THIS PLACE WRITING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT LARUNDEL END OF THE JAMES BUTTON FAÇADE 4ORE WALLS HANNAH DONNELLY KUTCHA EDWARDS LARUNDEL ASYLUM SITE BUNDOORA 3KND RADIO THORNBURY THEATRE UPCOMING I WANNA EXHIBITIONS AT WALK THROUGH A ROAD THE NORTHCOTE THE PARK IN CATH FERLA LIBRARY THE DARK RUCKER’S HILL CHRIS GOOCH PONCH HAWKES SAL KIMBER HIGH STREET RESERVOIR NORTHCOTE LIBRARY DAREBIN CREEK RUCKER’S HILL THE INCURIOUS WOMAN WHO MADE IN MERRI CREEK – WENT TO THE PRESTON A BIG STINK IN LIBRARY MELISSA REEVES ITS TIME DENISE SCOTT NICK RICHARDSON CAPP/ROBINSON CARNEGIE LIBRARY, RESERVE, PRESTON MERRI CREEK NORTHCOTE DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT LARUNDEL JAMES BUTTON What did I know of Larundel? When I was a kid it was a term of abuse for the loony bin. “Hey mate, you should be in Larundel.” That’s all I knew. A Google search reveals that since the asylum in Bundoora closed 20 years ago, the derelict, red-brick buildings on the hill are haunted by graffitists and ghost hunters as they await a final metamorphosis into a shiny housing development. The thrill seekers who steal through the ruin at night say you can hear screams; a girl in a nightdress is said to walk the floors winding her music box. A jerky video shot by two jerky guys brings such insights as, “This must be the observation room. The insane guy sits here, the doctor asks him questions and the whole audience watches – woah!” I asked Facebook friends for help. A creepy place, was the common response. A former journalist said he went there to write a story and saw a woman tied to a chair. The visit gave him nightmares. This is Larundel in our collective memory. But was it really a modern Bedlam, the London hospital of Dickensian horror, where the wild-eyed mad were locked up, living ghosts? Or are we spellbound by some undying idea of madness, and of the unfathomable cruelty of the past? The writer Sandy Jeffs sits in a café in Eltham, smiles and sighs, as if this subject is a little large for one coffee. “What can I tell you about Larundel? Where do I start?” She starts with cigarettes. Everyone smoked. The walls were brown with smoke. Penniless patients were always botting cigarettes from staff and other inmates. This was hard for Sandy, who says she’s the only schizophrenic she knows who doesn’t smoke. But she saw how a cigarette could calm people in great distress. Nurses smoked with patients as a way to talk and bond. Some women also swapped cigarettes for sex, and some men would drive onto the grounds to take advantage of that. There were always two sides to Larundel. Sandy was 24 when she was first admitted, in 1978. Diagnosed with her illness two years before, she arrived in a state of high anxiety, her hopes for a normal life crumbling around her. One moment she felt the Virgin Mary sitting on her left shoulder, the next her limbs were being torn off, her brain eaten by maggots. She once wrote that her thoughts were flying out of holes in her head “like a frenzied flock of birds”. She had a single room in B Ward in the main building, and was comfortable. But at night blood- curdling screams would come from A Ward, the admissions ward directly below. When the phone rang in B Ward, the male nurses would often jump up in a group and rush downstairs. Sandy was over-medicated and overwhelmed. The place was so big and she felt so small. Larundel shared 1200 acres with two other asylums, on a site people called “the psychopolis”. In the 1970s it had 19 wards and 750 beds. It had doctors’ residences, a school of nursing, a cricket oval, tennis courts and a pool. The grounds were a balm for sore minds, with lawns, roses and towering gum trees in gently sloping fields. But most patients lived in dormitories in tatty and unkempt wards, many of them set in barracks-style blocks. Privacy was a curtain drawn around the bed. Patients ate flavourless meat-and-three veg meals, and had their dishes and hand-me-down hospital gowns washed for them. They were woken at the same time, told when to go to bed, when to take their meds. Some wards were locked at night, and patients were thrown together in their torment or medicated haze. Someone in full-throated crisis could fire up the whole ward, until a group of nurses might sedate them and wrestle them into the seclusion room. It sounds grim. Why, then, does Sandy feel so fond of the place? Because, she says, it saved her life. Several times, careful doctors and caring nurses coaxed her back to sanity. Extremely vulnerable people quickly find soul mates, and conversations with her “mad comrades” made her feel less alone. And when she wanted solitude, she walked in the beautiful grounds. Had she not been admitted on one occasion, she is sure she would have killed herself. She was so out of control that the nurses were brutal – the only time that ever happened – and threw her around the room. As she sat on her bed in the dark, sobbing, a woman who spoke no English sat behind her, brushing her hair. JAMES BUTTON Sandy had come to Larundel at a time of exciting developments in psychiatry and mental health. In the 1950s the first anti-psychotic drugs removed the most florid and frightening symptoms of schizophrenia. The liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s spurred people with mental illness to demand the right to live in the community, and to have a say in their own treatment. Language changed: passive ‘patients’ were now active ‘consumers’. A wave of optimism swept the field: mental illness could be treated, perhaps even cured. These ideas had particular force in Victoria – and at Larundel. In the late 1960s, an innovative psychiatrist superintendent, Dr David Barlow, had the walls around the institution pulled down. He began the process of desegregating the male and female wards – a utopian idea that exposed female patients to the risk and sometimes reality of sexual abuse. Barlow and others also introduced new treatments, including the group, music and art therapies that Sandy took part in. A chaplain, Len Blair, wrote two pantomimes – Cindy Rella and the Hospital Ball and Alice in Larundel Land – that staff performed, to great hilarity among patients. Bill Lloyd, a psych nurse, created the Larundel Little Theatre Band, a rock band made up of staff and patients that lasted for nearly 30 years. Two artists-in-residence devised a Cinderella wedding procession; patients made costumes and stood along the road as clowns, ruffians and townspeople. Then the whole hospital sat down to a wedding breakfast. Sandy recalls Larundel’s daily soundscape of misery and laughter, a droning TV, the rumble of the medication trolley, the haunting jangle of keys. The red phone in A ward was the only contact with the outside world and would be ringing all the time. Sometimes a patient would take a call, then wander off and leave the phone swinging in the air. There were many funny moments. A psychiatrist remembers that one Easter Friday she admitted six Jesus Christs. A seventh patient came in saying he was Superman. The exhausted doctor wrote out a script: “Take one rock of kryptonite, three times a day.” The pharmacist wrote back: “I’m out of kryptonite, but will get a batch in soon.” Sandy says that while some nurses were cruel, most were kind. Most nurses and psychiatrists have happy memories of working at Larundel, but former patients are more ambivalent. Larundel was synonymous with loss: of family, friends, jobs, calm, hope. It meant constant fear – fear of some doctors and nurses, fear of oneself. One patient spoke of “this torture chamber between my ears.” Another said, “my very breathing was fear.” Sandy says these paradoxes haunted Larundel. They have also haunted her. Since her final admission there, in 1991, her books of poetry and her memoir, Flying with Paper Wings, have restlessly circled the asylum. Now she and Margaret Leggatt, a sociologist and former occupational therapist, have interviewed 75 former “inmates” and staff and entwined their accounts with Sandy’s own to produce Madhouse: Larundel Psychiatric Hospital – Asylum or Hell-hole? This remarkable manuscript, free of any of the acceptable language used to describe mental illness, teems with stories, characters, ideas and life. In 1995 a ceremony was held at Larundel to mark its looming closure. Sandy, turned up uninvited and asked if she could say a few words and read some poems. She writes: “After being vetted by an official person I was given permission to speak…I think I was the only former inmate in the room. I told the audience of mainly nurses, some of whom I recognised, that Larundel was like a church that needed to be desanctified to release the tortured souls of the mad who once paced the wards and roamed around the grounds…I am glad I got to say something because the voice of a mad person needed to be heard in that room. It reminded me of the plethora of mad people I had sat with in those shabby wards where we shared our stories and laughed at ghosts. In 1999, after 50 years of life, the asylum closed. Larundel is a Wurundjeri word meaning ‘camping place’. That’s fitting: for some it provided a haven, and some camped there too long.