Magnificence, misery and madness: a history of the Kew Asylum 1872-1915
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1998
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Melbourne Authors
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Arts: Department of History
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PhD thesis
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Day, C. (1998). Magnificence, misery and madness: a history of the Kew Asylum 1872-1915. PhD thesis, Department of History, The University of Melbourne.
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Deposited with permission of the author. © 1998 Cheryl Day.
Abstract
The Kew Asylum has been a dominant feature of Melbourne’s built environment for over 100 years. In addition to the visual impact it has made on Melbourne’s skyline it has been very much a part of the psychological landscape of the collective imagination of the city’s inhabitants. Despite this, comparatively little has been written about its impact on society, and almost nothing has been recorded in any comprehensive sense, about its occupants or inmates. This dissertation aims to go some way towards redressing this, not with a broad sweep institutional biography, but with an intimate portrait of the asylum’s earliest days. Covering a time frame of less than 50 years, this thesis adopts a multi-theoretical approach in order to illuminate the different facets of asylum life with the maximum clarity. The thesis contains several themes, some of which overlap and interweave in order to examine the complexity of institutional life.
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Kew, Melbourne, asylum, institution, mental illness