A New History of the Irish in Australia by Elizabeth Malcolm & Dianne Hall

Author:Elizabeth Malcolm & Dianne Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cork University Press
Published: 2019-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Ireland

50.6

Others 60

43.9

Scotland

43.0

Australia

42.5

England and Wales

36.3

Germany

29.5

France

16.7

China

0.0

Total female percentage of Australian asylum population

42.0

This means that doctors employed in colonial Australian lunatic asylums, most of whom were English- or Scottish-born and trained, would have found themselves face to face with many Irish-born working-class women. Doctors were thus dealing with patients who differed from them in fundamental ways: not just in terms of gender, but also ethnicity, culture, religion and class, and sometimes language as well. How these men viewed such women can be explored by studying the case notes of a sample of Irish women committed to Sydney’s Gladesville Asylum during the second half of the 19th century.

Irish women in Gladesville Asylum, Sydney, 1860s–1880s

English-born Dr FN Manning was medical superintendent of Gladesville Asylum from 1868 to 1878, before being appointed NSW inspector-general of the insane; in 1883 Scottish-born Dr Eric Sinclair followed him in the Gladesville position and, in 1898, succeeded him as inspector-general. Gladesville housed a total of 1048 patients in 1881, of whom almost one-third (31.7 per cent) were Irish-born. The Irish-born comprised 24.6 per cent of the 533 male patients, but 39 per cent of the 515 female patients. 61 Random samples of patient records from the late 1860s through into the late 1880s throw some light on who these many Irish women were and why they were committed, but, more especially, on how medical staff like Manning and Sinclair viewed them.

Winifred Sharkey, aged 46, and Catherine Dobson, aged 35, were both Catholic Irish immigrants. 62 Sharkey was living with her labourer husband at Maitland in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, while Dobson and her sailor husband lived in Sydney. Both women were committed to Gladesville in early 1878: Sharkey remaining there for nearly four years, whereas Dobson was discharged after only two months. Sharkey was diagnosed with delusional mania and Dobson with melancholia, and both were ultimately released into the care of their husbands. Winifred Sharkey had been in Gladesville previously and was discharged as recovered. But her husband gave evidence that, within a week of her return home, she ‘broke out again’, threatening to shoot him and having ‘delusions’ about the ‘improper conduct’ of a priest and others. Yet, once back in the hospital, she denied she had been violent. We can only wonder if marital conflict was an issue here, and had the parish priest intervened on the side of Sharkey’s husband?

Sharkey’s medical notes commented that she exhibited ‘numerous strange fancies’, believing that there was ‘a devil inside her’ and that ‘fairies drop lice on her’. Sharkey’s conviction that she was being tormented by a ‘devil’ and ‘fairies’ may well have seemed strange to the English-born asylum doctor and a symptom of madness, but in light of her Irish cultural background such notions were not strange at all. During the 1830s, when Sharkey would have been growing up in rural Ireland, belief in malevolent supernatural creatures was widespread. Such ideas were part of a vibrant popular religious culture that existed alongside the formal structures of the Catholic Church.

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