has marshalled former Member of Parliament and noted lawyer Archibald Michie, along with Mr Wyatt and Mr Wood. ₤3,000 in damages are sought. Ireland begins the proceedings in his round Galway voice. One of Melbourne’s most persuasive criminal lawyers, his strong suit is a clever and galloping eloquence capable of carrying him over the holes in his knowledge of the law itself. He lays out Bowie’s long and devoted service, struggling these last ten years since his arrival from England despite insufficient resources and the lack of suitable attendants. “Owing to the gold mania, people were in a considerable state of excitement; society had not settled down, and Dr Bowie found a vast number of persons, who from various causes, were labouring under mental disease.” He reads the Argus reports into the record. They are baseless, Ireland claims, warming to his theme as the glow of the morning tipple spreads through his ample frame. They rely on the evidence of witnesses to a parliamentary inquiry that is still in progress, witnesses with no credibility, “a number of servants dismissed from the establishment for misconduct, and a number of discharged lunatics” and whose claims have not yet had the opportunity to be challenged. “The jury must know the effect which articles of this description must have on the reputation and standing… of a man in Dr Bowie’s position: because these articles declared that he was guilty, not merely of wilful negligence, but actually of wilful cruelty.”
Chief Justice Stawell, Archibald Michie, Richard Ireland
Ireland closes his remarks and cedes the stage to his colleague Archibald Michie. A brilliant parliamentarian of great principle, who some compared to Disraeli, Michie is temporarily taking a break from office after the electors in his seat of St Kilda disapproved of both his continuing absences and vocal support of free trade. Lean, sharp, his hair has long since retreated from the top of his head and blows out in unruly fashion at the back: he leans gently towards the jury whilst addressing them as if fighting his way into a strong headwind. His words flow easily, with the style of a practiced
6 raconteur, a mix of “vinegar and honey”. In defence of the Argus and the articles it published, Michie details eleven ‘justifications’ of the alleged libels that he will seek to prove. That patients were incarcerated and restrained by being confined in large bags, overnight or even for days at a time, from which they were not relieved even for calls of nature. That they were tortured by the extreme use of straitjackets. That in the case of one patient, this treatment was meted out purely as a punishment for complaining to one of the Official Visitors who kept a check on patient welfare. That Patrick Mullens, who had died in the Asylum, was found on inquest to have several broken ribs: had these injuries been inflicted at the Asylum, he had been treated with “gross cruelty”: if prior to his arrival, with “gross neglect”. That the Asylum was infested with lice and bugs, and the attendants cared little for patient cleanliness and welfare, preferring instead to drink and play cards. That medicines were dispensed unlabelled, and routinely given to the wrong patients.
He outlines the charge that Mrs Steele, who had been admitted to Yarra Bend suffering acute grief at the loss of her husband, had been taken advantage of and overpowered by Bowie’s coachman, Sloane, and subsequently “became in the family way”. That Bowie not only presided over an establishment where such an outrage could take place, but was actually aware of the consequences and visited the woman after her release. As one of the Argus articles put it: “We warn any persons having female friends in the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, that so long as this crime remains unpunished, they have no guarantee that those friends are safe from the grossest outrage that women can be subjected to”. It is, says Michie, the most vulnerable members of society, those deprived of the capacity to make their grievances known, that merit the attention of the journalist. The press is obliged to investigate abuses and put their case before the public. This is precisely what the Argus was doing in this instance.
On that moral high note, Michie calls his first, and star, witness: Alfred Yates Carr. He appears in the courtroom behind a police constable, and followed by the attendant who had brought him down from the Bend that morning – blocky bookends for the small man in between, almost lost inside the blue pilot coat that mark him as the property of the Asylum. Well shaven, nevertheless, with moustache neatly cropped. He takes the witness stand two steps at a time, and in response to the question put to him by the court, raises his chin, stares down at the room, and gives his name. The faint creak of wooden floorboards as he shifts his weight from one side to the other, then back again. His blue eyes burn. The constable and the attendant exchange glances, and the larger of the two opens and closes his raw red slabs of hands and moves closer to the witness stand. Is the witness, asks Ireland, with a theatrical glance to the jury, in any state to be sworn?
This is not the first time that Carr and Michie have crossed paths. It is not even the first time that Michie has called upon him as a key witness. That was eight years ago, when Michie, arm in arm with his colleague Dick Ireland, was defending the Eureka rebels, and Alfred Yates Carr was the first doctor on the scene following the massacre at the
7 Stockade. Then, Michie had hoped that Carr’s testimony would vouch for the whereabouts of Raffaelo Carboni – but at the critical juncture, the doctor disappeared, skipping the country. At least this time he has made it to the witness stand.
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After his experiences at the Hunningham asylum, Carr just wanted to get away. With his wife Louisa, a young lawyer’s daughter whom he had married in London four years before, he got away as far as he possibly could – New Zealand. They stayed in Auckland only a few months before returning, though with an addition to the family, a son, Walter. Back in England he set up a medical practice in a suburb of Manchester, and became a father for a second time with the birth of Ernest. It was a hard time for a medical man to make a living in this way, with too many practitioners competing for a clientele. Where opportunity did abound though, was overseas. In the early 1850s there were large numbers of migrant ships sailing to Victoria following the discovery of gold. Surgeon superintendents were required on ships to look after the wellbeing of immigrants, and were paid ten shillings per passenger by the Immigration Board. In 1852 Carr took this route, signing on with the Araminta, a recently constructed vessel and one of several chartered by the Skye Emigration Society to provide free passage for impoverished Gaelic crofters to start a new life in the Antipodes: the Society had been created to raise money by public subscription following the failure of the potato crop and widespread famine, and also at the behest of landlords looking to clear their lands of troublesome tenants in order to farm more pliant and profitable sheep. The Araminta carried 392 Gaelic speaking assisted immigrants, mainly in family groups, and set sail from Liverpool in June 1852.
It was not a happy trip. It was uncomfortable, and though by rights Carr was entitled to dine properly at the Captains table, the ship was poorly provisioned and he fared little better than his charges – with whom he was not impressed. “When delivered into my charge at Birkenhead the emigrants with scarcely an exception were in a most filthy and disgusting condition, covered with vermin, infected with itch, and literally in rags; ignorant of the language and in fact more resembling brutes than human beings.” 1 His efforts to reduce the lice problem through sulphur, scissors and comb were only marginally effective; the passengers often preferred to defecate on the ship deck rather than the water closets; and attempts to reform this situation led to him being threatened with violence. Drinking water was contaminate when clothes were washed in the cisterns. Dysentery and diarrhoea broke out through the inferior quality of the food, and there was also a measles epidemic. At one stage, 90 passengers (nearly a quarter of the ship) were ill and requiring Carr’s attention, resulting in an exhausting workload. Despite Carr’s best efforts, 25 passengers died, mostly young children, and a further ten were severely ill. The nightmare voyage finished with the ship running aground at Point Richards on 2 nd October 1852, before limping into Geelong.
1 Clarke, W. B. (William Bartlett) 1999. "Araminta": emigrant ship 1852 . Bicheno, Tas. : W.B. Clarke, p31
8 Carr had a knack for dispute. He was prickly and paranoid, sensitive to any questioning of his competence at the best of times, and this was by no means the best of times. When Assistant Immigration Agent, Dr W.H. Baylie, on inspecting the ship, stated that “a more dirty vessel than the Araminta I have never inspected”, he worked himself into a fit of dudgeon. First he questioned the competence of the Immigration Board members who inspected the ship; then he twice wrote to Hugh Childers, a member of the Legislative Council, to protest his treatment. And just to fan the flames a bit further, he sent copies of both of these letters to the Argus, where they were promptly published. 2 This “offensive and improper” behaviour was not calculated to endear him to the Board, and his card was thereafter marked. Whilst the Board’s report into the voyage gave a positive assessment of Carr’s performance of his medical duties (discharged with “zeal and efficiency”), it added: "But his temper appears to be irritable, hasty and petulant, and the Board considers that it was fortunate for the peace of the vessel that so few of the Immigrants could understand English… These infirmities of temper involving as they necessarily do, a want of judgment and discretion might occasion serious result in future voyages… Consequently the Board feels unable to recommend that Dr. Carr be again trusted with the charge of an immigrant vessel, unless as in this present instance the great majority of immigrants happen to be unacquainted with the English language”. 3 Worse, the Board decided that further investigation was required before it could with good conscience pay Carr his fee of 10 shillings per passenger (a substantial sum of about 40 pounds in total). Carr pressed his case in increasingly histrionic fashion, piling up wild accusations that the Board had been surreptitiously searching his cabin, planting spies, inciting passengers to make complaints against him, all to find a pretext for refusing him payment.
On the basis of a minor professional slight, Carr had managed to stoke an ongoing and public fight with a government agency, harm his professional employment options and spin a bizarrely paranoid, improbable and self justificatory tale that, it seems, he himself came to believe wholeheartedly.
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Waiting for his government payment, rather than taking ship back home to his family the prospect of gold drew Carr further away. In late 1852 it seemed that half the world was heading to Ballarat (including the captain of the Araminta and most of the crew), and being so close – well, it would be a waste not to at least make a trip there and see what was happening, surely. By January 1853 Carr’s plans had changed: he would stay a while, and registered with the Medical Board of Victoria to enable him to practice. 4 In the event, he became enmeshed in goldfields politics, was involved in the events
2 Argus, 9/10/1852 and 13/10/1852 3 Clarke, W. B. (William Bartlett) 1999. "Araminta": emigrant ship 1852 . Bicheno, Tas. : W.B. Clarke, p22 4 Stoller, A and Emmerson, R 1973, "Dr John Alfred Carr: A Psycho Historical Study", The Medical Journal of Australia , p189
9 surrounding the Eureka rebellion, nearly lost his life, and did not return to England for over two years.
Carr set out his stall at a tent in Eureka. He placed lengthy advertisements in the newspapers outlining his publications and citing testimonials from English surgeons as to his being “fully conversant with every branch of his profession” and to his ability and good judgement as a surgeon. 5 A busy goldfield, populated by large amounts of inexperienced men digging deep holes in the ground whilst frequently under the influence of grog, provided no shortage of opportunities for the surgeon to practice his arts of setting bones and bandaging wounds, and Carr’s practice met with sufficient success that he joined with another local doctor, George Clendinning, to set up a local hospital. In his spare time there is also some evidence that he dabbled in gold buying and did his own share of (illegal) prospecting – when he was asked for his license, he replied “I have not, for I do not consider I require one”, and was promptly arrested, locked up and fined five pounds.
He also found time to contribute to the Argus as a correspondent, expressing confidence in the future of the goldfields, but also railing against their administration (“So frequent are the instances of imbecility and mismanagement on the part of the Commissioners that one becomes weary of recording them”). He also made the prophetic statement that “I venture to predict that without some speedy and efficient alteration to the manner in which justice is administered, that the community will take the law into its own hands, and the first step will be taken towards separation from the mother country which will inevitably ensue”. Carr immediately added that separation would be an outcome that he would “deplore”, but over the course of the year he became progressively drawn into the politicisation of the goldfields and an outspoken advocate for the diggers’ cause.
As later events would show, Carr’s political allegiances were confused and probably stemmed from personal grudges as much as from any democratic ideological commitment. Given his repeated capacity to turn any perceived slight or wrong against himself into a matter for a personal crusade irrespective of the costs, it would be consistent that the incident of his arrest for the lack of a prospecting license was the motive force for his political involvement. With his relatively privileged English background he certainly did not share much in common with many diggers. At one point he was even reported to have arranged a duel with the notorious Irish agitator ‘Captain’ Browne. 6 Nonetheless, as opposition to the government’s goldfields policies grew, Carr’s passion and his confident and articulate public speaking led to his appointment to the central committee of the Ballarat Gold Diggers Association in August 1853. He was to spend the next few months at the forefront of a movement to have the license fee reduced and the diggers enfranchised. 7
5 Argus 17/1/1853 6 MacFarlane, I (ed) 1995, Eureka: from the official records , Public Record Office, Arts Victoria, Melbourne, p3 7 Argus, 29/8/1853
10 On 10 th September Carr appeared as a witness before several members of the Legislative Council taking evidence for the Select Committee in Ballarat. 8 His main contentions were that the license fee was excessive and that the local administration was unjust. “I have noticed amongst the persons administering the law a want of ability rather than anything else, and in consequence of that there has been frequent injustice”, he said, but when pressed for instances of such injustice he replied that “several came to my knowledge… but I cannot at present remember them”. The only instance he could in fact cite was his own arrest for prospecting without a license. His testimony was inconsistent and self aggrandising: when questioned about the loyalties of the Ballarat diggers he initially claimed that “turbulent people” were in the “small minority”. But by the time he got warmed up, he was claiming not only that “there is a party in this colony… that is anxious to see this colony converted into a republic”, but that dissatisfaction with the license fee was so widespread that “at one time I could have raised, had I wished it, a body of men sufficient to have forced and demolished the Camp.”
Carr was also backward and forwards between Ballarat and Melbourne on the Association’s business. In September he was part of part of a delegation to petition the government about reducing the license fee: “from what I can judge of their character by their conversation and arguments", wrote the unnamed Argus correspondent (possibly Carr!), "the diggers of Balaraat have been much more fortunate in their selection of delegates than those on some of the other gold fields. The Balarrat (sic) deputation consists of men not likely to foster unnecessary excitement, although prepared to urge the diggers claims to the farthest”. 9 Not the most accurate of assessments, given that Carr specialised throughout his life in fostering unnecessary excitement. On this occasion however he was being swept along by the force of public opinion rather than swimming against the tide. Always the crusader for just causes (however variously and personally defined), for most of his life he was a tilter at windmills, but the early days of democratic agitation at Ballarat were a high water mark in his life in that, for once, his righteous cause was also shared by many others. He attended and spoke at the large public meetings: at Bakery Hill in November 1853 he had an excited conversation with Rafaello Carboni, telling him that "Nous allons bientot avoir la Republique Australienne! Signore." (We will soon have an Australian republic) – to which Carboni replied “What a farce”. 10 Of Carr, Carboni said “The specimen of man before me impressed me with such a decided opinion of his ability for destroying sugarsticks, that at once I gave him credit as the founder of a republic for babies to suck their thumbs”, and intimates that Carr spent the time after the meeting scavenging among the empty bottles in search of booze.
Soon afterwards Carr and Silvester returned to Melbourne to press their objections to the new goldfields management bill, and managed to obtain audiences with the Colonial Secretary, the Attorney General (who “in a great passion left the room and broke up the conference” after Silvester called him a traitor), the Chief Commissioner for the Gold
8 Legislative Council Select Committee Report on the Gold Fields, D.8, 1853, pp30 31 9 Argus 6/9/1853 10 Carboni, R 1982, The Eureka Stockade , Currey O'Neil, South Yarra, Vic.
11 fields and Lieutenant Governor La Trobe (who “expressed his appreciation for the orderly manner in which the people of Ballarat had conducted their proceedings”). Carr retailed the whole story to great acclaim at a public meeting back in Ballarat. He told the crowds that he would send copies of the proceedings to the home authorities and principal London journals in an attempt to sway opinion in their favour: “feeling satisfied that no sooner would the injustice and tyranny to which they had been subjected become publicly known in England, then the sympathies of every English heart would be with them, and the authors of such injustice be called to an account for their misconduct (Cheers and hear, hear), misconduct which had nearly brought the colony to the verge of rebellion”. Carr asked “if their delegates and committee still possessed their entire confidence (Yes, yes and cheers)”, and after he and Silvester were warmly thanked for their efforts, the meeting endorsed the text of the following protest to be transmitted to the authorities: “We, the undersigned, by the power invested in us by the diggers of Balaarat, do hereby on their behalf most emphatically protest against the proposed Bill for the management of the gold fields becoming the law of the land, it being iniquitous, unjust and unconstitutional, and an infringement upon the rights of freemen, those freemen being unrepresented in the Council of the colony. Alfred Yates Carr, Henry Woodthorpe Silvester” Carr responded to the thanks with a short speech (“happily the danger of civil convulsion has, for the present and, as I trust, for ever passed away") before leaving the stage to acclaim. 11
This role as the voice of the diggers was clearly a congenial one for Carr, which makes the subsequent turn of events hard to fathom. In August 1854, he made a fateful decision to move his residence opposite the new Eureka Hotel run by James Bentley. 12 He had only been there a couple of months when late one night he was called outside to examine a digger lying in the street. Finding the man seriously injured if not already dead, he assisted with moving him into the hotel and attempted to treat him, to no avail. Carr conducted a post mortem examination and concluded that though the body reeked of spirits, the cause of death had been a blow to the head.
At the coroner’s inquest the next day it became apparent that the deceased, James Scobie, drunk and in the company of another digger, had been refused access to Bentley’s hotel. In making a scene and trying their luck a second time they were set upon by a group of people. A witness placed Bentley at the scene. The judicial inquiry into Scobie’s death was run by Ballarat Police Magistrate, John D’Ewes, who was widely regarded to be a business partner of Bentley. D’Ewes conduct in the inquiry was so blatantly partial to Bentley’s cause that the latter’s discharge was seen as yet another example of corrupt authority looking after its own at the expense of the life of a digger. An angry public meeting got out of hand: the Eureka hotel was burnt to the ground.
11 Argus 30/12/1853 12 Argus 4/8/1854
12 The death of James Scobie and the riot at the Eureka Hotel would prove to be the touchpaper that would light the Eureka rebellion. Carr could, had he chosen, have played another star turn as the diggers’ champion. All that was required of him was to testify that the injuries received by Scobie were consistent with a blow from a shovel that Bentley had been seen carrying. But when he took his turn at the stand he seemed determine to aid the cause of the accused, giving an obscure disquisition on the effects of blows on men with empty and full stomachs, and suggesting that Scobie was so “replete” that even a mild blow such as the head striking the ground could cause death. 13 Notwithstanding this evidence, the jury took only 15 minutes to convict Bentley and two accomplices of manslaughter.
Carr was now a pariah. Was he merely remaining true to his professional opinions, and failed to read the political winds? Or had the pro democracy movement gone beyond what he was prepared to accept? At any rate, rumours circulated that Carr had swapped sides, and gone so far as to be sworn in by the authorities as a special constable around this time.14 Certainly, as his colleague Dr Clendenning later reported, he “became very unpopular and distrusted, as he was generally considered an agent of the Government, and therefore lost his private practice in a great measure”. 15
Relations between the diggers and the government continue to deteriorate. A group of diggers burns down Bentley’s hotel: three are arrested. Ten thousand congregate at Bakery Hill to demand their release, and the Ballarat Reform League is created as a vehicle for the digger’s grievances. Carr makes a lengthy speech on theories of political representation, which is poorly received. 16 But when the League’s resolutions are presented to Governor Hotham some days later they are read, then cursorily filed away with no response. A second meeting is called, and handbills adorn the diggings advertising a public meeting on Bakery Hill. DOWN WITH THE LICENSE FEE! DOWN WITH DESPOTISM! “WHO SO BASE AS TO BE A SLAVE”. The blue Southern Cross flag is raised for the first time. The delegates of the Reform League report yet more delaying tactics from the Governor, and the diggers become restless. The meeting votes to burn licenses and to resist any attempt to arrest unlicensed miners. Commissioner Rede decides to demonstrate the government’s resolve to retain license fees, and to meet any civil disobedience head on. Troopers are sent on yet another license hunt the next day, resulting in rioting and violent clashes. Shots are fired. More troops are sent out to rescue those trying to bring back arrested miners. The diggers converge on Bakery Hill yet again, and in the absence of the Reform League leadership,
13 Argus, 20/11/1854 14 Bowden, KM 1977, Goldrush Doctors at Ballarat , [Balwyn, Vic.], p77 15 Letter from Clendinning to Robert Bowie, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 11878, Unit 6 16 Molony, J 2001, Eureka , Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic., p94
13 Peter Lalor incites the crowd to burn their licenses and swear an oath of allegiance to the rebel Southern Cross flag. Bizarrely, given the volatility of the situation and his own poor standing amongst the diggers, Carr decides to attend the meeting as well. Someone from the crowd recognises him and calls out his name, he is seized and taken to be a government spy. A gun is placed to his head and he is half walked, half dragged towards the flagpole, perhaps to be lynched. Only the prompt action of one of the rebellion’s leaders, Timothy Hayes, saves his life. 17 After this experience Carr moved (literally as well as metaphorically) into the government camp for his own protection.
Following these clashes the diggers constructed a stockade at Eureka under the flag of the Southern Cross. The result is well known. In the early hours of the morning on Sunday 3 rd December, government troops surrounded and attacked the stockade. Asleep, unprepared, the details of their defences betrayed by spies, the diggers were overrun within minutes. Because many of the wounded fled the Stockade, the exact death toll is unknown: Peter Lalor stated that 14 diggers died immediately and 8 were fatally injured; a further 6 soldiers and police were also killed. 18 The first doctor to arrive at the horrible scene inside the Stockade was Alfred Yates Carr. He first tended to about 15 of the wounded who were too badly injured to be moved, and when this was done he went looking for assistance – but not before souveniring a piece of the Eureka flag, which he subsequently gave to Dr Clendinning, and which eventually found its way into the collections of the State Library of Victoria. 19 The first man he came across was Carboni, who despite being one of the leaders of the rebellion had not been in the stockade that night, and the two of them set up an impromptu hospital in the London Hotel. Carboni assisted Carr in treating the wounded for several hours, but when the police entered the hospital to arrest him, Carr made no remonstrance. Carboni was confused, and his later recollections suggest that he came to believe that the doctor was in the pay of the government: “Dr. Carr. spoke not a word in my behalf, though I naturally enough had appealed to him, who knew me these two years, to do so. This circumstance, and his being the very first to enter the stockade, after the military job was over, though he had never before been on the Eureka during the agitation, his appointment to attend
17 Argus 4/12/1854, 21/3/1855; Melbourne Morning Herald 13/3/1855 18 According to a second hand retelling of Carr’s account, he found 12 dead and 12 wounded. Dunderdale, G 1898, The Book of the Bush , Ward, Lock, London, p114 19 http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=MAIN&reset_config=true&d ocId=SLV_VOYAGER1927110
14 the wounded diggers that were brought up to the Camp, and especially his absence at my trial, were and are still a mystery to me”. 20
Carr spent several weeks treating the injured, including amputating the leg of William Hardie, an unfortunate livestock dealer who was shot for no apparent reason near the government camp the day after the rebellion was put down, and died a few days later. Carr himself had another brush with death in not dissimilar circumstances: when District Surgeon Williams failed to give a password on approaching the camp, he was fired upon by a trigger happy sentry, the musket ball missing its target, passing through the wall of the hospital and smashing into a medicine chest next to which Carr was reading, striking him with splintered wood. 21
This was the final straw. Carr visited a former colleague in Colac for several days, looking afraid, remaining silent and withdrawn. It was clear that his career in Ballarat was finished, and he began to make plans to return to England. He was subpoenaed to appear as a witness at the trials of the thirteen diggers charged with treason, including Carboni, for whom he could have not only vouched that he was not in the stockade on the night of the attack but that he also stayed to assist with the care of the wounded. In Carr’s own account, he could no longer delay in the colony with the “repeated postponement” of the trials, though he recognised that by leaving the cause of the prisoners’ for whom he was to give evidence might be “slightly injured”. He had simply had enough. On the 11 th March 1855 the James Baines departed Melbourne for England, with Carr on board. Archibald Michie and Dick Ireland are left to rely on other witnesses and their own famous eloquence in their defence of the Eureka rebels. No matter: not a jury in the colony will convict these men. Carboni and his fellow diggers are acquitted.
......
Eight years later, Carr finally takes the stand. Despite the passage of time Michie still has a distaste for his star witness, and hands the examination over to his assistant, Mr Wyatt. After his initial excitement, Carr settles. Gripping the rail of the witness stand he recounts, in some detail, his own ill treatment and that which he observed against other patients. Describes a period when he was placed in restraint continuously for a week: “A strait waistcoat, padlocked, with the hands behind, was placed on me in the first instance. It was put on in such a way as to create actual physical torture. Over that waistcoat was placed a bag”. Tell us more about the bag, says Wyatt – how was it put on, how did you feel? It was “composed of strong No. 1 canvas, impervious to
20 Carboni, R 1982, The Eureka Stockade , Currey O'Neil, South Yarra, Vic. 21 Argus 13/12/1854
15 water, which was passed over the feet, and slipped up the body, fitting closely, the hands having to be placed flat against the sides. The bag came close round my neck – so close, indeed, that even the bugs could not get ingress between the bag and the neck. I continually passed urine into the bag, and there it was next morning, accompanied sometimes with faecal matter. The head was not protected from vermin... My own head was bitten all over with bugs and fleas”. And why were you placed under restraint? I had an arrangement, where I could go occasionally to town with an attendant. Feeling that I was being detained at Yarra Bend for no good reason I obtained an interview with the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, to plead my case. The next day I also spoke with Doctor McCrea about the gross ill treatment of a patient named Lang, and the improper manner in which inquests were being conducted. Dr McCrea asked me for a written statement: but before I could provide one I was taken away to solitary confinement and restrained.
The use of “the bag” becomes, through the trial, an iconic issue, a metaphor for patient abuse and cruelty in all its forms. Is it, as Doctor Bowie contends, a humane form of treatment for patients who are violent or agitated, who may do harm to themselves or others, only to be used as a last resort? Or is it a routine form of cruelty, old fashioned and barbaric, simply used as a form of discipline and punishment? It becomes emblematic of two different perspectives on the treatment of the insane, which are themselves embodied by the arch enemies, Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum Doctor Robert Bowie, and Colonial Surgeon Doctor William McCrea. The two have feuded since shortly after the latter’s arrival in the colony. After sixteen years service as a naval surgeon, on his arrival in Victoria McCrea had been sent to the diggings at Forest Creek as the local coroner and magistrate. The energetic Ulsterman so impressed Lieutenant Governor La Trobe that in mid 1853 he was appointed to the position of Colonial Surgeon. By this time Bowie had been in charge of the Asylum for nearly a year: he had found it in an appalling state, and despite little experience in the field had gradually improved aspects of patient welfare and the quality of the site itself, using patients to build roads, drainage and gardens. However when McCrea, a driven individual with a huge appetite not only for work but for control, discovered on his appointment that the Colonial Surgeon’s remit did not extend to the Asylum, he campaigned vigorously – and successfully – to have this remedied. He then immediately set about providing suggestions for multiple ways in which things could be improved. Bowie was unhappy about having his absolute authority over the asylum usurped, and had a personality that was easily bruised by any perceived criticism. He dug in his heels, defended existing practice, refused to change. The two soon detested each other.
16 Restraint of patients was one of the old fashioned practices that McCrea saw Bowie as clinging to, part of the amateur, disreputable and gothic past of asylum practice. It was normal practice well into the nineteenth century: the mad, deprived of the faculty of reason that was the essential component of humanity had, some thought, regressed to the state of animals. Patients who behaved through word or deed in an uncontrolled or aggressive state were therefore treated in much the same way as dangerous animals – with shackling and with violence. The chief treatment used by the mad doctor was “inculcating salutary fear”, a method most famously employed by Francis Willis with King George III. Willis and his contemporaries believed in the power of “the eye”, the capacity of the mad doctor to tame the insane with the power of his gaze. He also believed that “The emotion of fear is the first and often the only one by which they can be governed. By working on it one removes their thoughts from the phantasms occupying them and brings them back to reality, even if this entails inflicting pain and suffering”. 22
McCrea saw himself as bringing modern, scientific methods to the colony, such as those advocated by the doyen of British asylum management, John Conolly. Absence of restraint was part of the new and humane “moral treatment”. On his appointment at Hanwell asylum in 1839, Conolly said: “In a fortnight there was not a single person under restraint in the asylum. I instantly removed all the manacles, all the staples to which those manacles were attached, and sent them to the blacksmith to be forged into more innocent implements”. 23 He wrote a volume titled The treatment of the insane without mechanical restraints , and in trying to clearly differentiate his own work from the practices of the past, inclined somewhat to hyperbole: “Indeed it would almost seem as if, at the period from the middle to near the end of the last century, the superintendents of the insane had become frantic in cruelty, from the impunity with which their despotism was attended”. But it was not that those asylum superintendents who used restraint were innately bad, more that “People not naturally cruel became habituated to severity until all feelings of humanity were forgotten… by degrees, restraints became ever more sever, and torture more and more ingenious”. This, in essence, was the charge against Bowie.
Bowie, though, was proud of the bag as a device of his own invention: “When I was in practice in Scotland I had the charge of an insane woman, upon whom we could get no straightjacket or anything else to secure her. I then bethought myself of a sack. We got one, made it into a kind of dress. And put her into it, and I had the satisfaction of seeing the woman cured”. 24 He believed that restraint was sometimes necessary, and that this was a far kinder mode than (for example) manacles. Even McCrea was initially inclined to accept some degree of restraint of patients as a pragmatic necessity. A report in December 1855 noted that the “causes of restraint were, in some cases, a disposition to maniacal violence, and among the men self pollution; but more generally dirty and
22 Scull, A 1993, The Most Solitary of Afflictions , Yale University Press, New Haven, p69 23 As cited in the Argus 16/6/1862 24 A Report of the Inquiry into the Management of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, as detailed in the nine days trial of the action for libel Bowie v. Wilson , 1862, Wilson and Mackinnon, Melbourne (hereafter Bowie vs Wilson)
17 destructive habits made recourse to restraint necessary. In all instances, the Board are convinced that restraint has been judiciously administered”. 25 By 1856 the asylum was averaging about 19 cases of restraint per month, the “causes for the adoption of restraint were – 1 st . Maniacal violence: 2 nd , Dirty and obscene habits of the lunatics: and 3 rd , Tendency to suicide”. It was still though, McCrea thought, something to be done away with: and over the next twelve months a series of improvements to patient welfare were adopted, such that McCrea’s next report could take on much more triumph list position. “Restraint may be said to be abolished in the asylum”! But having so publicly declared victory in bringing Yarra Bend up to the standard of modern British asylums, any future horror stories from Yarra Bend could only reflect badly on the Colonial Surgeon. Unless of course it could be publicly seen that the blame for such practices sat fairly and squarely with the aged Superintendent.
......
Carr had only been a patient at the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum for three weeks when apparently without warning he was restrained by attendants and his head shaved and blistered. This was not an unusual course of treatment at this time for a range of illnesses, not just insanity – doctors placed irritants on the skin to cause a blister which was then lanced, the release of pus being thought to be a way of ridding the body of toxic substances. Carr however felt that he was being punished for threatening to expose instances of the abuse of patients at Yarra Bend – specifically, the beating and “bagging” of a retired French army officer, Hebert, that led to the latter’s death. After being “treated” in this manner, and believing himself to be illegally detained at Yarra Bend in any event, Carr attempted to escape. He did not succeed. As a result, he later wrote in a petition to the government, he was: “placed in restraint, the tortures inflicted under this latter name and the agony endured were such as to seriously endanger the life of your petitioner and render him at times unconscious the manner of imposing the restraints is described in an annexed note. your petitioner was kept under restraint without interruption from the 6 th to the 15 th of April as appears from entries made in the official restraint book kept at the Asylum when it was removed in consequence of the serious illness of your petitioner. On the 19 th restraint was again applied, without cause and continued until the 23 rd , during this time your petitioner was treated with great brutality by several of the assistants and was constantly most grossly insulted”.26
“How did you respond?”, asks Wyatt.
“On the morning of Sunday, the 26 th April, after passing a restless night, owing to the bugs, Morgan Irwin opened the cell door and pitched in a tin plate containing my tea and a piece of bread on the top, just like he would pitch a bone to a dog. I did not like to have my bread in a sloppy state; I preferred to have it dry, and the tea by itself. I remarked that I was not in the habit of being treated like a dog. This led to angry words,
25 Victorian Parliamentary Papers C3 1855/56, Report of Visitors for December 1855 26 Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 11878, Unit 4, 1857 petition
18 at the conclusion of which I was induced to spit at Irwin as he was closing the door. He turned round, and, as I was lying on the floor, gave me a kick in the loins, which had the effect of pitching me over on to the bed. As I inferred that the next step would be the introduction of the straight waistcoat I barricaded my door. In course of time Irwin endeavoured to force the door. I treated him first to the entire contents of a pot containing urine and faecal matter. I then struck him on the head with the vessel, the scar of which yet remains. I then became perfectly passive. I was knocked down, got a thorough good hammering about the head and shoulders, and was rendered powerless. Some time afterwards, when lying actually helpless on the mattress, Irwin came and jumped and stamped on my back with all his force. Had I been lying on the floor instead of the mattress, bones would have been broken, and in all probability death would have resulted”.27
Morgan Irwin has brought Carr to the courtroom that day and stands off to one side behind the witness box, listens to the testimony with a wry smile on his face. In the five years following this incident, the two have developed some understanding and even a degree of closeness, Carr coming to have “a great liking for” the older attendant. 28 Irwin himself remained remarkably phlegmatic about the whole affair, even though the head injuries he received confined him to bed for three weeks. He always strongly denied kicking or stamping on his patient. Of Carr, Irwin stated that he “afterwards said he was sorry for what he had done, and hoped that he would not do it again. I said I hoped he would not; but I knew he was mad, and did not know what he was doing at the time… He always said he would kill some of us. On one occasion, when he had an attack of delirium, he said he would kill me, but he would wait for his own convenience”. However, “During his sane hours he was always very civil”. 29
With further prompting, Carr describes other instances of patient abuse which he has witnessed. For example, the case of patient Lang, held in the solitary confinement cell next to Carr’s. “Between twelve and one o’clock I heard a footstep in the ward and a noise as if a chain or buckle were being drawn along the ground. I heard the door of Lang’s cell open, and a series of severe blows struck… I heard Lang cry, “Enough, enough” and ask for a drink of water. The voice of an attendant replied, as I believe, “Not a d d drop.” The door then closed, and the footsteps retired… On the following morning I had opportunity of examining Lang’s person, and I observed that one side of his face was severely bruised, while the other side showed two red lines, as if he had been struck there with a strap.”
Carr has been talking for over an hour when Wyatt finishes. With each question he grows more settled, more credible, and the jury begins to see, behind the drab asylum uniform, the other Alfred Yates Carr, no longer the notorious lunatic but the well educated and intelligent professional surgeon. Dick Ireland has been contorting his florid face into
27 Bowie vs Wilson, p12 28 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p42 29 Bowie vs Wilson, p58 60
19 various expressions of incredulity for the benefit of the jury. He now has his opportunity to cast doubt on Carr’s evidence more directly, as he eases an ample frame off the bench to begin cross examination. If Carr has grown in credibility with the jury as the morning has progressed, it is critical that they see him once again as an unreliable lunatic and not as a professional medical man.
Could you tell us, Sir, whether you have been committed to any asylum as a certified lunatic prior to arriving at Yarra Bend?
......
Escaping from the aftermath of Eureka, a long sea voyage back to England should have been the ideal opportunity for Carr to regather his energies. Instead it enmeshed him in a melodrama that ultimately assumed a major place in his obsessional repertoire, setting in place a fixation on seeing a personal tormentor punished before the eyes of the world, and a quest for justice and self justification that would ultimately lead him back to Australia and into the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum.
Travelling on the James Baines was an experience in itself. Her 63 day voyage to Melbourne had approached the quickest on record, and her captain, Charles McDonnell, had a reputation as a fine and daring sailor. Unfortunately his concern for the comforts of his passengers did not match his desire to make the best possible time. The food in the second and third cabins proved to be bad: the beef was inedible, the salt fish unfit for consumption, the flour tainted and the biscuit a disgrace. Each passenger was given only a small allowance of water, even in the heat of the tropics. Creeping dissatisfaction led a group of passengers, Carr foremost amongst them, to seek some redress. But Captain McDonnell not only had no interest in the diet of the passengers, he was also running a lucrative sideline in the illegal sale of liquor, and had a penchant for clapping both crew and passengers in irons. A sailor who got a little drunk was put in chains for three days. The captain discovered his chief steward in flagrante delicto with a female passenger: both were locked up, the woman with a metal gagging iron in her mouth, from which she was bleeding profusely when released 36 hours later. 30 Furthermore, the daring feats of sailing that allowed McDonnell to achieve such fast voyages seem at times to have scared the wits out of the passengers, as when he ran at full sail within a stones throw of the rocks off the Irish coast. 31
Carr was also unfortunate enough to run foul of one of the passengers, a Mr Bridgeman, who presumably knew something – though obviously not very much – of Carr’s recent history, calling him a ‘Ballarat rioter’ and trying to pick a quarrel with him at every opportunity. Matters reached a head when Bridgeman accused Carr of theft from his cabin; Carr called him an ‘impertinent puppy’; Bridgeman kicked him; Carr threw coffee
30 The Morning Chronicle, 24/5/1855; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 25/5/1855; Liverpool Mercury 7/8/1888 31 http://www.eraoftheclipperships.com/page53.html
20 in his face, seized him by the throat and threw him to the ground; at which point Bridgeman struck Carr on the head with a cribbage board. The matter was brought before Captain McDonnell, who had already taken a set against Carr for raising the issue of the unfitness of the passengers’ food, and who applied his favourite remedy to any shipboard problems by clapping Carr in irons for three days: even more exquisitely painful as Carr had apparently dislocated a shoulder in the earlier melee. 32
Carr reached England feeling that he had been done a monstrous and cruel wrong. He and many other passengers held an ‘indignation meeting’ at the Angel Hotel in Liverpool shortly after their mercifully safe landing, to discuss what course of action to take against the captain and crew. The mood was angry, the space full, and Carr was to the fore. He proposed a motion, carried unanimously, that a deputation of passengers call on the Earl of Shaftsbury to ask for his assistance in bringing their complaint before Parliament, and a subscription to defray legal expenses was also set up. 33 It must have seemed to him like the heady early days at Ballarat when he was a leading figure in the Gold Diggers Association, spurred on by a wide feeling of public injustice – before things all went to hell as they had over the last year. Carr could be a passionate fighter for justice – usually for himself – but there were rare times in his life he became a leader rather than a Quixote.
Within weeks though, the whole affair had gone as sour as the ship’s biscuit. When Captain McDonnell was brought before the Government Emigration Agent the court was crowded to excess, expecting terrible revelations of cruelty. 34 They learned nothing more than the plum pudding seemed to be made out of melted tallow, flour and grease. 35 Carr was not even in attendance – he was out trying to round up witnesses – and by the time he returned, the magistrate had already dismissed the complaints – much to the satisfaction of the local mercantile men, if not to the passengers. It should have been over, but it couldn’t be for Carr until justice had been seen to be done. For the next two months, long after the other passengers had given up the fight, he continued to write to senior government ministers and the press, and in a last, desperate roll of the dice, applied for a warrant to arrest Captain McDonnell the day before the James Baines was due to leave port. The magistrate described the application as “vindictive” and summarily threw it out. 36
It is odd that after nearly three years away from his family, Carr chose to be shuttle backwards and forwards between a hotel and the establishment of a Miss Carroll in Withington (just outside Manchester), where it seems his sons had been boarding for some time. Where his wife Louisa was is unknown. Carr had other family matters to attend to though: his mother Mary was dying. She too lived near Manchester, and no doubt Carr was trying to balance the demands of litigating Captain McDonnell in
32 Manchester Times, 30/5/1855 33 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 25/5/1855 34 Liverpool Mercury, 29/5/1855 35 Liverpool Mercury, 29/5/1855 36 Glasgow Herald, 6/8/1855
21 Liverpool, visiting his children, and visiting his mother. With the strain of these events he became increasingly fragile of mind and unpredictable of behaviour. A fight broke out between himself, his brother Frederick and the latter’s brother in law, a Mr Brown, in which Carr struck Brown and was thrown out of the house. He was back, in a quieter mood, the next evening. A few days later, his mother, angry, gave him books and some of the family silver, and told him to expect no more from her. She went so far as to tell other family members to watch that he took nothing else. Perhaps, in the absence of any obvious income, Carr was broke and had been pressing the family for money. The next day he waited by her sickbed and refused to allow her doctor to attend, insisting that another physician be brought out from Manchester. The following day Mary Carr died. At the inquest the jury found that she had died from a “rupture of a blood vessel in the brain, produced by violent emotion of the mind” and intimating that it was the distress caused by Carr’s visits and behaviour that had brought this about. Carr though had other theories. Distraught, delusional, he claimed that she had been poisoned by other members of the family. The evening after the inquest he stood before the Manchester Exchange and read a proclamation accusing his relatives of murder, and was later accosted by police whilst kicking at a door and waving a loaded pistol around. He asked them whether “all that party were taken?”, i.e. whether those who had poisoned his mother had been captured. The constable, knowing him and wishing to calm the situation, informed him that they were all safely in the Stockport lockups, at which point Carr discharged his pistol into the ground, handed it over and walked quietly to the courtroom, where he was charged with being disorderly in the street. He stood in the dock holding a bunch of flowers that he had grabbed along the way; put his hat on his head and invited anyone present to try to knock it off; accused the coroner of high treason; and said to the magistrate “this is the last time you will sit on that bench. I shall have that place, and you shall have this.” He then threw the bunch of flowers to the floor and jumped out of the dock before being overpowered. As his mind was obviously unhinged, two local doctors were brought in to examine him, and shortly thereafter the former asylum doctor was committed to the Prestwich Lunatic Asylum as a patient. 37
The two doctors who signed Carr’s admission warrant recorded, as the “facts indicating insanity”, his rambling, incoherent speech, and the persistent delusion that “he is and has been in his Majesty’s service & that he has been lately appointed to some high office by the Secretary of State”. One also added “shape of head” and “has the appearance of a person of unsound mind”: whilst phrenology had relatively recently ceased to be respectable as a mode of determining insanity, doctors interested in mental science were increasingly interested in physiognomy and facial structure as a means of diagnosing different psychological maladies: but perhaps this is overanalysing the matter, and the doctor just knew a
37 Manchester Times, 18/8/1855
22 madman when he saw one. The asylum case notes tell a further tale of violence and delusion. Within a few minutes of admission he had managed to punch the head attendant in the face. He was described as having large whiskers and beard (“altogether a formidable look”), which were shaved off and he was placed in seclusion. He continued to state that the coroner at his mother’s inquest had committed treason and that he had damning evidence against him. He also managed to escape from the asylum though was soon recaptured and had to be carried the whole way back. After a couple of weeks it was noted that he was improving in both mental and physical health, and on the 12 th October, nearly two months after his admission to the asylum, he was discharged, and, the case notes state, “recovered”.
Though this particular bout of mania had passed, “recovered” would be too strong a term, for the underlying delusional structure was still in place. There is no record of what Carr did in the year after his release: whether he went to live with his wife and children, whether he resumed his medical practice. Nor is there any record of how he explained to Louisa that he had determined to return to Australia to pursue further evidence against Captain McDonnell and the owners of the James Baines (as it happened, a gentleman called James Baines, proprietor of the Black Ball Line). Nor any record of how Louisa took the news. Carr could evidently appear well and rational at this time, as he was appointed as ship's surgeon on board the Persia . An anonymous correspondent later wrote in horror that such a notorious madman should be placed in a position of care over so many lives, but a passenger on the ship stated that “Dr. Carr, from the commencement of the voyage of the Persia to its end, was all that a medical officer should be – efficient and gentlemanly; and in one particular case, which all my fellow passengers will recognise without further specification, his attention was beyond all praise”. 38
The Persia arrived in Melbourne on 27 th January 1857, and Carr set about placing adverts in the Argus and Government Gazette: “The Emigration Commissioners having decided, upon the recommendation of the Secretary of State (Sir George Gray), that the Prosecutions against the Master and Owners of the ship James Baines, for violation of the Passengers Act, shall be renewed in every case in which evidence sufficient to warrant conviction shall be produced. All Passengers who left Melbourne by the James Baines on March 10th, 1855, and arrived at Liverpool on May 20th, 1855, who have not already done so, are requested to forward, without delay, their names, addresses, and complaints, regarding Bad Provisions, Sale of Spirits, Ill Treatment, &c., in writing, directed to Dr. A. Y. CARR, Post Office, Melbourne. Victoria. by order of the James Baines Legal Redress Committee”. 39 Almost certainly the Secretary of State and Emigration Commissioners had said no such thing, other perhaps than to ask Carr to go away and not come back until he had some proper evidence to support his claims.
38 Argus 21/2/1857 39 Argus 5/2/1857
23
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Yes, said Carr, after the death of my mother I became mentally depressed, in consequence of which I was an inmate of the Prestwich lunatic asylum. I remained there several weeks, and was well treated. I was committed by the magistrates on the grounds that I was incapable of self control. I believe the treatment I received there saved my life.
You were not there because you were drugged with Indian Hemp?
No.
But you still believe that this was the reason why you had the attack that saw you committed as a dangerous lunatic to the Yarra Bend Asylum? Indeed, you wrote a pamphlet on the subject, claiming that you old enemies from Ballarat had followed you and introduced the drug into your wine and tobacco?
Yes, I have a strong suspicion that one two or three occasions Indian hemp has been administered to me.
......
On Carr’s return to Melbourne he looked up some old friends. They were surprised by his appearance, it having been reported in a local paper that he had died in an insane asylum in England. He stayed with an old school friend, Dr O’Reilly, and the two were considering going into business together. Matters were going well enough until on a Saturday morning a few days later Carr “was suddenly attacked with delirium (after smoking tobacco and eating a small quantity of fruit) the symptoms of such delirium being precisely similar to the effects described in the second volume of Johnsons Chemistry of Common Life as being produced by a narcotic intoxicating drug called Indian Hemp, and much used in India for intoxicating and sinister purposes under the name of Gunjah” which had “been administered gratuitously for the third time, by some unknown persons, evidently for the purpose of creating delirium and temporary madness in the person of one of peculiarly nervous sensibility”. 40 Having gone out shopping saying he was going to buy some vegetables, Carr returned with 300 pounds worth of goods, including goat, rabbits and champagne. An argument with O’Reilly ensued, with Carr smashing up the drawing room and giving his friend a black eye. 41 Leaving the house he went to the shop of a Mr Ellis and stole a brooch: hearing the shop owner accuse him of theft, Carr struck him in the head and was promptly arrested, taken to the police station and charged with theft and assault. After spending the night in a cell, he was removed to the Eastern Gaol for a week for observation as a possible lunatic.
40 Carr’s descriptions, Age 28/2/1857 and in unpublished MS in Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4 41 Argus 18/2/1857
24 Carr regarded these proceedings – and the fact that he had not been before a magistrate – as completely illegal. He also claimed that he was badly treated in the jail. A few days later he escaped, only to be recaptured “in a most brutal manner”. On finally being brought before a magistrate, various witnesses including O’Reilly, the gaoler at Eastern Gaol, and the Chief Medical Officer William McCrae all testified that Carr had been insane at the time, and showed signs of delirium tremens when locked up. O’Reilly though believed that Carr was a monomaniac, insane on only two points: his views about the events at Ballarat and those on board the James Baines. Apart from these areas he was quite sane and competent to practice medicine. This evidence swayed the judge, who told Carr that he would discharge him if he promised to return to the Persia and put himself under the care of the captain, which he duly did. 42 Though not for long: he soon again took lodgings in town, worked himself up seeking evidence to prosecute the James Baines affair, and on the 8 th March 1857 he suffered another attack. Following a visit to Dr Howitt in the afternoon he went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens, stopped for a smoke and it was at this point, he believed, that he was again set upon by delirium, as a result of the adulterated tobacco. In his deranged state he decided to visit a Catholic priest at the Elizabeth St church. Whilst waiting he pocketed a watch from a mantelpiece, proclaimed himself the king of England, got into a scuffle and was taken away by the police and locked a cell at the Swanston St police station. Appearing before the magistrate the next day he was clearly not in a rational state, shouting, banging the furniture and rocking backwards and forwards, before repeating to the magistrate more or less the same sentiment he had expressed when in an identical position in England two years earlier – “We’ll change places before long! The last shall be first, and the first last – at least that’s what Jesus Christ said”. 43 He was again committed to the Eastern Gaol for one week for medical inquiry on the charge of being a dangerous lunatic, and then at the end of the week, on 17 th March 1857, committed as a patient to the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum. 44
Carr’s committal brought, to all intents and purposes, an end to his pursuit of Captain McDonnell and the James Baines . Perhaps though he had succeeded in putting a curse on all concerned: the next year, whilst unloading cargo in Liverpool, the James Baines caught fire and was destroyed; her insurance policy had expired three days before,
42 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4; Argus 18/2/1857; Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p19 43 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4; Argus 10/3/1857 44 The warrant from Governor Barkly was not actually signed until a few days later on the 23 rd
25 inflicting massive financial losses on the owner; and Captain McDonnell, distraught, retired from naval service only to die of pneumonia several months later.
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Being poisoned by drugs was a recurring part of Carr’s obsessive delusional structure, though for many years it was opium rather than Indian Hemp (or, as we know it today, marijuana) that was his focus. It all seems to start on the morning of 14 th December 1851. Carr, in private practice at the time, is called out to treat a young child. Entering the dim, overheated bedroom he finds the boy in convulsions. Despite Carr’s best efforts, he dies a few hours later. During the treatment, Carr questions the boy’s mother and discovers that he was given medicine the night before prescribed by another qualified doctor, Mr Birks. Sniffing the empty bottle, Carr thinks he detects opiates, and from the boy’s symptoms concludes that he has died from opium poisoning. He charges Birks with negligence, of prescribing medicine without examining the patient, and asks for an inquest: but the coroner returns the verdict of “death by natural disease”, finding no trace of opium either during the autopsy or in the medicine bottles. Refusing to accept the verdict, Carr appears before a magistrate in the Salford police court preferring a charge of murder, conduct sufficiently bizarre to occasion a newspaper article, headed “Extraordinary Conduct of a Surgeon”. The affair ends with the magistrate telling Carr to “Leave the court sir; your conduct throughout has been disgraceful”; Carr exits stage left, promising to take the case to a “higher authority”.45
The notion of a child poisoned by opium strikes us as scandalous. In the mid nineteenth century however it was a common occurrence. In a society with a far narrower range of medical options, the use of opium as a cheap and effective painkiller was as widespread and uncontroversial as the use of paracetamol is today. Its sale was completely unregulated in Britain before 1857, and it could be purchased over the counter for a penny in many shops and in a range of forms: pills and lozenges, powders, cordials, and dissolved in alcohol (laudanum). It was the preferred treatment for a range of ills “from intestinal to bronchial to menstrual to psychological”, and was also believed to counter the effects of alcohol and was therefore frequently taken to sober up. 46 With such widespread use and no regulatory control over the strength or labelling of different mixtures, accidental death through opium poisoning was inevitable (a figure of 140 deaths was given for 1868). The issue was sufficiently well recognised that many home doctor’s manuals gave instructions for treating opium poisoning via purging. 47
45 Bristol Mercury, 27/12/1851 46 Milligan, B 2005, "Morphine Addicted Doctors, The English Opium Eater, and Embattled Medical Authority", Victorian Literature and Culture , v.33 no.2, p542; Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England , Free Association Books, p33 47 Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England , Free Association Books, p79
26 Opium not only treated all ills, but was prescribed for all ages. It was widely used as an “infant quietener”, and there were many soothing syrups available: Godfrey's Cordial (a mixture of opium, treacle, water and spices), Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, Street's Infant Quietness, Slowe's Infants' Preservative. 48 The latter was particularly popular around Manchester, and could well have been the cause of the death of the child whom Carr was attending. Whilst there was some middle class disquiet about working class parenting techniques that involved the use of such preparations, there was equally a popular view that such ‘cordials’ were stimulants and strengtheners and actually good for children. But strengths varied from bottle to bottle, evaporation could further concentrate the mixture, and children developed a tolerance for the drug, leading to higher doses. Inevitably, tragedies occurred. What was scandalous about Carr’s accusations was not that a child had been given opium, or even that it had been poisoned by the dose, but the fact that he claimed that it was a doctor who was responsible. The nascent medical profession was still trying to establish its authority to control the prescription of certain drugs, such as opium, and relied on the argument that leaving prescription to professionals would prevent such tragedies. Carr’s accusation was regarded in some quarters as being made against the profession as much as an individual, and he found little support from amongst his colleagues.
Opium poisoning did however become a matter of intense interest to Carr. Within a few months he published a short article in the Medical Times and Gazette, an account of “Infantile Poisoning By Opium Successfully Treated”. This time, an extremely similar case proves to have a happier outcome due to Carr’s treatment using a mustard cataplasm and bleeding by three leeches. Could it be conjectured that his extreme response to the first case was conditioned to some extent by a feeling of guilt that his professional skills had been unable to save the child’s life?
Carr corresponded on the topic with Alfred Taylor, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Lecturer on Chemistry at Guy's Hospital, London, who was preparing an expanded edition on his work on “Poisons”. 49 It is also the theme that provided Carr with the topic for his final professional paper, “Poisoning by Opium”, in the July 1858 volume of the Australian Medical Journal, written and published whilst he was a patient at Yarra Bend, and probably one of the few articles in the Australian medical literature published by a man who the very same medical establishment had declared to be insane.
Carr’s fixation with opium inevitably raises the question: was he himself an addict? There are intriguing leads. When he qualified for the Licentiate of the Society of
48 Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England , Free Association Books, p34 49 Argus, 17/1/1853
27 Apothecaries in 1843 he listed his address as “China or Indian Army”, and the Society’s List of Licentiates has “China” as his place of residence. The Treaty of Nanjing had been signed only a short time before, bringing to an end the First Opium War in which the British army had forcibly opened several Chinese ports to trade in order to continue the importation of opium to pay for Chinese tea. Perhaps Carr had sensed an opportunity for furthering his career in the new colony of Hong Kong. Perhaps he had joined, or intended to join, the East India Company as a surgeon: though the Company had by this stage lost its monopoly on the China trade it was still active in the area. The need for surgeons was certainly intense: whilst few British soldiers died during fighting in the Opium War, many perished from fevers and dysentery. Carr’s own father was a military man, perhaps a further prompt in this direction. But it is not clear whether he made it to China or not. It is tempting to imagine the young man working as a surgeon at one of the British controlled ports and seeing first hand the effects of extensive opium consumption. We could imagine him experimenting with the use of opium as a medical treatment, either smoked or in the form of laudanum. We could imagine him an opiate addict, a not uncommon fate for a nineteenth century surgeon, though not as well documented as the “luxurious” or “stimulant” use of the drug by romantics such as De Quincey and Coleridge from which we tend to draw our picture of opium addiction. We could speculate about his experiences with the drug and the root cause of his later insanity. But this is all it would be: imagination and speculation.
It was not opium, though, that Carr believed had brought him through the gates of Yarra Bend – it was Indian hemp. It is an interesting choice: there was little knowledge of cannabis in Europe before the 1840s, and even in the 1850s it was not readily available. Carr though claimed to have administered it medicinally as a treatment for melancholia, so it is not impossible that he had firsthand knowledge of its effects, which presumably were sufficiently similar to his experiences during his attacks for him to conflate the two. 50 He could though have relied on the extensive descriptions of its effects that were increasingly to be found in the medical literature. In responding to a question from Ireland about the effects of Indian hemp, Carr cites James Finlay Weir Johnston’s classic 1850s textbook The Chemistry of Common Life rather than personal experience: he would also almost certainly have been acquainted (being fluent in French and up to date with the
50 Bowie vs Wilson, p13
28 literature) Alexandre Jacques François Brierre de Boismont’s Des Hallucinations , published in 1845.
Carr obviously saw a strong similarity between these accounts and his own symptoms, and they are therefore worth some attention as the closest thing we have to a description of Carr's own experience of insanity. According to Johnston, in his chapter “The Narcotics We Indulge In”, “haschisch” is “the increaser of pleasure, the exciter of desire, the cementer of friendship, the laughter mover, and the causer of the reeling gait… taken in moderation it produces increase of appetite and great mental cheerfulness, while in excess it causes a peculiar kind of delirium and catalepsy… taken in doses sufficient to induce the fantasia, as its more remarkable effects are called in the Levant… The sun shines upon every thought that passes through the brain and every movement of the body is a source of enjoyment… When first it begins to act, the peculiar effects of the haschisch may be considerably diminished, or altogether checked, by a firm exertion of the will, ‘just as we master the passion of anger by a strong voluntary effort’. By degrees, however, the power of controlling at will and directing the thoughts diminishes, till finally all power of fixing the attention is lost, and the mind becomes the sport of every idea which either arises within itself, or is forced upon it from without. We becomes the sport of impressions of every kind. The course of our ideas may be broken by the slightest cause. We are turned, so to speak, by every wind… The errors of perception, in regard to time and place, to which the patient is liable during the period of fantasia, are remarkable”. 51 De Boismont administered haschisch to his experimental subjects, recording their experiences. The descriptions run to several pages, but the following sample is representative: “Interrogated as to his sensations, M. B. said that they were very voluptuous. He felt particularly gay and happy; he wished to be alone in a quiet place; he had great repugnance to speak or to move; all countenances appear to him ridiculous… My hearing was prodigiously developed; I heard the sound of color green, red, blue, and yellow sounds struck me with perfect distinctness. A glass upset, the creaking of a chair, or a word spoken, howsoever low, vibrated and resounded like the rolling of thunder… All kinds of Pantagruelic dreams passed through my fancy; goat suckers, storks, striped geese, unicorns, griffins, nightmares, all the menagerie of monstrous dreams, trotted, jumped, flew, or glided through the room. There were horns terminating in foliage, webbed hands; whimsical beings, with the feet of the arm chair for legs, and dial plates for eyeballs; enormous noses, dancing the Cachucha, mounted on chickens' legs. For myself, I imagined I was the paroquet of the Queen of Sheba, and imitated, to the best of my ability, the voice and cries of that interesting bird”. 52
But was there a connection between the use of hemp and insanity beyond a perceived similarity of symptoms? De Boisment's text is a model of scientific curiosity and does not harp on moral concerns about the use of the drug, but does draw a causal relationship: “Let it not be forgotten, that Madden and Desgenettes saw several lunatics in the hospital, at Cairo, who had lost their reason simply from the use of haschisch. Quite
51 Johnston, JF, 1856, Chemistry of Common Life, p103 52 De Boismont, A 1859, On Hallucinations , Henry Renshaw, London, pp335 341
29 recently, the papers called attention to numerous cases of mental alienation noticed at Constantinople, owing to the use of haschisch”. 53 The links between haschisch and insanity were even more closely drawn by another French doctor, Jacques Joseph Moreau, who published "Hashish and Mental Illness" in 1845, the same year that De Boismont published his work on hallucinations. Moreau proposed an organic aetiology for insanity purely on the basis of the similarities in how the two were experienced, and believed that to experience haschish hallucinations was equivalent to entering into the mind of the mad without becoming insane: as a result, he tested the drug in various doses on himself. Pure speculation again, but if Carr had access to the drug to prescribe to his patients, might he too have indulged in similar experimentation: perhaps, even, on the day that he was overcome with delirium in the Botanic Gardens after stopping for a smoke?
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Ireland’s strategy begins to take effect. Once started on the topic of Indian hemp, Carr’s composure begins to unravel. Shifting from one foot to the other, redder in face, louder in voice. “Mr Ireland, when our Saviour worked miracles, the Jews said that he was possessed of a devil, and was mad. Was Jesus Christ mad or not, Mr Ireland?”. The Attorney General baits him mercilessly, as the scene becomes reminiscent of the dark days at the Bethlem hospital when the insane were exhibited for the amusement of visitors: “The ATTORNEY GENERAL. – Are you acquainted with the present Emperor of the French? Witness. – I am not aware that I ever set eyes upon the man in the whole course of my life. The ATTORNEY GENERAL. – Are you acquainted with any of the Plantagenet family? Witness. – The Plantagenet family is generally presumed to have ceased to exist. Such is the result of my reading history. The ATTORNEY GENERAL. – In fact you never knew any of them? Witness. – Never knew what? The ATTORNEY GENERAL. – Any of that family. Witness. – I decline to answer that question at present [The witness here became exceedingly incoherent in his statements... In the midst of his remarks he took up a book lying beside him, and wrote in it with pencil the words “Alfred Yates Plantagenet.”… The ATTORNEY GENERAL. – Are your family connected with King Alfred the Great? Witness. – I can’t say positively. Recollect I am on oath now… [The Attorney General here proceeded to put a number of questions to the witness as to whether he was acquainted with the Duc de Barry…]
53 De Boismont, A 1859, On Hallucinations , Henry Renshaw, London, pp342
30 The ATTORNEY GENERAL intimated that he had no further questions to put. He also told the witness (apparently ironically) that he had answered everything most satisfactorily…” 54 Morgan Irwin steps forward to lead Carr from the box, who mutters some indistinct remarks about the Attorney General which are not captured by the court reporters, and leaves the room.
Given this performance, could Carr’s statements about patient abuse be taken at face value? Michie insists that the testimony is reliable on these points. Carr suffers, he says, from monomania. It is, he suggests, “possible for a man to have a monomania on one subject, or upon two or three subjects, and yet to be perfectly sane on all others”. 55 But did monomania exist? When Hamlet had claimed I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw – could such a statement possibly be true? Michie brings forward various experts to support the view. Not so, says Ireland, reading from Dr Burgess’s work “Relations of Madness”: “Nor should the idea of partial insanity be received or entertained, for where there is monomania there is total madness”. He buttresses the point with his own witnesses, such as Dr Edward John Wilson, who claims that if a man is mad on one or two points you cannot trust him on any other. Much to the enjoyment of the gallery, Michie slowly dismantles him in the cross examination with wit and historical allusions: when Martin Luther saw the devil and threw his inkpot at him, was he mad on that subject? (yes) So do we need to disregard his entire theological output as the ravings of a madman? Etc. In giving his evidence, did Dr Carr appear as natural and reasonable as any other man? Yes. Michie lands another blow: Dr Wilson, it seems, is a personal friend of Dr Bowie who has stood in for him at Yarra Bend when he was sick, and treated him for his carbuncles. Hardly, gentlemen, a neutral opinion on the subject?
Several other witnesses weigh in with their assessments of Carr’s reliability and character. John Basson Humffray, MLA, was a former digger who had no reason to have a liking for the man, but nevertheless stated that “I have known Dr Carr some years. I first saw him in November 1853. For long periods he has been perfectly rational and lucid, and able to attend to his professional duties. When enjoying a long lucid interval, he was always recognized as a man of capacity and talent… I have known occasions when he has had to be taken care of on Ballarat. That was not the result of any excess. I have not seen him drink more than half a dozen times when the practice of drinking was very prevalent on Ballarat”. 56 Chief Justice Stawell describes him as “the most impulsive, pugnacious man naturally that he ever saw. He appeared to be a man determined to speak everything he thought without restraint”. 57 And a pithy view from the man in the courtroom who had known Carr the longest: James Harcourt, formerly of the Hunningham asylum in England, some years since emigrated to the colony of Victoria,
54 Bowie vs Wilson, p13 14 55 Bowie vs Wilson, p25 56 Bowie vs Wilson, p82 57 Bowie vs Wilson, p113
31 and currently running a private asylum in Pascoe Vale: “He was sane when I first knew him. He is insane now. I consider him a clever man gone mad”. 58
The members of the jury will have to make up their own mind.
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When Michie claimed that Carr suffered from monomania, he was not simply expressing an educated lawyer’s opinion, a diagnosis convenient to the legal case at hand. Monomania was a well established category of insanity, and listed as Carr’s “form of mental disease” on his inscription as patient number 487 in the Register of Patients at Yarra Bend. Other labels for forms of mental disease at the time included mania, religious mania, melancholia, dementia, imbecility, idiotcy and epilepsy, a range of conditions (including congenital intellectual disability) that are today seen as quite distinct. In the 1850s there was still a wide range of views on the origins of mental illness. Some accentuated “moral” causes (what we would now see as psychological) such as religious enthusiasm, grief, excessive mental excitement due to too much study, disappointed love; and some accentuated physical causes such as intemperance, sunstroke or syphilis. A distinction was also made between predisposing causes such as hereditary illness (“taint”) or various developmental problems, and “exciting” causes that directly brought on the illness. William Willis Mosely, in an influential 1838 work outlined 31 different exciting causes, from the general (sunstroke, “blow on the head”) to the highly specific (number 28, “the fearful associations of being awoke from sound sleep while the house is on fire”). The patient Case Books from Yarra Bend provide more detail about the supposed causes of the illness, and are a mix of the predisposing and exciting: “hereditary domestic anxiety”; “Too close relationship of her parents, she being the issue of first cousins”; “intemperance”; “Dissipation and bad company”; “Disappointment in love”; “Childbirth” – these all, of course, from the female case books, the earliest remaining. Sadly, the case book containing Carr’s records is no longer extant.
Whilst Carr was diagnosed with monomania, Dr Bowie initially had little information to work with in unravelling its cause. The Register of Patients has many columns of information to be filled in, but apart from noting that Carr was a pauper and married, the rest were left blank: Family, Occupation, Native Place, Residence, Previous Residence, Habits of Life, Religion, How long insane, If disordered before, supposed causes, If dangerous or destructive, Lucid Intervals, If under restraint during this attack, State of Bodily Health. It is easier now than it was then to dig out some of the facts of Carr’s early life, and hold them up to the light: but they are little more than coordinates putting him at a particular place and time: the whys and wherefores, which, for Carr, are not easy to establish even at the best of times, are at this point nonexistent. He was born to an army captain, John Carr, and his wife Mary (nee Yates), and was christened in Mayfield, Staffordshire on 8 th May 1821. Elusive from the beginning, he first appears under a different name – John Alfred Carr. He decided upon a medical career and
58 Bowie vs Wilson, p34
32 pursued this course with diligence and no small degree of aptitude. As part of his medical training he spent twelve months at Charing Cross Hospital in London, and in what may have been the first of his overseas voyages, a further six months at the ancient Hopital de la Charite, just over the river from the Louvre in Paris, during which time he became familiar with both the French language and the work of French physicians. He duly qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons on 6 th May 1842 and a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries on 13 th April 1843. 59 By his own lights he was in Germany at some stage in 1843, qualifying at the noted medical school in Heidelberg as a Doctor of Medicine. 60
We have already speculated as to whether he spent time in China, but the next we see of him is his marriage to Louisa in May 1845, at which point he has also adopted his mother’s maiden name, appearing on the marriage certificate as John Alfred Yates Carr; the John soon to be dropped. He sets up a medical practice in Kensington, which appears in the Medical Directory in 1845 and 1848, but not for the two years in between: another unaccounted gap. By 1848 he is once again building his career in England, publishing two articles on cholera in the Lancet. 61 At which point, as we have seen, he also makes his first close acquaintance with a lunatic asylum, as a doctor at Hunningham.
The predisposing causes of Carr’s illness remain, though, obscure. Of the events which had made him who he was we know nothing: nothing of his relationships with his parents and siblings, nothing of his childhood humiliations, youthful interests and reading. Whether he was happy with his family and chosen career we have no idea. By the time he appears more fully in the records, the cracks are already showing: in his obsessive pursuit of Dr James Harcourt at Hunningham; Dr Birks as a poisoner; Captain McDonnell. Diagnosis from the records 150 years after the fact is fraught and speculative: but if we had to find any modern label to attach to Dr Alfred Yates Carr, it might be that of paranoid schizophrenia.
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He was certainly not in a good state as he was taken by cart the several miles from Melbourne, up the Heidelberg Road, over the Merri Creek and then off down into the 600 acres of land almost entirely surrounded by water, the creek and a long looping stretch of the Yarra River. Bouncing down the rough track on the high ground looking back to the bay, he passes “through the big gates”, then down between rows of oak saplings towards the new Asylum buildings. The asylum is less than ten years old, with the rough look of a place that expanding more quickly than can properly be planned. Originally designed to accommodate about 60 patients, the seeming epidemic of insanity that has swept through the colony during the gold rush has seen its numbers swell to
59 Lancet , 1842, p256; Records of the Society of Apothecaries 60 Argus, 17/1/1853 61 Lancet , v10 1848, “Cases of Malignant Spasmodic Cholera”; Lancet v11 1849, “Remarks on the Theory and Treatment of Asiatic Cholera”
33 over 300. Many believed that gold fever itself was a cause of madness, if not directly through an excitation of the nervous system, then at least indirectly through sunstroke alcoholism.
The three bluestone buildings are well made enough though. Carr is taken for processing to the two story doctor’s residence and administrative block, which is flanked by the early male and female wings. He bounces out of the cart, warmly shakes the thin, grey haired man by the hand and says “I am very glad I am with you, Dr Bowie”. The latter, unsmiling, replies “Well, if you behave yourself, you will have no reason to regret it”. Back out into the white March light, gusts of hot wind whipping the dust, Carr is taken past the gardens, a man in patient garb shouting a non stop mixture of instruction and invective at his co workers. Down to his room, past the more haphazard additions in brick and wood, past what passes for an exercise area, an enclosed strip of dirt where patients huddle in the strip of shade against the wall. Before stepping inside his small room, he looks around this far corner of the Bend, the brown river close by, its high far banks and cliffs another round of enclosing walls beyond the moat. Yarra Bend had been chosen as an Asylum site because of its seclusion and peacefulness. For those who were free to visit and leave as they pleased, it was an attractive location. Bowie himself was of the opinion that it was “the most admirable site for a lunatic asylum I ever saw… The grounds are extensive, the views are varied, you can go to different parts of the reserve and have most beautiful views”. 62 This was a opinion shared by other visitors. The poet R.H. Horne visited the site in 1853 and announced that the "situation of the Asylum at the Yarra Bend is the perfection of selection for such a place (comparable with the Botanical Gardens); combining features of nature, beautiful in themselves, and admirably open to the improvements of art. It is at once airy and sheltered, equally picturesque and commodious, well wooded, well watered, and removed from the turmoil and distractions of every day life". 63 The Argus, visiting the site in 1854, agreed: “we do not think a more charming spot could be found in the colony. Those who have visited it will bear us out in this assertion; those who have not should do so without delay. Let them stroll along the pleasant pathway (the work of inmates, by the bye) which has been made on the side of the river, and whilst gazing at that river gracefully streaming along beneath its undulating and grass covered banks whilst looking at a landscape the very perfection of natural beauty if they can truly feel that such a spot is gloomy, they may take it as a sure indication that they ought forthwith to place themselves under Dr. Bowie's care. 64 This view was also later expressed by the Illustrated Melbourne Post, which described the site as “one of the most picturesque and characteristic bits of Australian scenery to be found in the colony”, and included a picture showing the Superintendent's residence looking much like a cheery country house surrounded by parkland. 65
62 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1858 Select Committee report, p12 63 Argus 14/3/1853 64 Argus 28/12/1854 65 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 25/6/1862
34 Yarra Bend looked different when seen through other medical eyes. Dr McCrea, for example, striding through the grounds, inspecting the buildings, checking every detail, seemed to take a set against the place from the beginning. Part of the problem was that it was simply too small. It would be easier, some thought, to just start over again with a large new, barrack style building after the latest British designs, rather than continue to extend the hodgepodge of wooden cottages.
But McCrea also found the location bad: “the opinion of all modern writers of any authority… [is] unanimously in favour of an elevated position, with a commanding prospect”, he said, and immediately began to agitate for the construction of a new asylum on the opposite bank of the river, high on the Kew hillside, where patients could take in views and healthy air. “When it is considered”, he wrote in his annual report to Parliament, “that nearly one third of the lunatics it contains are “melancholy”, it is obvious that, in an asylum for the insane, a site which commands an extensive and cheerful prospect is an absolute necessity”. 66 Yarra Bend, by contrast, was a place of low prospects, lacking cooling breezes and suffering “damp exhalations” from the wet winter grounds. John Conolly, undoubtedly a writer of authority in McCrea’s terms, was in favour of building on a “gentle eminence”: but whilst views were desirable, he said, they were really only beneficial for educated patients: “Those whose faculties have never been cultivated derive little satisfaction from the loveliest aspects of nature, and experience little emotion amidst the grandest. The sun rises and sets, the stars shine and fall, the hills reflect all the variety of brightness and shadow, of wildness and of verdure, and yet are scarcely noticed with more than mere passing attention. But when education has called the higher faculties into life, impressions upon them, even from external nature, become powerful for good or ill, and in the case of a mind diseased, may act as remedies, or aggravate the malady. 67
Dr Bowie, though, had become attached to Yarra Bend, had invested considerable time and labour in its improvement. He had no desire to start over. Views? Pah, they might be pleasing to the eye, but they also incited a desire to escape. Healthy breezes? On the contrary, the current site protected the patients from cold winter winds. Another battleground on which the two men could fight. The best site for the asylum became the subject of a Board of Inquiry in 1857, and then a parliamentary select committee in 1858.
The descriptions of Yarra Bend in the reports from these inquiries is a litany of misery: “The old stone buildings are built like gaols, the day rooms dark and gloomy, lighted
66 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum 1856 67 Conolly, J 1847, The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane , J. Churchill, London, p8 9
35 only at one end by a barred window, situated too high for the inmates to look out of… liable to the serious objection of being immediately contiguous to the river, the precipitous banks of which overlook it from the opposite side… The prison like buildings and gloomy outlook of the exterior of the present asylum is sufficient to produce depressing effects upon the healthy; but a survey of the interior arrangements exhibits a series of wretched places, utterly unsuited to the purposes of such an establishment… Day wards without windows… Long narrow yards, alternately dusty and muddy, ill drained, with lofty fences, sufficient to exclude all prospect, but not sufficient to prevent escape”. 68 Indeed, one would think it akin to the House of Ussher. Consider Poe’s opening lines: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.”
In the late nineteenth century it was argued that Australia did not have enough history to support a genuine local Gothic literature. Where were the crumbling castles and ruined abbeys? But they were looking in the wrong place: the authentic colonial gothic is to be found not in the stories in The Australian Journal but in the parliamentary papers covering government inquiries into carceral institutions such as asylums and prisons, not only for the descriptions of their physical locations but for their often sensationalist catalogues of violence and abuse, depravity and misery. Rational arguments for institutional improvement only took the matter so far: the increasing employment of Gothic rhetoric drove home the point at a deeper level. The Gothic form was peculiarly apt for this purpose: at the height of its popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Gothic novel had dramatised the triumph of modernity over a past that was depicted as corrupt and imprisoning. Set piece Gothic locations, old, grey, haunted, and gloomy, were generally institutions of established political and religious power: castles and stately homes, monasteries. Not, strangely enough, asylums, which would give full scope for the genre’s themes of extreme mental states, hauntings and power: not until Renfield, Dracula’s slave and accomplice, is committed to Dr Seward’s mental hospital in 1897 does the asylum take its full place in the Gothic novel.
Like so many trends in Australian colonial asylums, the use of Gothic rhetoric was pioneered by British
68 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1856/57 Report of the Board Appointed to inspect the YB Lunatic Asylum and to report upon the accommodation required; 1857/58 – Select Committee report
36 reformers. The rising medical profession aimed to establish a clear distinction in the public mind between the gloomy horrors of the privately run asylums of the past, and the clean, light, modern asylums managed by trained doctors. W.A.F. Browne's 1837 What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be was a key text in tracing this difference, involving lengthy descriptions taken from earlier parliamentary inquiries about the conditions in the older institutions: his prurient hints at the results of mingling male and female patients in the one building; his descriptions of the apparatus of restraint, patients kept like animals in a menagerie by "bolts, bars, chains, muffs, collars, and straight jackets"; patients dying because of force feeding, bleeding and drugging; moving into florid hysteria with passages such as "No representation of blind frenzy, or of vindictive ferocity, so perfectly realizes, or apparently justifies, the ancient theory of metempsychosis, of the belief in demoniacal possession, as the maniac glorying in obscenity and filth; devouring garbage or ordure… Females of birth drink their urine… Outlines of high artistic pretensions have been painted in excrement; poetry has been written in blood, or more revolting media".
The message was continued by Conolly, whose descriptions of an old style madhouse could also read like passages from Poe: "The untrodden lawn, the dusty and desolate courts, the paved yards, the wretched sheds, the lonely outhouses, together with the closed doors and windows of a private asylum, often give to such places an external character which makes the visitor regard them with dread, and the passer by speak of them in whispers. The idea of their entrance is connected with that of the fatal gate, which whoso entered left all hope behind. If a patient is visited in such a house, the unlocking of doors, and the threading of long passages, and ascent of gloomy stairs, with the close atmosphere of apartments filled with patients sitting by the walls, oppressed with indolence and monotony, are all features too familiar to those who knew such houses before later improvements penetrated into them". 69
So when members of a parliamentary committee inquiring into the merits of the Yarra Bend and Kew sites asked a visiting doctor “Do you think that it is desirable to have the asylum placed where there is nothing but dark precipices and sullen waters?”, they were hoping, it seems, for the whole asylum to be swallowed by the river as “the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher ."” – to be replaced by the light, airy, structured spaces that were a more appropriate ground for the project of modernising the medical treatment of the insane.
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The gothic mode is in evidence as Archibald Michie calls the next witness to the stand to testify about conditions at Yarra Bend. As Carr is led away, his place is taken by a former patient, Robert Coates, who needs no prompting to talk. The asylum’s ‘alarming gardener’ spits out the words at a rate of knots in a broad Kentish accent, his verbal kites
69 Conolly, J 1847, The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane , J. Churchill, London, p58 59
37 flying higher and higher on the winds of his own rhetoric. The attendants are all drunks, they eat our food, what’s left of it after Dr B has fed his chickens and his friends; the attendant who gives out the medicine, why, he is there only to pay off a gambling debt to the Doctor’s son, doesn’t know the first thing about what he is doing, it’s a miracle no-one has died; dirty, yes, I should say so, I caught 523 bugs in a single night, kept em in a jar and gave em to Dr McCrea the next day, something should be done about it, the walls of the rooms are just covered in excrement, they never wash it off, just whitewash right over it; post-mortem examinations you say? Don’t rightly know what you call em, but I’ve seen a right mangling of bodies carried on in the dead house, yes, I’ve put skulls out of the way of other patients meself, oh yes, bones in the gardens, the patients were apt to trip over em at night unless I picked em up, yes, I’ve seen portions of bodies hanging on the trees there until the stench was so sickening and offensive we could scarcely bear the place…
The court by this stage is in a degree of uproar. Chief Justice Stawell restores some order with his gavel, and adjourns the first day of the trial. Crowds stream from the public gallery in excited conversation.
The next day Michie brings forward a succession of witnesses, mainly former attendants. Samuel Wainwright, who had worked at British asylums and left Yarra Bend on good terms, describes drunken attendants, filth, poor management, and Bowie’s utter lack of control over, or knowledge of, what was happening there. Food was mixed together into a black mess and patients ate with their fingers, Bowie finding knives too dangerous. One day he found “a pannikin containing the brains of a man. It was in the day room, where we had our food. I was looking for a pannikin to drink with, and reaching this down, smelt what it contained. Goode said – “Its old So and so’s brains” (I forget whose). Dr Bowie told me to bring them”.
Mary Steele, the unnamed subject of the Argus’s article hinting at a patient becoming pregnant by a member of the asylum staff, takes the stand. Yes, she had been a patient at the asylum for over three years, after her mind became affected following the death of her husband. After she was discharged she continued to work at the asylum, in the laundry. Sloane, Bowie’s coachman, had surprised and overpowered her in one of the cottages. Several weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant, and left her employment. Dr Bowie nevertheless heard rumour, came to visit her, found out the full story. He was clearly upset, and dismissed Sloane immediately. When her child was born, she gave it to Sloane’s family – he was a married man – but it died two months later.
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Day three of the trial, and a witness with a very large axe to grind, one that has been a long time in the sharpening: Dr William McCrea, with hours ahead of him to inform the assembled gathering of every detail demonstrating Dr Bowie’s unfitness for office, his
38 outmoded practices, his false opinions. His view that Yarra Bend is a suitable location for an asylum is merely one example. Settling his large and angular frame behind the desk, he is the embodiment of a modern medical authority as he chooses to discuss instead the absence of “any comprehensive plan for the amusement and instruction of the lunatics”. Modern “moral” treatment required patients to maintain, insofar as possible, a normal social life. Rather than sequestration and inertia, physical and mental activity was encouraged, not least because it reduced the time that patients might spend dwelling on gloomy matters. What McCrea found on his arrival was a single piano, kept in the Bowie residence, and the odd game of cricket. There was no backgammon, no draughts, no games with dice – Dr Bowie said that the patients would swallow the pieces. There were no books or writing instruments – Dr Bowie said that the patients would only destroy them. “He seemed to have a great deal of fear of some sort”, said McCrea. His picture of a man who had lost touch with developments in the field reflected the testimony previously given to parliamentary inquiries, for example by the Official Visitors, Drs Richard Eades and Edward Barker, who were charged with providing some independent external oversight of the Asylum. Asked to describe Dr Bowie, they remained polite: "carefully conscientious as far as his knowledge goes", though perhaps “a certain want of the creative or imaginative faculty”.
Over time, with the help of constant urging from McCrea, Eades, Barker and others, improvements were gradually made. Dominoes, cards, bagatelle, draughts and chess were introduced, all apparently without disaster. A billiard room was created, and whilst some claimed that it was only the odd attendant who played, the poor condition of the table attested to more vigorous use. The poet Richard Henry Horne, who was a regular visitor to the asylum and seemingly a friend of Dr Bowie, reported that Carr was one of the more skilled users of the table, having been accustomed to playing billiards in his earlier life. 70 For more physical exertion, the men were encouraged to play cricket, skittles or leapfrog; the ladies had the option of battledore & shuttlecock (a precursor of badminton). For the musically minded there were weekly concerts and dances, and even a dramatic society formed by attendants for the amusement of patients. Quieter pursuits included attending prayers and reading, though apparently Bowie’s fears of regular damage to the books was in fact accurate.
Of all the amusements engaged in by asylum patients, cricket attracted the most notice from visitors. The game itself was somewhat different from the modern version: bowling was done underarm, the wicket had only two stumps, the overs were four balls long, and the whole affair was as much an excuse for gambling as anything else. The colony had taken up the sport with enthusiasm from the earliest days, with the Melbourne Cricket Club founded in 1838, and games moved to what is now the site of the MCG on a Richmond paddock by 1853. Matches were widespread across Melbourne, including the Yarra Bend asylum, though in the latter case there was a clear divide between attendants and patients: “With regard to the cricket, it would appear that the attendants sympathized with that English nobleman who kept a salaried bowler to bowl for him,
70 Bowie vs Wilson, p50
39 because it generally happened that the attendants were ‘in’, and the patients ‘out’, or fielding as it was called. The patients were thus kept running about for the purpose of feeding these attendant batters with their balls. This arrangement, this running about for the luxury of the batters, was scarcely fair play”.71 Nor were the "teams" necessarily of ordinary size: one visitor stated that "I have seen a hundred of them [patients] playing at cricket at a time; and attendants were posted in various parts of the field to prevent any of the inmates escaping". 72 Equipment was a constant problem: bats were knocked together by the Asylum carpenter in between making coffins, but the untreated wood tended to split almost immediately. 73
By the time of Carr’s arrival then, daily conditions for the patients were much improved on what they had been, and there was no shortage of activity with which to fill the day. After his initial attacks had passed, his treatment was a cut above that of the other patients. When not suffering from one of his episodes, Carr was quite congenial, and was accorded the respect due to a fellow medical man who had fallen on difficult times. In many respects he was treated as a visitor as much as a patient. A year passed. Carr was not subjected to further ill treatment, but nor was he released. He spent much of his time walking, and was in fact “treated with great kindness… I was rambling about the ground without an attendant, doing what I pleased”, having given his word as a gentleman that he would not attempt to escape. He was even on occasion allowed into town in the company of an attendant to visit the opera or for other purposes. 74 He was fond of a game of bagatelle with the attendant John Harbottle, a dab hand at billiards and a regular at asylum balls, known for his quadrilles and always conducting himself as a gentleman. 75 In Carr's own words, “during the first period of my detention, I had not the slightest ground or cause of complaint. I was perhaps treated more kindly than any other patient in the establishment”. 76
The special privileges accorded to Carr were some compensation, it was no doubt felt, for one of the other major defects of the Yarra Bend asylum: whilst it was possible to separate patients based on their illness – the maniacs and the melancholics being kept apart for example – it was poorly designed to separate patients on the basis of their social class. Paying patients and the well to do might be placed in the same area as convicts and labourers.77 Whilst all sufferers of mental illness were widely considered at the time to be in a pitiable state there was nonetheless the sense that for certain types of people the madhouse was, regrettably, a more likely destination than for others: the temperamental Irish, with their emotional religion; inebriates, and other members of the lower orders who lacked the self control and moral compass that a good upbringing instilled. But what was one to make of the sober, middle class, Protestant male who went
71 Bowie vs Wilson, p10 72 Bowie vs Wilson, p50 73 Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS7459 letter dated 27/2/1858 74 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p7 75 Bowie vs Wilson, p42, p50 76 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p6 77 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1857/58 Select Committee report, Bowie evidence 26/1/1858
40 mad? Clearly this could only be the result of some external force rather than a moral weakness: ‘sunstroke’ was a common diagnosis. 78 And once stricken by such an awful fate, it was adding insult to injury to treat them the same as the ‘undeserving mad’. According to the testimony of Dr Stillwell, "Although wholly or partially insane, educated men have, to some extent, the same habits and modes of conversation as when they are sane: therefore, being associated with uneducated men would be a source of annoyance to them, and whatever annoyed them would have a bad effect on the brain”. 79 When Dr McCrea was asked whether “a Chinaman and a doctor of medicine, both lunatics… sitting side by side… would be prejudicial to the recovery of, say a superior person”, he replied that “There is not the least doubt of it; it must be a cause of irritation”.80
Throughout this Carr continued to find ample time for writing, to family, solicitors and the authorities. He still had papers with him “having reference to my mother” and “concerning the proceedings which were taken in England against the owners of the Black Ball line of packets”, so was evidently still pursuing these cases.81 Three months after his arrival he was still confident that he would soon be released, that Dr Bowie was diligently working to this end, and that it was just a question of the necessary paperwork being signed. His recent experiences of being bagged and beaten had only sharpened his desire for freedom. He wrote to the Governor asking for his case to be expedited; to Parliament, making a claim against the government for his work in treating the wounded after Eureka; to Parliament again, a long petition outlining the history of his case and asking for release; he pressed his case with the Official Visitors. He wrote to his former Ballarat medical colleague Dr Williams, now in Queenscliffe asking whether he might visit: “if any one you for example will sign an undertaking in the sum of £100 that I will not commit a breach of the peace I can be allowed to go to Queenscliff 'where I shall be out of the way of mischief' & without any attendant, once I am away from Melbourne there is no danger of my getting into a scrape.” Williams never had the chance to take up this offer, as Bowie failed to send the letter. And he wrote to his wife: do not come out to assist. Louisa must stay in England lest she arrive in Melbourne to find that he has already caught another boat home. “Keep up your spirits and do not despair, once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum. AYC”. The tone and sense of these documents is often lucid, but it is clear that Carr is still saddled with delusions about painful past events: in one extraordinary passage he asks Louisa to tell his son Walter that he has discovered that Walter’s grandmother was poisoned by aconitine and not strychnine as previously thought – but they “must not mention this to any one as on my return this whole matter must be investigated, and I have just completed a very long account of all the symptoms and circumstances of her death. Which will be sent to the Secretary of State by this mail & you must not even tell Miss Carroll lest the murderous Howard(?) Carr should take the alarm”. The language in these documents is certainly self justificatory and the retelling of events one sided; it is
78 Boucher, L 2004, "Masculinity Gone Mad: Settler Colonialism, Masculinity and the White Body in Late Nineteenth Century Victoria", Lilith: A Feminist History Journal v.13 79 Bowie vs Wilson, p38 80 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1860/61 Evidence of McCrea 21/3/1860, p556 81 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p8
41 sometimes wild, with words and sentences frequently underlined for effect; often distraught – but then, who would not be distraught if imprisoned in an asylum for two months whilst believing themselves sane?
Carr never resiled from the belief that his incarceration at Yarra Bend was illegal. Even taking the witness stand in 1862 he commenced his testimony “I come now from a certain bastile, commonly called the Yarra Bend lunatic asylum”. Whilst there is no evidence that his committal contravened the laws of the time, his case certainly highlights the fact that it was much easier to get into an asylum than out – asylums being socially convenient places to keep the troublesome and indigent from making public nuisances. It also highlights the extraordinary power of asylum Superintendents over their charges, the power to treat, to punish, and to set free. Viewed from the inside, this could appear tyranny and despotism: John Clare, the English poet who spent his later life at Northampton asylum, described the superintendent there as “Doctor Bottle imp who deals in urine / A keeper of state prisons for the queen / As great a man as is the Doge of Turin”. Dr Conolly harked back to the bad old days, when “the superintendents of the insane had become frantic in cruelty, from the impunity with which their despotism was attended”. The picture appeared different, of course, if you were in charge of an asylum: Browne's What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be painted in its final chapter a vision of the ideal asylum that effectively case the superintendent as a philosopher king, ruling benignly over a harmonious, hierarchical society in miniature. This world, where the mad and depraved are made docile, tractable and submissive to authority was clearly a vision attractive to the ruling class: "Browne's stress on social harmony and tranquillity; his claim to replace violent repression, conflict and strife by moral suasion, docility, and willing submission to authority, even among the depraved and unruly; his practical demonstration of the powers of 'reason and morality' when allied to a new form of 'moral machinery' – these constituted a potent advertisement for the merits of reformed asylums run by practitioners initiated into the mysteries of moral treatment and medical psychology". 82 The new asylum management did however constitute “a prodigiously effective set of techniques for imposing and inducing conformity, and incorporated a latent (and rapidly realized) potential for deterioration into a repressive form of moral management”. 83
Browne was not unaware of the dangers of this level of control and power, noting that "the popular belief that asylums have been employed to gratify the cupidity or malice of interested or indifferent friends, appears not to be without foundation. Men who were sane, or who scarcely displayed a shade of eccentricity in their conduct, have been entrapped, imprisoned, and confined, in defiance of the most active interference made in their favour". 84 Carr found himself in a similar situation: apparently without symptoms
82 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry , Routledge, New York, p.xxxix 83 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry , Routledge, New York, p.xliii 84 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry , Routledge, New York, p.113
42 for the best part of a year, yet unable to secure a release. He initially believed that Bowie was on his side, and that it was McCrea who was the obstacle. Over time however he began to change his views on who was friend and who was foe. Perhaps it had become clear that Bowie’s verbal support had not translated into any practical action; perhaps he sensed that he was merely being humoured. Certainly it was McCrea’s view that Bowie was preventing Carr’s release, writing in 1858 that “he has been repeatedly examined with a view to his being discharged, and the last two times I saw him I would have discharged him had Dr Bowie deemed him cured. Dr Bowie does not consider him fit to be at large in this colony, but would be very glad to get rid of him if he could be sent home. If I could conscientiously discharge him I should be very glad, as I am quite tired of him”. 85 Bowie for his part believed “Dr Carr to be more rational now than he has been for many years, but I am confident if he remains in this colony and be subjected to excitement he will soon again be a dangerous, a highly dangerous, lunatic. I consider it would be an act of Charity to send him home, and from what I have ascertained I do believe he has strong claims on the Government”. 86 Perhaps during his own examinations of Carr, McCrea felt it fitting to tell Carr that he personally thought him sane, but that Dr Bowie did not, feeding an animosity that could only cause Bowie problems.
For Carr was not merely writing letters petitioning for his release as he scribbled away at his desk, he was also documenting instances of patient abuse. Somehow he had gained access to the Restraint Book, which listed all details of patients who had been restrained, and for what length of time, and made his own copies. Having experienced restraint and physical violence at Yarra Bend himself, Carr once again chose to project his own personal situation into a broader injustice, and commenced a crusade to make the mismanagement of the asylum a matter of public notice. Copying from the asylum records was one technique, but he was also recording what he believed to be beatings dished out to other patients. Just as he had taken arms against tyranny and abuse of authority at Eureka and again on board the James Baines, so he would bring down Dr Bowie.
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His representations to McCrea and the Official Visitors having so far been unsuccessful, Carr chooses a more direct way to bring to the attention of the authorities the treatment received by himself and others at Yarra Bend. Proceeding down William St in the company of an attendant on one of his trips into town Carr effects “a slight ruse” on his unfortunate companion and manages to slip away. His destination is a two story brick building containing the town offices of both the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly and the Chief Secretary John O’Shannassy. He manages to obtain an audience with Sir Henry by the simple expedient of presenting his card to the aide de camp. After doing so “I was requested to enter my name in the usual visitors’ book to the Governor, and after waiting
85 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/565 letter 58/3480 86 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/565 letter 58/4329
43 some time I was admitted, in due course, to His Excellency. I placed in his hands copies of some five or six letters, which I believed had been suppressed, and His Excellency promised to peruse them, and stated I should receive a reply in due course… At that interview I was neither unduly excited nor even in my conversation in the slightest degree disrespectful to him; nor did I create the slightest feeling of alarm upon his mind”. 87 He also has a few words to the Chief Secretary whilst there. Carr is ostensibly following up the progress of both his financial claims against the government (Parliament has decided to pay him £150 for his services at Eureka, though Carr is asking for £1000) and the matter of when he might be discharged. These letters almost certainly also include his account of the unsavoury occurrences at Yarra Bend.
On his return, Bowie is furious. That a patient has been able to escape and confront the Governor in such a manner is highly embarrassing. On the flimsy pretext that Carr is obviously “excited”, he uses his despot’s powers to order that he be immediately bagged and placed in solitary confinement until further notice. Carr is placed in a cell in the bluestone B (refractory) ward set aside for the most violent and noisy patients, shackled and bagged, becoming all the while more desperate. On one occasion Carr bites an attendant’s finger so hard that blood runs down his beard, and cries “Murder!” as he is then set upon. He is given no water with which to wash.
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Dr William McCrea leans forward in frustration and some degree of anger as he recalls a visit to Yarra Bend in September 1858 in the company of Eades and Barker. This is what I found, he growls. Dr Carr had been in the bag for seven days. I conceived the treatment improper and barbarous and I ordered Dr Carr to be taken out of the bag immediately. Dr Carr was perfectly quiet and perfectly rational. Myself and others had urged Dr Bowie for quite some time that as restraint had been abolished in nearly all asylums in England, so it should be here. He would have none of it. He did not believe in it, as the patients would tear their clothes and cause unnecessary additional expense to the institution.
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The Official Visitors to the Asylum are given the task of making a full inquiry into Carr’s treatment. Plump bewhiskered Richard Eades and stolid grey Edward Barker are longstanding and respected pillars of the Melbourne medical establishment, and have
87 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p20
44 been making monthly trips to Yarra Bend for several years, slowly cajoling Bowie along the path to reform. They returned to the Bend the day after their visit with McCrea but "to our surprise and astonishment found Dr Carr again confined in a bag & straight jacket fastened behind with padlocks and his hands bound behind. We liberated him, held an inquiry, found Dr Carr’s statement correct & caused his removal to another ward". 88 Whilst it did become apparent that Carr had found a way out of the straitjacket after two days, and only pretended to be still restrained by it when attendants entered the room, on examining the attendants Eades and Barker found nothing to justify Carr’s treatment over the last week. In upholding Carr’s claims, their report was a huge blow for Bowie and seriously undermined his credibility. Bowie wrote to McCrea to justify his actions, his indignation and his loathing of the troublesome Carr both palpable: “he was put under restraint, because I knew him to be impulsive, violent, highly dangerous, and wholly regardless of human life, and that I was afraid he might injure or kill some of the inmates of the asylum; or, if he could escape, perhaps offer violence to His Excellency the Governor, into whose presence he might again intrude. His insane pride, and morbid craving for notoriety, justify the latter apprehension… Dr Carr is a cunning lunatic, and can control himself to a certain extent for a time, but the time is too uncertain to allow of any dependence being placed on him… I have nothing more to add on this subject, except that the removal of Carr from a refractory ward, to a quiet one, against my remonstrances, has greatly aggravated his insanity and had a bad effect on other patients, and that his excitement has been greatly increased by allowing him to peruse the mass of papers he had collected and call to memory events, which to effect a cure, ought to be as much as possible forgotten”.
Responded McCrea: “your own indisposition about this time is the only excuse I can admit for your share of the blame… in future you will never allow any patient to be placed unnecessarily in restraint, nor permit such patient to remain one minute longer restrained than is absolutely required.”
Stop interfering, says Bowie: leave Carr to me. “I know the man I have to deal with, and I feel assured I can manage him”. For Bowie the feud has become personal and consuming. In his assessment, the patient is, “even in his sanest moments a bad man, and truly contemptible”. Being left to the Superintendent’s mercies was unlikely to end well for Carr.
But events had already escaped from Bowie’s control. Melbourne society was still small, personal, professional and political networks are intertwined. Both McCrea and Bowie have their supporters in Parliament to pick up the cudgels in the ongoing fight for control over the asylum. Carr’s treatment ignited the smouldering dissatisfaction with Bowie’s behaviour. The Member for East Bourke, Augustus Greeves (“a painstaking man, who, with … a fair share of small ability, and a great ambition for public fame or
88 Public Record Office Victoria 1189/571 V5984 62/W5173
45 notoriety, has given all his time … to the study of public questions” 89 ) took up the case in Parliament and moved for the appointment of a select committee “to inquire into the condition and management at the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum”. Strangely, Bowie’s defender in chief was none other than his future tormentor Archibald Michie, member for Melbourne. Presumably he is here speaking from conviction, and at the libel trial for coin. “The House”, he said, rising from his seat in the Legislative Assembly, “should pause before they proceeded to stigmatise the character of one of the most benevolent men in the community, and probably cause his utter ruin”. The Member for East Bourke was “laboring under some extraordinary hallucination as to the man of whose treatment he was speaking”: Carr was “not only a lunatic, but a very dangerous one, and perfectly incurable” who had written a tract alleging that “not only were the people of Victoria leagued against him, but that wherever he went there was a conspiracy to poison him, and that he could not go to a restaurant to eat by injurious devices were used to poison him with “Indian hemp.”” Further evidence was adduced regarding Carr’s unreliability: he had “endeavored to incite the other patients to mutiny, and had said ‘You know they can’t hang us, we are all lunatics’ (Laughter) – a remarkable instance of the cunning for which lunatics were proverbial”. Bowie had other supporters in the Parliament whom he might have wished had remained quiet: George Evans “believed Dr Bowie was very much indebted for his successful management to the exertions of his wife, a lady of the highest attainments, and the daughter of the celebrated civil engineer, Symington”.
Michie’s eloquence notwithstanding, the House voted for the establishment of a select committee to inquire into the management of Yarra Bend, which met for the first time in January 1859. It was effectively a dress rehearsal, closed to the public, for the libel trial over three years later. Carr was the first witness called. The committee itself was chaired by Greeves, but contained staunch Bowie defenders such as Michie and O’Shanassy, so as Carr told the story of his experiences at Yarra Bend he was put under pressure by some hostile questioning. His testimony though, while occasionally shocking in its content, was calm and lucid. O’Shanassy’s presence was particularly extraordinary, as he was at the time Chief Secretary of Victoria, yet here he was cross examining certified lunatic Alfred Yates Carr. Carr outlined in detail (no doubt aided by notes he had copied from the asylum restraint book) not only his own violent mistreatment, but the beatings he had heard administered to other patients. How could he be sure of what he described, asked O’Shanassy – after all, he only heard, not saw, these incidents – could these cries have just been the ‘involuntary’ cries of patients? No, said Carr, “I had become perfectly familiar with the sounds of all the screams and cries of the patients”, and he knew what a beating sounded like. His extensive evidence ran over two days, and despite cross examination, he painted a picture of routine violence committed on patients by attendants, with Dr Bowie culpable in his lack of vigilance and lax administration of the asylum.
89 R. W. G. Willis, 'Greeves, Augustus Frederick Adolphus (1805 1874)', Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 4, Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp 292 293
46 The committee called further witnesses, many of whom would also reprise their evidence in 1862: alarming gardener Robert Coates, describing Bowie as “more like a wax figure than the Superintendent”, claiming that the asylum balls were a pretext for “violent and indecent romping”, and that Bowie had banned the Bible, as it was “the worst book you could read”. Over the period of a fortnight the committee heard from several witnesses, all hostile to Bowie. It is unclear whether witnesses to speak in his favour were due to testify: but his saving grace was that before the committee could report to Parliament the O’Shanassy government fell and the committee was dissolved. It was over two years before the evidence of Carr, Coates and the various attendants would see the light of day.
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The months began to pass, Carr remained in good health, was frequently given to visiting town and interacting with many citizens of good standing, who thought him perfectly sane, as did Dr McCrea and the Official Visitors. Why then, he asked, was he still being held as a patient at Yarra Bend? A handwritten note from McCrea in the Public Records Office dated July 1859 reads “I certify that Dr Alfred Carr has recovered from his mental affliction and is now of sound mind”. 90 Why was this not acted upon? Did McCrea, against his better judgement, accept Bowie’s view that “however sane Dr Carr may appear to you at the present moment, it is only a lucid interval, and if he goes out he will be violent tomorrow”. 91 Bowie harboured a monstrous grudge against Carr for the trouble he had caused and the damage to his reputation. But things are far from black and white: as Bowie himself later said, his life would have been much simpler had he been able to discharge Carr and forget about him entirely.
Carr remained a patient at Yarra Bend throughout 1859, and by December it was over a year since he had displayed any symptoms. Ultimately it was too much for McCrea. “If a man had been twelve months without any proof of insanity, I think you would be most unjustified in keeping him in an asylum”, he said. 92 Over the protests of Bowie, he and Dr Webster examined Carr and declared him sane. After nearly three years of trying to secure his release, on 2 nd December Carr found himself outside the gates of Yarra Bend asylum, a free man once again.
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The defence rests. It is time for Attorney General Ireland to come to Bowie’s defence, to counter what the jury has so far heard with his own witnesses. He has twice as many, which surely counts for something, he says. Medical men are brought forward to testify that mechanical restraint of patients, if carried out under proper supervision and in a humane fashion, is in fact necessary. Families of patients, and even the occasional former patient themselves, testify to Dr Bowie’s kindness and the good treatment
90 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6 91 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p569 92 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, 3/5/1860
47 received. Regular visitors to the asylum such as clergymen and builders are asked whether they have seen the horrors spoken of, body parts strewn around the ground, filth and stink – and no, they haven’t, they have always found it a well regulated establishment. Many current attendants also testify, hardly the most impartial of witnesses given that attendant abuse of patients is one of the issues under investigation. The testimony of attendant Elizabeth Powell, whilst on the subject of conditions at the Yarra Bend Asylum, expressed equally well the proceedings at the Supreme Court: “A dramatic society was formed by the attendants, for the amusement of the patients. (Laughter). The CHIEF JUSTICE – Was there tragedy or comedy? Witness – Both. 93 Many attendants were also questioned as to Carr, his behaviour and treatment. They describe him as, at times, violent. In his rages he has threatened to murder Dr Bowie, to tear the attendants to pieces. They all recall Carr striking an attendant on the head with a pannikin – but who was struck, and when this incident occurred, varies with every witness. At other times he has dined and drunk with the attendants in a most sociable manner. John Thomas Smith, another Official Visitor, regretted the former laxity allowed to Dr Carr, as in the opinion of the Board of Visitors he is now “the most dangerous man in the asylum.” Since his testimony before the court he has been particularly bad: “If a person went into his cell now, I believe Dr Carr would strangle him, from what I saw of him last night… He was striding about the room and swearing in a most fearful manner”. Nonetheless, when cross examined, even the medical witnesses were forced to admit that when giving his evidence, Carr gave every impression of being completely sane.
Finally, on the seventh day, the prosecution calls Dr Bowie to the stand, to rebut the accusations in his own words, and to show to the jury that here is no monster or even dotard, but a caring man with a difficult job. Though white haired and slight of frame, there is still a spryness to his step as he crosses the courtroom floor. How was the Bend when I arrived in 1852? It was a miserable place. The buildings sat in a bog, there were no roads or gardens. Despite the lack of proper staff and the never ending influx of new patients, far beyond what the asylum was designed to hold, it is now a much much better one. Yes, Dr McCrea and others had made suggestions for improvement. No, these have not been helpful – had we been left to continue without his interference the place would have been much better. Bowie is proud of the bag, being an invention of his own devising. No, it is never used as punishment. Sometimes to keep the patients warm, in fact some of the attendants go into the bag voluntarily because it is so warm and comfortable. Has he tried the bag himself? Well, admittedly no. Dr Carr? He has been treated very well. No, I’m not sure what happened when he was kept in the bag for a week, there was some misunderstanding, I was unwell at the time. Yes it was true that Dr Carr was kept in a cell without a ‘convenience’, but that was because he had in the past thrown the contents at an attendant. Dr Carr’s evidence is worthless, that tale he told about Lang being beaten was pure delusion, a malicious delusion, I never saw a mark on
93 Bowie vs Wilson, p39
48 the man. Yes, I had two patients tied together for a few days, but they were plotting an escape, it was done for the purpose of making them tired of each other’s company and preventing future association. The patient Patrick Mullens who died, he was already much bruised from his time in the gaol when he came to us, and certainly his ribs were broken before he came. No, I have never put a man in restraint as a punishment, and I trust I never will.
Under the gentle questioning of his legal team, Bowie counters accusation after accusation. The following day is a different matter. Archibald Michie launches an acerbic cross examination, his sharp thrusts leaving Bowie looking all of his seventy years and more: uncertain, contradictory, defensive and peevish. He becomes muddled in the details of the cases he has referred to, and it transpires that the asylum records do not support him in some instances. Yes, yes, he admits, sometimes the records are not kept as well as they should be: after all, “I have a great deal of writing and a great deal of walking about to do”. No, the buildings are not riddled with vermin, that patient who claimed he had collected all those bugs, had “not done it in a straightforward way… he had employed agents to collect them all over the building”. Laughter ensues. That will do just as well, says Michie. Even Ireland can’t resist – it was, then, a kind of joint venture of the lunatics? Pressed about his treatment of Carr, he admits to having him restrained for “insolence”, and because he knew him to be violent, even though he hadn’t been so at the time. “I always used mildness, except when other treatment was required”. Substantial discussion ensues about whether Carr had broken his “parole”, or word as a gentleman, in going to see the Governor. Even Chief Justice Stawell is irritated with Bowie by this time. The jury is allowed to ask a question: given that Carr is a man of such violence, has he ever attacked another patient. No, Bowie doesn’t think so. He steps down. The plaintiff’s case rests.
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Bowie had done his best to prevent Carr’s release, believing that he had not really recovered and would suffer a rapid relapse back in the outside world. The December day when the latter finally walked out the Bend after nearly three years was a Friday, a hot day, a windy day, the sort of day when a man walking back from Yarra Bend into town might well need a drink. Carr’s account is meticulous in its documentation of his alcohol consumption: “on Friday Dec 2 nd I drank one glass of sherry at the house of Dr Barker the only other refreshment I took that day consisted of oranges purchased at Collingwood – on Saturday Dec 3 rd took about noon one wineglass of sherry – in the afternoon I visited the botanical gardens, I there drank water only , I met and conversed with Mr Horne, the author, who can testify to my sobriety at that time 4pm. Upon my return to Collingwood I took beaten up with an egg one glass of sherry to relieve the fatigue after my walk – at 7pm I called upon Dr Barker who accompanied me part of the way to the house of the Dean of Melbourne, with whom I remained until nearly 11pm, I was at this time perfectly sober an orange and a glass of ale with my supper was all I took
49 after leaving the house of the Dean”. 94 Others had a different story. Carr had gone to stay with Samuel Wainwright, a former asylum attendant who had, however, left Yarra Bend before Carr arrived. He was seen drinking with Wainwright and another former patient, Robert Coates: the three men, strangely enough, who were called as the first three witnesses in the libel trial.
According to Wainwright, on the evening of the day after his release Carr “made the acquaintance of a women who lives in Collingwood Flat” and went back to her house for a brief while; he returned to Wainright’s house drunk, woke him up in the early hours and was rambling on about arresting Bowie and the former Chief Secretary John O’Shannassy. According to Carr, he was stone cold sober, and was on his way to church for communion when the cab he was in took him to the Little Collins St police station where he was arrested at Wainwright’s charge so that the latter could embezzle the money Carr had left with him. According to Wainwright, Carr was in such an unstable state when he left the house that he followed him around the city until he could get him to a police station, and Dr McCrea was called. According to McCrea, Carr said when he entered his cell, “I arrest you Dr McCrea”, and had later been very violent and destroyed all the bedding in his cell. According to Carr, none of this was true.
Whichever way, on Monday 5 th December, three days after his release, Carr was readmitted to Yarra Bend. “He was a perfectly sane man the day before he went out, and the day after he went out he was perfectly mad”, said a perhaps slightly chastened McCrea, who believed that alcohol was the cause of his relapse. Eades thought it had to do with nervous excitement about his release and return to England. Wainwright was of the opinion that it was due to excitement brought on by sex and drink. 95
Whilst free from Yarra Bend, Carr had submitted an advert to be placed in the Argus, which appeared on the day he returned there. It may be taken perhaps as some proof of a disordered state of mind for a doctor advertising their practice to state that they had just been released from a lunatic asylum.
It did not take long for the feud between Bowie and Carr to reignite. In January the Visitors found Carr back in restraint, not only in a padded cell but also in a straightjacket, sweltering on the hottest day of the year. Carr was attending a church
94 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 4 95 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6
50 service at Yarra Bend when one of the attendants forcibly removed him; a scuffle ensued, Bowie was called and a furious argument broke out in which it seems, in the heat of the moment, Bowie made some accusations that Carr had poisoned his own mother. Wild with fury by this time, Carr struck the Superintendent and was dragged off to the padded cell where he was later seen, quieter by now, by both the Visitors and by Dr McCrea. He showed them the injuries which had been inflicted on him by the attendants. He had also had his chamber pot removed after he threw it at one of his tormentors, and his cell stank in the summer heat with the smell of his faeces and urine in a corner. (Bowie’s view: “There is no doubt this cunning patient performed the functions of nature in his dormitory to cause annoyance, and excite commiseration on which to found a charge against his attendants”. 96 ) He was still being goaded by Bowie, who was reproved by both Visitors. Dr Eades told the Superintendent that “That is not a proper mode of addressing or speaking to a man that has been insane; I think it calculated to excite him by throwing back his mind on his own hallucinations”. The other Visitor, Dr Barker, was equally convinced that Carr’s treatment was punitive in nature: “I did not think that the state I found Dr Carr in would ever be justified by his state, and that it could not be for curative treatment; it was a thing that would rather tend to increase insanity than to decrease it”. 97
McCrea, Eades and Barker started to intervene directly on Carr’s behalf, and in turn Carr continued to provide ammunition for the anti Bowie forces. The editor of the Argus was now a regular visitor, was allowed meetings with Carr which Bowie was not permitted to attend, took notes. Bowie reminded McCrea that “while his vanity is inflated” by these visits “I consider Dr Carr’s recovery is retarded, the regulations of the Asylum broken, and the difficulties of my office greatly increased… even in his lucid intervals his delusions are only dormant, and easily roused into furious, raving mania. There is not a more dangerous lunatic in the Asylum, for what he wants in physical strength is made up in cunning and malevolence”. Bowie’s communications to McCrea and others at this time overflow with anger and self justification. After all, he had warned them not to release Carr and look what had happened – but despite this, he was still under scrutiny and attack and many people it seemed were taking Carr’s part against him. “I am not aware of having ever treated Dr Carr harshly. On the contrary I have granted him every indulgence”. 98
Meanwhile the parliamentary select committee into the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum reconvened, and took evidence from others who shared a different view. Dr Eades stated that “any man to be a superintendent of an asylum should be a man of the greatest degree of patience, and a very great amount of self government mingled with a decided kindness of manner on all occasions, and incapable of being moved by anything said or done by a patient”. Asked whether Dr Bowie was such a man, he replied “In some respects, no”. 99 Alongside the Committee, Parliament continued to debate whether to
96 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 13 97 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p562 98 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6 99 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p573 574
51 settle Carr’s claim of £1000 for services rendered at Ballarat, which was strenuously opposed by those Members who had fought, in some cases literally, for the diggers’ cause at Eureka, including Peter Lalor, John Humffray and John O’Shanassy.
With a turn of the political wheel, though, Bowie’s fortunes greatly improved. As the Nicholson government collapsed the until recently little known Richard Heales was installed as Chief Secretary in a coalition government in which he was dependent on John O’Shanassy for support. Both were Bowie supporters, and Dr McCrea was promptly informed by letter that the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum would be removed from his ambit as Chief Medical Officer and Dr Bowie given complete control. No reason was given other than that it would “conduce to the better regulation of the Asylum”.
On the 14 th June 1861 however, the Select Committee released a progress report – brief in itself due to lack of recent progress under the new government, but appending all the evidence collected up to that point from Carr’s first appearance before the committee in early 1859. All the charges against Bowie and his management, from Carr and other patients, from McCrea and the Official Visitors, from disaffected former asylum staff: all rolled off the presses of the Government Printer to be laid before the public for the first time and bring the case of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum back into the public eye once again. The Argus seized on the report, which, it said “brings to light many of the ugliest facts of the ‘management’ of a public institution ever man had to reply to. It is positively sickening to read evidence to be found in almost every page of this report. Were its suppression consistent with our duty to the public, and especially to the unhappy portion of the public that finds its way into this den of horrors, no sentence from this book would ever soil our columns”: media confections of prurience, titillation and outrage evidently having a long and illustrious history.
Bowie was aghast, defending himself to the Chief Secretary against the “series of distorted facts and groundless assertions have been reiterated against my management of the Yarra Bend Asylum ”. The Committee, he said, had been driven by political circumstances, had only taken the evidence of peculiar witnesses and had refused to examine other witnesses whose names Bowie had put forward in his own defence. 100 He did everything in his power to further discredit Carr and to justify his treatment of him. Carr had been making threats against the Chief Secretary and the Governor: according to another MP, “I was talking to a gentleman in Collins street, when I was tapped on the shoulder, and somebody called me by name. I turned round, and saw Dr Carr. He had a three pronged fork in his hand. He said, “Seventeen years ago, I stabbed a man in the thigh with a fork; but the proceedings were informal, and broke down. You can tell John O’Shanassy to look out. If I don’t have justice done to me, I shall seek another interview with His Excellency the Governor.”… He then told me he was the Duc de Berry. I made no observation, except to calm his mind, and walked on.” 101
100 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/569, letter dated 28/6/1861 101 Bowie vs Wilson, p82
52 ......
At almost exactly the same time that he was said to be the most dangerous man in the asylum, Carr managed to have published in the Argus a short letter on one of the most newsworthy issues of the day, Burke and Wills. It contained helpful suggestions to the Howitt rescue expedition about how best to treat the scurvy that the explorers are likely to be suffering from (if found) through the use of mustard and cress seeds. 102
It would normally perhaps be unusual for a newspaper to publish such a letter from an asylum patient, but in this case the correspondent was both known and trusted. He had, after all, been supplying the editor with information for the three inflammatory articles that would shortly be published.
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Just after lunch on the eighth day: all witnesses have been heard. An animated Michie sums up, for the benefit of the jury, the case for the defence. Dr Bowie has “confounded altogether the character of one institution with another. The lunatic asylum at the Yarra Bend is not – at any rate, it ought not to be – a gaol”. He spends considerable time establishing the credibility of Carr’s evidence: its consistency with evidence he gave to the parliamentary committee three years before; its consistency with the asylum’s own records. The plaintiff has called witness after witness to discredit Dr Carr, but from his admirable demeanour whilst giving evidence, the jury can see that he is an educated and accomplished man, deserving of their credit. Dr Carr has given us painful testimony of the absolutely intolerable misery that attends being restrained in the bag for days at a time, yet Dr Bowie, who has never even tried one on, sees fit to make jokes about it. He is not charging Dr Bowie with being a cruel man, not perhaps naturally a tyrant, though perhaps a thoughtless and careless one, not naturally a very sagacious man, and one who, not having had the advantage of studying modern British asylums, resorts to the worst practice of the worst times in the worst establishments of the olden period. He refused to take good advice, saw censure in every suggestion, like an obstinate woman, gentlemen!
102 Argus 2/7/1861
53 “I confess I should have liked – confronted as I am with the grievous mortality which seems to beset this institution – some more circumstantial accounts of these cases: but we have them not. We have them, gentlemen, merely in this obscure form – that they arrived one day, that they were put to bed a few days afterwards because they suffered, that they died, are buried, are forgotten”. To claim that Patrick Mullens died from injuries received before his arrival flew grossly, revoltingly in the face of the evidence. “It was monstrous that this poor unfortunate man should be taken to this place, rapidly passed to death, and then his history to be over, and no more to be heard of him". The poorest amongst us must receive justice, and it is the role of the press to expose their cases to public scrutiny so that justice may be had. A “vast number of atrocities must have occurred – atrocities to miserable wretches rapidly passing into a state like that of wild animals, till they leave their tormentors never to rise again. Houghton digs their grave, another individual washes the body, and instant and it is all over. The tragedy, gentlemen, of these facts is elsewhere. Many an old father or mother can guess, perhaps – getting a glimpse into these matters from inquiries of this kind – that in some wretched place, far away in Australia, some poor son or daughter is lost, never more heard of, and probably last seen or known of there.”
Michie speaks for three hours to the jury and to a spellbound gallery. As he resumes his seat, immense cheering breaks out amongst the spectators.
The following morning Ireland takes up Bowie’s case. It is all very well playing to the passions of an audience, he says, like my colleague yesterday, but I ask you to take note only of the facts. The jury will have seen that the defendant’s witnesses were mainly lunatics and discharged servants, persons inferior in quality of those speaking in favour of Dr Bowie, who in their calm demeanour, their respectability, their credibility, and impartiality, must have the jury’s preference. Who could believe someone like Robert Coates? His yabber yabber in the box showed that there was a screw loose somewhere. He tells us about trees dangling with the remains of bodies just like the Chinese lanterns at Cremorne Gardens, and of men’s skulls and bones lying about the ground, but no other witness can support this evidence. As for Dr Carr, his rambling account seemed to conflate multiple different episodes. The Attorney General asks the members of the jury to apply their own good sense about his reliability. Do they really believe that a man can be insane on one point only, and sane on others? Dr Carr never showed himself insane as a professional man, but would they turn to him for medical treatment? He was sorry, though, for the way he had to treat him in the witness box, in putting some of those questions to him, for he has heard that Dr Carr has been bad ever since. The other cases are easily dealt with. Mary Steele was not, as the Argus implied, a patient of the institution under Dr Bowie’s care. Patrick Mullens never made a word of complaint, so how could Dr Bowie know that he was nursing broken ribs? Yes, Dr Bowie had had occasion to place violent patients in mild and humane restraint, but members of the jury should remember how this was dealt with in the past – he reaches down, clanking, holds aloft a heavy pair of iron manacles – Dr Bowie had submitted a mild mode of restraint for a revolting one, and for this he was described as a monster of cruelty. Doctor Bowie
54 has served the public cause for ten years during a most unsettled state of society, Was he now to be charged – an old man, the father of a family, and whose foot was now on the brink of the grave – was he to be charged with brutal inhumanity for political purposes? His client was not seeking money – only the exemplary damages that would vindicate his character, having passed forty years in his profession without a stain on his reputation.
I have now done my duty, said the Attorney General to the duty, and I ask you to do yours. Slight applause breaks out as he resumes his seat, immediately stifled.
Chief Justice Stawell sums up. He runs through all the arguments, but seems quite favorably disposed to the defence. He asks the jury not to make a judgement on the basis of misguided sympathy, just because Dr Bowie is an old man – he is also a public man, and public property. The jury does not have to decide whether monomania exists – just whether they believe Dr Carr, and whilst the doctor seemed to be the most impulsive, pugnacious man that he ever saw, his evidence, if not the truth, was certainly a most touching tale. The judge himself goes so far as to describe the bag as cruel.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the jury retires. After deliberating for two and a half hours, they return, and the foreman takes the stand. The verdict – on those counts relating to Mrs Steele, they find for the plaintiff, Dr Bowie, and award £100 damages. On all other counts – the jury finds for the defendant.
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The Argus was quick to claim victory: “The verdict of the jury in the case of BOWIE vs WILSON is a triumphant vindication of the rights of the Press, in the exposure of public abuses”. There was “no shadow of a reason why a lunatic asylum in Victoria should be in anything inferior to a similar establishment at home”, arguing that the press should hold the government to the sort of civilised standards expected in Britain, and that in doing so the paper had acted “purely out of public motives and for the public cause”. Despite the insinuations of the plaintiff’s legal team: “The picture was not heightened or over coloured in any of its details. It comes out with even a more prominent ghastliness in the evidence of Dr Bowie, his attendants, and patients – a picture of horrors such as makes the blood run hot in our veins – a picture of the madhouse as it was in the old times, when madness was a crime and the madman a wild beast – a picture as dirty as it is horrible, and with a comic side as well – such a one as HOGARTH might have drawn ninety years ago, and only the old Bedlam or Bicentre could have matched – before humanity had struck off the chains from the madman, and reason had taken him in hand… As for the superintendent of the asylum himself, he almost claims our pity, for the display he has afforded of his own utter helplessness and imbecility… a poor, feeble old man, with no natural propensity for cruelty, and possibly with the best intentions… pottering about among his pigs, patients and poultry, with a nearly equally divided
55 affection – a very POLONIUS among mad doctors… a man great in little things, and with a decided genius for all the petty mechanics of his calling”. 103
The case had a piquancy that attracted the attention of newspapers from across the colony, who were only too happy not only to retail the stories of abuses of power in the purplest prose at their command, but also often to preen themselves at being part of “the press”, and hence share in some small part the glory due to the Argus on the occasion of this particular triumph.
For example, the Bendigo Advertiser. “In the exaggerated and distorted representations of the proceedings in lunatic asylums, which we often meet in novels, we find nothing really more painful than the revelations disclosed in this trial, or anything so graphic and interesting as the plain and unvarnished statements of the witnesses. There are all the materials of the tales of horrors cruelty even to death, gross negligence, filthiness, dishonesty, and lust. Add to these, glimpses of the human nature of the world outside the walls of the asylum, professional pedantries and jealousies, official neglect, and legislatorial purblindness and ignorance, and we think we have a chapter furnished to us of life in Victoria in 1862 such as can scarcely be paralleled for interest and variety. It is a shocking reflection that in this era of civilization, in the very centre of one of the most intelligent and well informed communities in the world, which has lavished money in the effort to relieve its distressed and unfortunate members, of whatever description, such a state of things should have existed in the asylum at the Yarra Bend as has been disclosed by the evidence at this trial”. 104
The trial afforded no shortage of satirical material for Melbourne Punch. Cheap puns abounded about “getting the sack”, “Bowie knives” and bedbugs, and “the bag” also became an icon of madness that could be applied, for example, to the colony’s legislators.
Bowie though was not without many friends and supporters, who were appalled by the outcome, and after the Argus’s description of the trial had been published in pamphlet form they released a rejoinder of their own. Rebutting some of the individual charges they claimed that the whole trial was stacked against Bowie, who “not only to contend against a partial journalist, a given to change lawyer, a jury deficient in knowledge and acumen, but his counsel had to submit to improper dictation on the part of the Chief Justice!” 105 Michie was portrayed as a Judas for defending a case at odds with his formerly expressed
103 Argus 7/6/1862 104 Argus 9/6/1862 105 A companion to the 'Argus' report of Bowie against Wilson, right versus might , 1862, William Robinson, Melbourne, p9
56 opinions, for the sake of the money – showing perhaps a certain naivety about how barristers actually make a living. A testimonial was appended, signed by eighteen of Bowie’s colleagues in the medical profession, praising his many years of public service under difficult conditions. He was also supported by The Illustrated Melbourne Post: “Dr Bowie will find the thinking and unprejudiced portion of the public, ready to accord to him the character of a humane and conscientious public servant… a large amount of clap trap and exaggeration was brought to bear against him”. Most of the problems described in the trial were not down to Bowie, but rather due to the poor class of staff on which he was forced to rely to carry out the everyday running of the institutions: “not only is it impossible at present to obtain a high class of attendants for the most repulsive of almost all occupations, but that even in our domestic circles we are compelled to put up with such servants, and with such services, as would in England be held altogether intolerable”. 106
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Carr and Bowie both returned to Yarra Bend, each in their own way broken men, the former increasingly agitated and violent, and the latter, despite the support of his friends, exhausted, shocked, distressed that after all his years of work, his word counted for less in the eyes of a jury than the ravings of a madman. Nor was there any respite for Dr Bowie, as public scandals around deaths at the asylum continued to mount. Just over a week after the trial had concluded, Charles Jenkins, formerly a driver to members of the Melbourne Club, was admitted. He died three days later. The inquest was reported in extensive detail by (unsurprisingly) The Argus (“We venture to append it as a climax to the hideous picture lately laid before the public of Victoria” 107 ), and displayed yet another unedifying spectacle of mismanagement and finger pointing. The inquest found that Jenkins had died of maniacal exhaustion and peritonitis: but also that his death was hastened due to receiving simultaneous and quite contradictory treatments from Bowie and his assistant, Dr Callan. The former tried to stimulate the patient, applies blistering, prescribes opiates: the latter tries to lower the patient with cold baths, calomel, taking blood. The two never communicate, nor record their treatments in the medical book. At the inquest, they unashamedly point the finger of blame at each other.
Misery heaped upon misery for Bowie. On the day that the jury delivered its’ verdict on the Jenkins inquest, a critically ill patient named John Turner was released from the Yarra Bend Asylum back to his own house, where he died three days later. Turner, a wheelwright from Prahran, had fallen on financial difficulties, become “intemperate”, and finally exhibited such wild behaviour that it attracted the attention of the police. By the systems of the day, such cases were not able to be taken directly to the asylum, but first had to be taken to the Western Gaol for a week for medical observation, prior to any certificates of insanity being signed. Turner had spent three weeks at the Gaol, where it seems he had suffered ill treatment, before being released into the care of the Asylum,
106 Illustrated Melbourne Post 25/6/1862 107 Argus 30/6/1862
57 where he stayed for a further nine days prior to his discharge. Much like the libel trial of the previous month, the inquest into Turner’s death excited significant public attention and ran for several days, and though this time the Western Gaol was the main focus of public and media attention and opprobrium, the patient’s treatment at the asylum was also closely scrutinised, with the Coroner remarking on the “vast amount of discrepancies which existed in the evidence as to the condition, treatment and everything connected with the deceased while in the asylum”.108
Even now, Carr returns like a revenant to haunt Bowie’s peace of mind. During the course of the inquest, Turner’s two teenage daughters and eleven year old son were brought (incredibly, awfully) onto the witness stand. They received a visit from Dr Carr at their house in Prahran, they claimed, to pass on a message from their father whilst he was in the asylum. He was dressed in asylum clothing, stayed with them for four hours before departing, and seemed quite rational. Impossible, says Bowie. Dr Carr could not get out without his knowing, and even if he had, he would have done some mischief and ended up in police hands in no time. Both siblings though corroborate their sister’s evidence: “I recollect a man from the Yarra Bend calling at our house on a Sunday, at about half past seven. He stayed till about twelve o'clock. He said he had a message from father, which was, that we should go and see him on the following Sunday. He had on prison clothes marked L. A., and said he was not allowed to wear his best clothes. His name was not Brown, Jones, or Robinson. It was Carr. He was a short thin man, with a slight moustache and beard. The man seemed to talk very sensibly, and said he was going to Little Brighton to see his sister … He had a pilot coat on, and white trousers, also a cap with a peak on it, also L.A. under the arm. He said he left the asylum at six o'clock in the morning, and got a car. He had blue eyes. I should know him if I saw him again.”
The consistency of description from the three children was damning, and they could have no reason for making the story up. Carr had again made Bowie look like a fool. When Eades and Barker next made their way out to Yarra Bend for their regular visit several days later, they found Carr lying on the floor of a windowless stone cell, nine feet by six and a half, in the refractory ward, where he was being kept for 21 hours a day. 109 Nothing, it seemed, had changed in the four years since they and Dr McCrea had first found Carr in such a state. They ordered his immediate release and an attendant especially assigned to his care, reporting that they were of the opinion that Dr Carr’s life was being endangered, and that he was “imprisoned not so much for curative means, as for those of retaliation, and punishment, under which we found him rapidly sinking”. 110
Bowie made a feeble protests to the Chief Secretary, writing in a broken, spindly hand with fractured grammar and a wounded, defeated tone. “I am sorry you should have so much trouble with the Asylum, it did not use to be so when I was left intermedelled with.
108 Argus 24/7/1862 109 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571, 62/ V4477 110 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571, V5984 62/W5173
58 It was then said the best proof all was going on well was when they scarcely ever heard of us”. Carr was still an “outrageous madman” who had tried to attack a visiting doctor just the other day. Dr Black’s recollection was somewhat different, that Carr had said to him “I think I have seen you before in Ballarat”, and had merely attempted to get out of bed when he was immediately “assaulted” by the attendants: a violent struggle followed and the cell door was locked with Carr greatly agitated and beating against it. Said Black, “Picture to yourself poor Carr… emaciated as he is… requiring such a course of treatment in the presence of 5 or 6 powerful men, how necessary must be the aid of bags and ropes… moral courage is so much wanting… it is very sad that a gentleman and a member of our profession should be left to the mercy of such keepers”.
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Bowie proposed another solution to the problem of Dr Alfred Yates Carr: why not transfer him into the care of Dr Harcourt at his institution in Pascoe Vale? This suggestion was, in the view of the Official Visitors, was “cruel and unworthy… for we are aware that Dr Bowie knows that one of the earliest maniacal seizures with which Dr Carr was attacked occurred in Dr Harcourt’s Establishment in England, & was attended with unpleasant results”. 111 Yes, the same James Harcourt for whom Carr had worked at Hunningham and with whom he had quarrelled so violently, having lost thousands of pounds on his ventures in England, had emigrated to Australia six years earlier and set up another private asylum a few miles to the north of Melbourne. Harcourt was also well aware of the difficulties at Yarra Bend, and wrote to the Chief Secretary offering to take over the management of the Asylum, free of charge, for a temporary period until a new Superintendent could be brought out from England. With Bowie’s physical health and state of mind both seemingly in decline, the offer was gratefully accepted, and on 22 nd August 1862 Dr Robert Bowie received a letter informing him that “the Government have come to the decision that it is essential to the interest of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum that you and Dr Callan the Assistant Superintendent should be relieved from the duties of your respective offices”. 112 Bowie refused to go quietly, protesting the legality of his dismissal in letters to Governor Barkly, His Grace the Duke of Newcastle Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Earl Shaftesbury, Chief Commissioner of Lunacy.113 He remained in the Superintendent’s residence with his family, and when Harcourt arrived to take over, threatened to throw him out as a trespasser. It was several weeks before the will of the government was finally brought into effect and Harcourt picked up the reigns.
111 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571 V4626 62/V4984 112 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1095 113 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1095
59 A strange symmetry. The young Dr Carr had worked for Harcourt tending the patients at Hunningham, where he was to have the first of his attacks of paranoid and sometime violent mania, and in an act of revenge instituted a full scale inquiry into the asylum by the Lunacy Commissioners. Fourteen years later, at the furthest ends of the earth, James Harcourt became the head of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum as the result of a public inquiry which Alfred Yates Carr – this time as a patient – had again played a critical role in instituting.
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What Carr thought of Harcourt’s appointment – whether it dredged up old injustices, anger, delusions – is unknown. After the libel trial his own voice disappears from the records, absent from the letters preserved within the Public Records Office and from the evidence transcribed by secretaries to parliamentary committees or court cases. We last hear him stepping down from the stand at the Supreme Court: “I am Alfred Yates Carr, and I want a writ of Habeas Corpus”. “No further questions were put to the witness, who then left the box, uttering some remarks in reference to the Attorney General, which were not distinctly heard”. 114 From this point until the end of his life – another thirty years into the future – we have occasional glimpses of him, with decreasing frequency, either in the short and hurried notes of institutional documentation or as a passing reference in the newspapers as a result of his periodic escapes.
Immediately following Harcourt’s arrival at Yarra Bend, Carr was assigned an individual attendant, and once over the stresses of the libel case entered another period of calmness and lucidity – to such an extent that some of his old privileges were reinstated, such as walking in the neighbourhood, fishing, and visiting town (why, it was asked in Parliament, was the government employing an attendant full time to escort Carr to the opera?). However on the 21 st November, Carr took advantage of being left alone for a few minutes whilst his attendant answered a call of nature. His escape took him as far as Brighton, possibly under the delusion that his sister resided there. After a few drinks and for reasons no one could fathom, he broke into a chapel and its attached school house and demolished everything in the place. On the completion of his handiwork he tore a page from one of the children’s books and posted it in the window. It read “Do Nothing Rashly”. He was recaptured and returned to the asylum. 115
Disturbingly, during the four days he was at large, he had also made threats to kill the Governor, Chief Secretary O’Shanassy and other eminent persons: said O’Shanassy in the Legislative Assembly “Care would be taken that Dr. Carr did not escape again; and he (Mr. O'Shanassy) felt personally interested in his being properly secured. (Laughter.)”. 116 So it was no doubt met with some degree of surprise and trepidation when Carr escaped again three days later. This time we have no record of any outrages committed, and when
114 Bowie vs Wilson 115 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189 unit 572, Argus 5/12/1862 116 Argus 5/12/1862
60 he turned himself in at the house of a Mr George O’Connor, the latter wrote to O’Shanassy passing on a message from Carr that he had “never had the slightest intention now or at any other time of doing you the least personal injury on the contrary he has expressed very great admiration for you generally”. 117 Enough was enough said Harcourt – Carr had forfeited his privileges through his recent behaviour, and would henceforth be treated like any other patient.
These escapes and recaptures were tracked in the asylum’s Discharge Register. Three years later, on 17 May 1865, a line in this weighty ledger reads “Discharged Cured”. Three months later, on 29 August, he was readmitted. On where he had been during this time, what he had done, why he had failed to return to Louisa and his family in England, and why he was ultimately brought back to the Bend, the sources are silent.
Carr was discharged cured again in 1866, promptly “caused considerable disturbance at a number of churches” and was immediately readmitted. 118 He wrote to the Governor on Christmas Eve 1872: the clerk receiving it simply noted the subject as “Mad” and referred it to the Chief Secretary. The next year Carr was widely heard to say that he intended to "get out and have a slap at the Governor". When it was discovered that he had disappeared one Saturday morning, information was promptly sent to police authorities, and Carr was arrested on the road to Sandridge in the early afternoon.
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He was still writing to the Governor, but did he still write to Louisa? Did he ever stop? Did she still write to him? When did she and his sons Walter and Ernest stop believing that he was ever coming home? From the one letter of Louisa’s that has been preserved, she had already found herself in difficult circumstances as far back as early 1858: unable to pay the rent, she was relying on the charity of Carr’s family to support them in a couple of rooms at the back of a house in Ealing. I parted with all my best clothes but I don’t mind that a bit . At the time of his mother’s death Carr had quarrelled badly with his family, but it is a Henry Carr, who Louisa describes as a “great dear angel” who has been supporting his wife and children. Louisa herself was unable to work because of bronchitis, but was hoping to get a situation as a governess at a school when she recovered. Of the children, they “are both very well & Walter is of great comfort to me, when he awakes and finds my breathing bad he jumps out of bed lights the fire and makes me a cup of tea without the least noise, he helps me a great deal & wished he was a man that he might cash a deal of money for me. Ernest is rather delicate but grows better they never forget you in their prayers”. Walter sent his own note: “My dear Papa, I am glad you are well and wish you were here to play at ball in the fields with us, you must bring me a wheelbarrow when you come home, make haste, and bring Mamma a Parrot that will talk… Ernest sends lots of kisses me too. Your Affectionate Son, Walter S Carr.” By 1861 the family had taken up lodgings on one floor of a terrace house in
117 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189 unit 572, 62/Y8275 118 Argus, 28/5/1866, 29/5/1866, 27/6/1866
61 Camden, and Ernest had gone away to school: in the census for this year, Walter’s occupation is also listed as “Scholar”, so there must have been some money to support the children’s education. The census also shows a Louis Carr living with the family, aged 7 and born in Paris. The timing of his birth does not fit with any of Carr’s visits to England, which may suggest that Louisa remarried were it not for the fact that the census shows no man living with her and she is described as the “head of household”. She is also still using the surname Carr, though one wonders about the role of the “great dear angel” Henry Carr. Perhaps Louis was simply the child of another relative or friend, taken into the family.
It is all conjecture. After the 1861 census Louisa and the rest of the family simply disappear. No record of her death, or remarriage, or emigration can be found.
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Yarra Bend had been Carr’s home for thirty years when the decision was made to transfer him to Ararat asylum, a little over 200 kilometres to the west of Melbourne. He was admitted to Ararat on April Fool’s Day 1887, aged 65 going on 66, and described as being dangerous, destructive and suffering from chronic delusional insanity. He was moved with 26 other patients, almost certainly to the newly opened ward for “criminal lunatics” opened at the disused Ararat Gaol. The case notes mark him as being “full of delusional ideas as to identity”, as being “treacherous”. To the end, his delusional complex about drugs and poisoning remained intact: at times is very much excited and occasionally charges other patients with trying to poison him . In 1892 he is described as being “if anything, more demented than formerly”. The next note, two years later: The same . The final, terse, note on 26 th June 1894 reads “Found dead in bed this morning at 7am. Cause of death: Disease of Heart and Pleurisy”. 119 The post mortem examination nearly throws up a final irony: the body was inspected by a Dr Bowe, and were it not for the missing “i” one could almost think that the former Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum had returned from beyond the grave to see with his own eyes whether it was true that his old nemesis was really dead.
119 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 7403
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No trace could be found of friend or relative and Alfred Yates Carr was buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave in the Ararat cemetery. He was 73 when he died, and it was over half a lifetime ago that he had written to Louisa “Keep up your spirits and do not despair, once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum. AYC”. Half a life lived as a free man; six years as a cause celebre and catalyst for government inquiries into the management of the insane; and then thirty two years of obscurity behind asylum walls. He was forgotten to nearly all, including his old friends at The Argus: despite the copy he had generated for the newspaper, as both author and subject, his death passed without comment. His old sparring partner, Dr Robert Bowie had long since passed away in 1869, and been followed to the grave by those who had championed his cause at one time or the other: Drs Eades and Barker, John Thomas Smith and Augustus Greeves. Dr McCrea still had five years to live, but was seeing out his peaceful old age at his home in Richmond. It was left to the local paper the Ararat Advertiser to provide the obituary for “an old colonial celebrity”. 120
120 Ararat Advertiser 29/6/1894
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