Summary
Australian troops travelling to South Africa in 1899 to join Britain in fighting the Boers left behind communities consumed with the conflict. The colonies that would form the Australian nation in 1901 organised parades, concerts and eagerly awaited news from the battlefield. This article analyses these cultural responses to the South African War alongside the experiences of institutionalised delusional men. It traces ways the conflict penetrated the walls of Australian asylums, and the minds of the insane within them, as well as the sane existing in society. Delusions based on the conflict appeared not only in the words of men who had travelled to South Africa, but also those who were evidently deeply affected by Australian involvement in the war, following the fervour within the societies from which they came. The resulting analysis of the words and experiences of the insane expands the historiography of the conflict in new ways.
Keywords: South African War, Australia, trauma, delusions, asylums
On 22 February 1902, 22-year-old farm labourer George C. was admitted to New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane in Tasmania on the eighth day of an attack of madness with ‘unknown cause’. He was labelled a ‘person of unsound mind’ and his case notes reveal he ‘states that he has been fighting in South Africa under all the Generals’.1 A little under 6 months later, on 13 August 1902, 23-year-old Cecil T. was admitted to the same hospital. His initial medical assessment reported that his current condition had lasted 3 months and he ‘has variable delusions as to his identity. States he is Baden Powell 1 day and the next that he is Lord Roberts’.2 After admission, his case notes state that he ‘talks in a foolish manner of his exploits in South Africa’, ‘that he was also a soldier in Egypt’ and that he claims he has ‘£2000 in the Bank of Ladysmith (South Africa)’.3
Both men display clear signs of delusional thinking centred on the South African War, a conflict fought between the British and Boer forces from October 1899 to May 1902. The war was initially met with unbridled public support and enthusiasm by many in Australia, enthralling society while the British forces made impressive headway through the Boer colonies, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The separate colonies that would jointly be known as Australia from Federation of 1 January 1901 sent approximately 16,000 soldiers to fight. Recent studies have uncovered evidence of war-related psychiatric conditions caused by military service in the conflict.4
Despite the similarities between the delusions experienced by these men, only Cecil had actually served in the South African War. On 9 February 1902, he enlisted in the Third Battalion Australian Commonwealth Horse and on 8 April, sailed for South Africa. The contingent arrived in Newcastle, South Africa on 10 May and, after ‘exercising the Squadrons, recuperating the horses’ and ‘marching expeditions through the adjacent country’ for 3 weeks, the war ended.5 Cecil and his unit did not return to Hobart until 9 August, and 4 days later he was sent by Justice’s Order to the New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane, where he remained until his discharge on 11 February 1903. Cecil’s experiences from his enlistment to his institutionalisation were no doubt contained in official military documentation that has since been destroyed or has degenerated. Apparent from the records available, however, is that he suffered from a form of delusional insanity that centred on his military service. George, on the other hand, was a farm labourer living in the town of Koonya on the Tasman Peninsula who became delusional for an unknown reason. He remained in New Norfolk as a ‘person of unsound mind’ until his death on 2 March 1911.
The psychiatric symptoms exhibited by these men include an evident preoccupation with the South African War, which reflected popular Australian reactions to the conflict. This article will centre on the war to explore the intersection between delusional subjects and common priorities or viewpoints within their surrounding culture. Male case books from a range of asylums across Australia throughout the years of the South African War form the archival base of this study. These include Victoria’s Ararat, Kew and Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylums, Gladesville Hospital for the Insane and Callan Park Mental Hospital in New South Wales, Fremantle Asylum in Western Australia, as well as the Hospital for the Insane, New Norfolk in Tasmania. The case books were initially examined with the purpose of finding soldiers who developed a psychiatric condition as a result of their military service. As the investigation continued it became apparent that the conflict entered the asylum not only through the men who had fought in South Africa, but also within the delusions of those who were, like many Australians at the time, consumed by thoughts of war. While the patients in question were evidently impacted by Australian involvement in the war, also important is the exact understanding and positioning of the insane male and insane soldier in Federation era Australia, and particularly how these understandings may have affected the nature of the delusions experienced.
Historiography
A range of psychiatric theories exist about the source of delusional thinking. While these are largely outlined later in this paper, this article takes a Humanities-centred approach. Within this sphere, scholarship from recent decades has integrated a deep focus on patient records to further explore the social history of institutions such as asylums and hospitals, or in the words of Risse and Warner, include ‘a quest for sources which can help reveal past social experiences and mentalities’.6 In an attempt to broaden the social world of the patient, historians have pointed to the interaction between these worlds, including the involvement of family or friends, and institutions to determine their contribution to the conceptualisation of insanity and the insane.7 Such considerations have been accompanied by a focus on patients’ output, including letters and other creative works, by way of demonstrating the complex relationship between institution and institutionalised, or doctor and patient.8 These works are largely a response to the apparent silence of the insane in nineteenth-century asylum case books, which can be attributed to the tendency of medical professionals to dismiss the voices of the insane as ‘nonsense’.9 In late nineteenth-century Australia, asylum doctors were more concerned with the appearance of insanity, or its physical manifestation, than its meaning. Colonial doctors were not yet willing to accept a relationship between patient and doctor that was not based on ‘passivity and silence’.10
The study of delusional subjects partly overcomes this issue, as it is necessary to record a delusion’s content, or patients’ words, to determine the extent of their madness. This is despite the tendency of most asylum doctors in the nineteenth century to disregard the words of the mad, treating them as sounds in which ‘nothing significant was being said’.11This has, according to McCarthy et al., resulted in ‘silenced, obscured or invisible’ patient experiences, caused by ‘power relations’ within the asylum itself.12 The nature of the case notes support this, as while many men are labelled ‘delusional’, further details of the specific delusional themes are not provided by physicians. The insane character is important, however, as expressed by Foucault: ‘The personality thus becomes the element in which the illness develops and the criterion by which it can be judged; it is both the reality and the measure of the illness’.13 Despite evident reticence within the asylum case books, the existing details of delusions do allow the researcher to hear the voices of the mad more distinctly, and use them to construct historical narratives.
Many historical works on the institutionalised insane contextualise patient experiences or narratives alongside the society and culture surrounding them. While some scholars focus on responses by patients to their institutionalisation or the immediate environment surrounding them, this study is more concerned with the impact of a significant event on a patient, or the placement of delusion within the specific time of its formation. Important work in the Australian context has been written by Stephen Garton and Catharine Coleborne, who have presented wide-ranging studies that identify the permeability of Australian asylum walls, and place the delusions experienced by institutionalised men and women in gendered and cultural context.14 More focussed examinations have also emerged, significantly by John Burnham and Allan Beveridge on the connections between delusional content and cultural change in Edinburgh and Tasmania, respectively, and Louise Hide on the significance of delusions as ‘culturally constructed’ reflections of a patient’s life, specifically pain narratives.15 Especially relevant are David Goodman’s findings about madness on the Victorian and Californian goldfields, and the cultural themes surrounding gold in the delusions experienced by ‘diggers’.16 Rory du Plessis’ work is also significant in the context of this paper, through its observation that historical events frequently shaped the delusions of patients in South Africa’s Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum from 1890 to 1907, including some patients whose delusions also revolved around the South African War.17 These scholars have all noticed discernible links between cultural events, or a patient’s broader life experience, and their delusions.
The South African War of 1899–1902 not only captured the minds of people living within Australian society, but also penetrated the walls of Australian asylums and the minds of the insane. This paper narrows the focus from one location, or one moment in time, to analyse the impact of a specific event from a sole-nation perspective. The conflict was Australia’s first nation-wide military experience and initially produced widespread fervour within society. This paper thus examines the interplay between public perceptions of the conflict, hegemonic masculinity in the Federation era and the delusions of institutionalised men in Australian asylums.
Reflexivity and the Archive
Case notes provide numerous benefits to the medical historian, including information about demographic characteristics of asylums, the influence of ideology and perceptions of gender, class, race, geography and ethnicity on treatment, and the everyday running of an institution. They allow the historian to more clearly understand the relationship between medical institutions and society, as well as the character of society itself.18 However, patient case notes cannot provide a clear vision of clinical conditions. Asylum case notes often contain information from family members that is shaped by the fear of stigmatising mentally ill relations or themselves and, compounding this reticence, physicians often dismiss their words as inaccurate.19 There are also issues with consistency between attending physicians, bias by the person recording the patient’s illness, or even issues with censorship.20 Added to these are the more practical concerns of degeneration or destruction of files from more recently decommissioned asylums or hospitals, which also exacerbates the difficulty in analysing psychological subjects for historical research.
Beyond the issues arising during a patient’s institutionalisation, it is also necessary to consider the reflexive influence of the historian, an issue amplified when considering the sensitive nature of the archive and the advances in psychiatric knowledge since its creation. While Sally Swartz insists that a historian must acknowledge the discursive influence of the psychiatric domain on patient archives, she also points to the individual history of the researcher as a significant influence on how their stories are told.21 More recently she has called for the historian of asylums to ‘dream the archive’ using ‘disciplined imagination’, writing that ‘just as we dream up our patients, we dream up our archive, as we interact with it in order to create a narrative’.22 When discussing the historical framing of shell shock as a phenomenon, Tracey Loughran similarly asserts the importance of the ‘empathetic imagining of a subject’ added to rigorous analysis of the archive, claiming that ‘our histories are always the product of more than just the historical method’.23 While assumptions should be avoided in creating a story of patients’ lives, it is necessary for the historian to exercise inter-subjectivity when analysing these archives, to ensure they are consuming them with as broad a perspective as possible. Adding to these considerations, Stephen Garton writes that ‘the systems we have for decoding these thoughts and fantasies situate them at the level of the symbolic’.24 The delusions themselves do not represent ‘psychic realities’ and can be interpreted in multiple ways, which demands some skilful negotiation by the historian attempting to create a narrative based on these frequently disparate statements of experience or belief.
In applying these methodological considerations to this focussed analysis of delusions involving the South African War, it is necessary to locate the place of psychiatry in Federation era Australian society, as well as attitudes towards the conflict among physicians. In late nineteenth-century Australia, psychology—the scientific study of the mind—was accepted by few physicians, and even those who expressed interest in psychological principles believed mental, or ‘nervous’, illness to have underlying physical causes, following prevalent beliefs in Europe and the United States.25 Australian physicians would use one of three diagnostic categories to label the insane—mania, melancholia or dementia. Although European and American mental health professionals began using contemporary terms such as ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘manic-depressive psychosis’ in the 1920s and 1930s, most Australian doctors continued to use outdated nomenclature.26 There are also difficulties in applying contemporary medical knowledge to historical instances of mental illness, as beyond shifts in nomenclature and concrete belief structures are broad transformations in ‘psychological and philosophical theory’ that underpin attribution of emotion to disease.27 This does not preclude any study of delusional insanity during this period, as its importance as an area of enquiry remains. However, it must be carried out with an admission and awareness of these issues within the archive and the conclusions that arise from it.
It is also important to consider the specific attitudes of Federation era physicians towards the war, and how these may have influenced the content of case notes. Much of Australian society fervently supported the conflict in its earlier years, and there was a marked public insistence on ‘loyalty’ towards both the British Empire and the conflict, with numerous claims of disloyalty among alleged opponents of the war appearing in the press.28 The enthusiasm towards the conflict appeared to extend to the medical establishment. For example, on 20 May 1901 the Australasian Medical Gazette, the official journal of the Australasian branches of the British Medical Association, reported on a reception in Sydney, New South Wales, held to celebrate the efforts of doctors who had travelled to South Africa.29 Frederick Norton Manning, a significant figure in early Australian psychiatry, New South Wales Inspector for the Insane from 1876 and Lecturer in Psychological Medicine at the University of Sydney from 1886, was present.30 The speeches made on the night included jingoistic statements about the war and much discussion of the dreaded Boer enemy, in following the general content of the Gazette at the time.31 John William Springthorpe, Victoria’s first psychiatrist and one of the only Australian medical officers to utilise Freudian psychoanalysis when serving in the First World War, was editor of the Gazette. His personal diary written during the war, while predominantly focussed on his grief after the recent death of his wife in childbirth, repeatedly expressed admiration for the bravery of Australian troops.32 The open support for the conflict exhibited by these members of the medical community suggests that physicians recording the delusions of patients about the South African War may have done so in a way that reflected their own position on the conflict.
Also, although psychology and psychiatry are widely accepted today, there is still no clear agreement between researchers on the aetiology and symptomology of most mental illnesses, including delusional insanity which has been labelled a ‘multi-dimensional phenomenon’.33 Delusions can be caused by a total of 75 different psychological or organic conditions—including endocrine, metabolic and neurological disorders.34 Added to the uncertainties in the consideration of delusion are the effects of external variables on the diagnosis of mental illness. Walker suggests that diagnostic categories can influence medical judgement, writing that a person diagnosed as psychotic, for example, will be more likely to have their symptoms labelled delusional.35 Porter emphasises the effect of environment on diagnosis, claiming that institutionalising a person, and thereby separating them from the rest of society, effectively creates a mentally ill person.36 Approaches towards mental illness are thus highly subjective which, added to the inconsistencies in consideration and treatment from the late nineteenth century to today, means that any study of psychiatric history must carefully question and analyse the archive.
Theoretical Perspectives on Delusions
Since the seventeenth century, physicians and scholars have offered explanations and definitions for delusional thinking, which by the nineteenth century was viewed an ‘indisputable but an essential character of madness’.37 This idea continued in the writings of Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist influential in the twentieth century definition and identification of delusions, who wrote that ‘to be mad was to be deluded’.38 From the early nineteenth century, European doctors aimed to correct what they saw as an ‘error’ in the deluded patient, through behavioural or psychological treatments that included reasoning or persuasion.39
By the end of the nineteenth century, delusions were essentially labelled a ‘speech act … taken by the interlocutor to express a … belief about self or world’, which was defined by its ‘unshakeability, insightlessness, imperviousness to reason, bizarreness of content and cultural dislocation’.40 Similarly connecting delusional content with a patient’s environment, the late nineteenth-century British neurologist Hughlings Jackson pointed to ‘personality and history’ in explaining the formation and content of delusions.41 As the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth began, the prevalent view of delusions shifted from that of a simple ‘error’ to one of a ‘belief’, or ‘experience’, incorporating the patient’s lived knowledge. Although psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler advanced understanding of delusional thinking, Karl Jaspers was most influential on lasting perceptions of delusions.42 He claims that ‘a delusion is a primary phenomenon—experiencing and thinking that something is real: this constitutes a transformation of one’s total awareness of reality’.43 The delusion can thus incorporate significant personal or cultural events, which aids in an understanding of the men whose delusions centred on the South African War, a British conflict that preoccupied and enlivened Australian society.
This article does not aim to join or contribute to the scholarly discussion surrounding the aetiology of delusional thinking, however, it is necessary to mention that the definition of delusions continues to be contested. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines delusions as ‘fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence’, other scholars label them ‘pathologically falsified subjects’ or ‘empty speech acts…disguised as beliefs’, and others reject any definition based around the ‘belief’.44 Most perspectives on delusions either attribute them to neuropsychological or motivational (also called psychodynamic) causes, however, there is no definite agreement even within these two groups. Neuropsychological accounts see delusions as the consequence of one or more cognitive malfunctions most commonly resulting from an ‘abnormal perceptual experience’ on its own, or accompanied by a reasoning bias. There may also be a lack of adequate hypothesis evaluation or ability to decipher the intentions of others.45 When these have organic origins, neuropsychological explanations are able to provide adequate accounts of their occurrence, by locating specific brain injury and its connection to the resulting delusion.46 The lack of agreement even among those positing a neuropsychological view of delusion formation has resulted in the conclusion, as mentioned above, which there must be a ‘multi-factorial model of delusional formation’.47
Motivational accounts of delusion formation focus on the events or attitudes within a person’s life that contribute to the specific content of their delusions, in following theories proposed by earlier psychiatrists such as Jackson and Jaspers above. According to Beck and Rector, grandiose delusions may be the result of ‘an underlying sense of loneliness, unworthiness or powerlessness’, or paranoid delusional thinking may ‘include fear of retaliation for having done something that has offended someone’.48 It is thus necessary to analyse a person’s life history to determine the source of their delusional formation, which accords strongly with psychoanalytic approaches.49 The Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader writes that ‘a curiosity about the logic of that person’s world can open up new therapeutic directions and offer the possibility of change’.50
This study will not include a complex discussion of the psychopathology of delusions, because there is little chance of tracing the life histories of the delusional subjects, particularly those who did not fight in the South African conflict. Also, given the subjectivity even today in the aetiology of delusions, the vast differences in psychiatric practice between then and now and the effect of environment and context on the mental health of the institutionalised, any attempt to retrospectively evaluate a Federation era asylum patient is impossible. Instead, this article will adopt a motivational approach by connecting the delusions experienced by a group of men and recorded by Australian asylum doctors with the surrounding culture during and after the South African War.
Delusional Thinking in Australian Society
There are a range of connections that can be made between a person’s delusions and their cultural background. Most studies connecting societal attitudes and delusions either focus on perceptions of mental illness, or how cultural differences between patient and psychiatrist can affect recognition or treatment of delusions.51 The latter has received increased attention in recent years, as more scholars investigate the treatment of migrants and refugees in their country of settlement, and the ways that cultural difference can alter the diagnostic criteria of delusions.52 These considerations reflect the gradual shift towards more society-based approaches to the interpretation of delusions.
Many scholars of psychiatric history note the connections between delusional thinking and a person’s cultural background. Baines labels delusions ‘cultural entities’, pointing to the cultural meaning implicit in all delusions.53 Porter takes this line of thinking further by demonstrating that societal beliefs about insanity affect the very structure of madness. In writing that ‘even the mad are men of their times’, he explains that delusional beliefs reflect the environment surrounding the insane person, and how they see themselves within that environment.54 Recent studies on the asylum in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century specifically link the colonial context, or racial histories, with the diagnosis and treatment of the mad. Swartz labels the history of South African psychopathology over this period a ‘history of the ways in which historical contexts enfold, shape and make insanity’.55 More recent psychiatric examinations of the psychotic experience, particularly delusions, position it in relation to a ‘normal life-world experience’, insisting that it includes a feeling of estrangement with the inter-subjective human world, and how separate elements of the world co-exist.56
A person predisposed to delusions is thus likely to be triggered by major events within their home countries, such as war. Conflict can induce anxiety among all citizens, however, those with serious mental health conditions can begin experiencing delusions related to the stressful event.57 In 1899, the Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman, at that time Resident Medical Superintendent at the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum, wrote that the insane often refer to shared understanding of ‘common and contemporary symbols of the mysterious and unknown’ to make sense of their delusional experience.58
In the same year Norman penned these words, the Australian colonies were preparing themselves for involvement in the South African War, their first collective large-scale military venture. From mid-1899, the colonies had received requests by both British settlers (uitlanders) within South Africa and the British government for aid.59 With the exception of a handful of politicians, most considered the war crucial to Australian security, with several expressing the ‘our country right or wrong’ view which prioritised support to the seemingly monolithic British Empire over an in-depth discussion of the validity of the war.60 The similar fervour for the war in Australian society was strongly based on the loyalty many in the colonies felt towards the British Empire. However, there were some groups that openly disagreed with the war, including the nationalist publication The Bulletin and others in the Irish Catholic community, academics and labour organisations. These groups were labelled ‘pro-Boer’, although very few actually supported the Boer enemy, instead they objected to the war on patriotic and ethical grounds, particularly after the formation of the concentration camp system by the British that housed Boer non-combatants in inhumane conditions.61 Generally, however, there was overwhelming support for involvement in the conflict, prompted by the commercial press, which sourced most of its information from Britain’s sensationalist ‘New Journalism’.62 Parades, concerts and marches farewelled the colonial troops from the war’s commencement in October 1899, and the overwhelming crowds—for at least the first half of the war—bear testament to the general support for the conflict within society.63 British victories were celebrated widely across the colonies, particularly those in Kimberley, Pretoria and Mafeking in the first half of 1900.64 The latter in particular caused riots in various cities, including Adelaide, South Australia, where a group of stores on Rundle Street were attacked for remaining open on the public holiday celebrating the relief of Mafeking by the British forces.65 It is evident that the South African War captured the Australian imagination.
The Australian preoccupation with the conflict extended to some civilian men who began experiencing delusions based on this evidently impactful event. This article will now position these men within Federation era Australian society. Recent psychoanalytical research has pointed to the relevance of identity and personal meanings in the subjective experience of delusions within psychosis.66 A close examination of Australian responses to the conflict as well as gendered attitudes towards the male citizen can provide a basis from which to analyse delusional themes and determine how delusional men may have seen themselves in relation to Australian society.
Richard C. was admitted to Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum in Melbourne in November 1902 with ‘delusional mania’ and specifically ‘delusions of persecution’. His doctor recorded that he ‘says he escaped from a Queensland asylum where he was placed after court martial in S. Africa for killing a British Lieutenant’, and that ‘some people are desirous of doing him an injury on first opportunity’.67 While much of society openly supported Britain during the war, within the Australian contingents a very different view of the British emerged throughout the conflict. In their letters and diaries, soldiers frequently criticised the abilities of British headship and the rank and file British ‘Tommy’. Most complaints were based on dissatisfaction many Australians felt with their living arrangements in South Africa and the inability of the British to win the war quickly as was expected.68 There was also a widespread belief that British soldiers were vastly inferior to the Australians, even the elite Imperial Yeomanry unit which inspired competitiveness in the colonial troops.69 Australian soldiers were frequently court martialled for verbal and physical attacks on superiors, including the particular case of Troopers James Steele, Arthur Richard and Herbert Parry, who in July 1901 were sentenced to death, later commuted to 10 years, for mutiny after openly criticising the abilities of their commanding officer, British Major General Stuart Beatson.70
Most Australian South African War soldiers had returned from the war before Richard’s institutionalisation, so it is possible that he was influenced by these attitudes among veterans of the conflict. Similar themes were present in the delusions of 38-year-old chemist John C., who was brought to New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane in Tasmania by the police on 5 September 1900 on the urging of his mother Mary Ann C., who told asylum staff that he ‘shuts himself up in his room all day and walks about the room day and night’.71 He was labelled a ‘person of unsound mind’ and that he ‘has delusions that there is a conspiracy to defraud him and his property … He states that the present Generals in South Africa were guilty of giving away secrets of the British Army to the German Government’. John’s delusions, too, placed an element of blame on British military headship despite the enthusiasm for the conflict in South Africa within Australian society. While John remained institutionalised for over 3 years, likely related to his threats of harm to his mother and wife, Richard was ‘quiet’ over the almost 3 months until he was discharged on 4 February 1903, and had requested to be allowed to work on the asylum farm. Moral therapy, which posited that hard work and morality were the aims of civilised people, was popular within Australian asylums at this time.72 These references to his calm nature and desire for employment were certainly included in his case book with the assumption that they were more relevant to his recovery and ‘cure’ than the persistence of his delusions, and evidently contributed to his discharge.
Some scholars label persecutory delusions ‘motivated beliefs’, which ‘serve some intra-psychic function for the individual’. Others point to deficient perception or reasoning that cause misinterpretation or confusion about events surrounding them.73 Delusions of persecution involve ‘externality’ and ‘personalising’ biases, which cause them to shift blame or attribution when negative life events occur.74 These are thought to be a protective function among those with increased awareness of risks to their self-worth, thus linking delusional content with the environment surrounding the patient.75 In his analysis of late nineteenth-century asylum case books, Stephen Garton found that men who presented with persecutory delusions often also had an ‘overwhelming sense of guilt’.76 Guilt may have been a factor in the lives of many Australian men during the years of the war, pressured by a patriotic society to enlist in the war, which may have also impacted Richard and John.
When the British declared war in South Africa, Australian men in the colonies eagerly enlisted for military service. Drought in the decades before the war was declared in October 1899 had created unemployment among rural workers.77 Many were rejected by the military forces due to the sheer number of men who had enlisted, particularly in the first year of the conflict. Some, desperate to be part of the South African military venture, attempted to stowaway on ships bound for South Africa and numerous letters exist within the surviving military archive in which men beseech authorities to accept them.78 For example, 58-year-old Alfred Field, of Tasmania, wrote desperately to the Chief Secretary’s Office in 1899, citing his previous experience in the military forces while pleading to be accepted. He claimed: ‘I am a younger man at 58 than many are from 40 to 45’, however, was ultimately rejected.79 Librarian Alfred Taylor also wrote unsuccessfully to the Tasmanian Chief Secretary on 3 March 1900 to offer his services as a scribe and masseuse for wounded soldiers who were unable to write home to family and friends.80
The desperation with which Australian men attempted to enlist in the war may be reflected in the delusions of institutionalised men that placed them in South Africa. Plumber James C. was admitted to Callan Park Mental Hospital, New South Wales, on 25 November 1899 with ‘mania acute’. His case notes state ‘he sees people running after him. He thinks they are Boers and he tries to defend himself’.81 During the conflict, the Australian jingo press, mirroring Britain’s intensely patriotic ‘New Journalism’, othered and dehumanised the Boer enemy, projecting animalistic qualities onto them or generally portraying them as ‘dirty’, or uncivilised.82 These depictions were a significant influence on perceptions of the enemy in Australian society and may also have affected the attitudes of delusional men. Delusions centring on the war may have emerged from a feeling of guilt at not being one of the relatively few who did fight in South Africa. Du Plessis writes that several civilian patients in Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum from the commencement of the war in 1899 until 1907 experienced delusions related to the South African War. One man in particular believed that he caused the South African War, which du Plessis links with a feeling of guilt.83 This aligns with psychiatric research that attributes grandiose delusions to a patient’s feeling of worthlessness.84 It also relates closely to the case of 21-year-old miner John B., brought into Kew Asylum, Victoria, by police in 1900 with ‘mania’ supposedly caused by ‘self abuse’, declaring that ‘he is the cause of the war in South Africa’.85 Many Australians unsuccessfully attempted to enlist in the South African War and others who were accepted arrived on the battlefield after the war ended, which provoked extreme frustration in personal records.86 While it is not possible to determine exactly why James C. claimed he was running from Boers or John B. said that he caused the conflict, it is apparent that in some way its occurrence shaped their delusional beliefs.
This article has placed delusional men within Federation era Australia and attempted to make meaning of their delusions by discussing how their self-perception may have been connected with their understanding of the South African War. It is also necessary to investigate their position within Australian society, which constructed the insane male in specific ways that likely contributed to the nature of their delusional thinking. This article will now turn to the relationship between gendered expectations of men during the period and the specific themes represented in male delusions.
Masculinity and Madness
The late nineteenth-century Australian ‘bushman’ male was idealised within society, which placed often unrealistic expectations on men living in the colonies. Hegemonic masculinity, according to Connell, is a ‘historically mobile’ conception of dominant manhood that is created by ‘correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power’.87 Australian Federation on 1 January 1901 saw the separate colonies become the Commonwealth of Australia, and during this period competing visions of Australian hegemonic masculinity appeared. One of the most prominent was the figure of the bushman, which reached many in urban centres through the idealisation of rural, working class masculinity by writers and journalists including Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and J.F. Archibald, editor of The Bulletin.88
The type of man who was to represent the process of nation-building was the ‘bushman’ or ‘bush worker’, who was seen as more inherently masculine than those working in urban pursuits.89 Russell Ward also focusses on the late nineteenth century ‘bush worker’ or ‘rural proletariat’ who was ‘masculine in outlook and disposition’ as essential for the development of the Australian nation and its dominant pastoral industry.90 In Europe a more domesticated view of men emerged by the end of the nineteenth century, but this was not necessarily the case in the settler colonies where the ‘bush worker’ was still the ideal, despite attempts by the conservative middle classes since the 1850s to domesticate Australian men.91 This meant that many men felt they had to correspond to this vision of hyper-masculinity. Beveridge writes in his analysis of patient letters from the Royal Edinburgh Asylum during the same period: ‘Patients tried to understand and explain their experiences in terms of contemporary cultural and scientific developments’, which suggests that this pressure on male citizens would have included institutionalised men.92
Significant work has been carried out in relation to gender in the Australian asylum. While Lee Ann Monk has presented important findings about the masculinity of asylum attendants and patients, Garton and Coleborne have each presented a gendered interpretation of the appearance of delusional insanity within asylums in this period.93 They found that the most apparent difference between male and female delusional content reflect differences in patients’ everyday lives.94 Coleborne writes that men were generally more paranoid than women, and their delusions were often linked with technological advancement and industrialisation, whereas women’s delusions were mostly related to their domestic situations, in accordance with the sphere of activity assigned to each gender within Federation era patriarchal society.95 An analysis of female asylum case books from Yarra Bend and Ararat Asylums in Victoria dated 1899–1902 support these findings, in which the conflict is not mentioned at all.96 While this may be the influence of asylum physicians who considered the conflict irrelevant to the interests of female patients, so omitted any reference to military concerns from their case notes, findings by Garton and Coleborne suggest that there is some real-life significance to the difference in delusional theme between the genders.
Connections exist between exaggerated visions of Australian masculinity in the Federation era and the delusional themes found in asylum case notes from the period. Some contemporary models of grandiose delusions point to their function as a patient’s defence mechanism against harmful thoughts.97 Other research links feelings of failure or worthlessness, as well as traumatic experiences in early childhood with the formation of grandiose delusion.98 The insane male was considered an anomaly within Australian society, unable to fulfil the masculine ideal. In the late nineteenth century, insanity was considered an affliction caused by weakness, moral or otherwise, resulting in a feminised view of mental illness, which likely compounded feelings of worthlessness among these men.99 Garton’s study of asylums in New South Wales from 1880 to 1940 has uncovered men who experienced delusions involving great wealth after having found themselves unemployed or lost significant amounts of money.100 Coleborne also connects the patient experiencing grandiose delusions with their world, claiming that ‘in many cases, delusional identities reveal patterns in the historical constructions of powerful social and political identities’.101 Thus, events occurring in the society surrounding the individual are also significant in explaining grandiose delusions.102
Perspectives of grandiose delusions that emphasise their defensive function can help us understand the delusions of men who believed they took part in the South African War as an attempt at reconciling their position as an insane male in Australian society. George C., mentioned at the beginning of this article, was convinced that he had fought in the conflict, however, went on to claim that he was fighting ‘both against Boers and Chinese’.103 Ten months after the outbreak of the South African War, on 8 August 1900, Australian troops from New South Wales and Victoria set sail for China to aid the British in fighting against anti-European societies in the Boxer Rebellion.104 Although the almost one thousand Australian soldiers who travelled to China did not see active combat, the venture frequently appeared in local newspapers, illustrating its public significance.105 George later showed ‘great violence’, forcing asylum staff to use a jacket to restrain him and began imitating ‘the whining of a dog, distracting the other patients greatly and setting all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking’, giving us more insight into the disordered state of his mind and the difficulty in making definitive conclusions in histories of delusion.
Delusions and War Trauma
The similarity between George’s grandiose delusions and those experienced by Cecil T, mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this article, can prove useful in understanding the relationship between delusion and war trauma. Cecil’s delusions were patently grandiose, referencing a conflict in Egypt to which he claimed he travelled on a fictitious warship named ‘Terrible’. He also claimed to have served in Russia, stating ‘he is Baden Powell 1 day and the next that he is Lord Roberts’ and had ‘£2000 in the Bank of Ladysmith’.106 In fact, Cecil enlisted on 9 February 1902 and served as a Private in the Third Battalion Australian Commonwealth Horse, which left Hobart on 8 April and arrived in South Africa on 10 May, and which did not see any active service until the end of hostilities on 31 May.107 War can cause psychiatric symptoms even in the absence of active combat, so this does not preclude the existence of war trauma in Cecil’s case.108 However, Cecil arrived in South Africa too late to see any active combat, which―in following the frustration felt by soldiers in a similar position―could have produced feelings of disappointment, or worthlessness, emotions that have been linked with the formation of grandiose delusions. His elaborate claims could be considered a defence mechanism to guard against the impact of these feelings while experiencing the stigma of mental illness.
Many Australian men who volunteered for the South African War were rural workers seeking employment after drought had negatively affected their work prospects.109 These were literal ‘bush workers’ who were expected by both military and political authorities, as well as the general public, to fulfil the ‘bushman’ ideal of Australian masculinity. For example, in the later years of the war, various purposely named ‘bushmen’ contingents were sent to South Africa. Also, on 14 January 1902 Allan McLean, Victorian member for Gippsland, said in Parliament: ‘The nature of the conflict is such as to render Australian bushmen especially suitable… The Australian bush man is the equal of the Boer in horsemanship, in marksmanship, and in bush craft…his aid is invaluable to the mother country’.110 Those who reached South Africa were expected to represent the strength and virility of the new nation through their combat abilities.
Some men were not able to fulfil this expectation, however. Recent studies have revealed that, like those who returned from First World War service with shell shock, psychiatric conditions also affected some men who fought the Boers in South Africa.111 This article has emerged from a broader analysis of men who enlisted in the South African War and developed war-related trauma during or after their military service, based largely on asylum case books. This research uncovered a group of traumatised veterans from the conflict who were classified as ‘delusional’ by attending physicians. The remainder of this article will discuss gendered expectations of the male soldier during the South African War period alongside two veteran case studies to suggest ways these delusional men may have seen themselves in relation to their communities and conversely how their communities viewed them.
Studies on a range of wars connect delusions and military service, although most physicians only began noting this connection from the First World War. In the 1920s Paul Dane, a prominent Australian psychologist, included dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and psychosis as two reasons for the hospitalisation of traumatised veterans.112 Similar patterns emerged among British and American veterans of the war, however, some psychiatrists, including the Briton Frederick Mott and American Edward W. Lazell, maintained that battle could be separated from the incidence of psychosis because the home life of a soldier and their general disposition provided the primary conditions for its appearance.113 Theories that emphasised the environment in which a soldier was raised, or hereditary predispositions to mental illness, were officially discounted from the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after the Vietnam War, and particularly from the publication of DSM-III in 1980.114 More recent studies of delusional thinking as a factor in PTSD have established the regularity with which it appears, with Kaštelan et al. writing that 20% of men traumatised by their service in the Homeland War in Croatia experienced hallucinations and delusions, and David et al. finding that 33% of the 53 Vietnam, Korean, Gulf and Somalian War veterans they examined became delusional.115
Australian gender norms in the late nineteenth century dictated the standards by which ultra-masculine soldiers were judged, precluding the possibility of mental illness, which at the time was seen as an ailment caused by weakness.116 As a result, many soldiers suffering from war-related psychiatric conditions had their traumatic symptoms minimised or attributed to organic factors. In a nation that emphasised the virility of its male citizens, significant pressure existed on men to fulfil their predetermined role.117 In her study of disabled veterans of the First World War, a time when the ‘bushman’ ideal of masculinity persisted, Marina Larsson writes that shell shocked men unable to financially support their families were seen as the ‘antithesis of masculinity’.118 Many within the medical community loyally supported British prosecution of the South African War, meaning that the level of analysis asylum doctors employed while recording delusional content was likely influenced by their opinion of the conflict and the soldiers who fought in it.
Recent studies have found that delusions experienced by veterans of war with PTSD are persecutory and paranoid, and related to the experience of combat. David et al. and Hamner write that many delusions among veterans with PTSD contain soldiers’ dead or living victims ‘screaming’, calling ‘help’, or stalking them, and connect these themes to war guilt.119 More recently, Jones, Bhui and Engelbrecht surveyed the pension files of 225 United Kingdom Army veterans dated 1945–2000, and found that 7% of these re-experienced past wartime events, and 9% experienced shame and guilt.120
The case of Henry H., who was admitted to Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Victoria, in March 1900 with ‘delusional mania’ after returning from service in South Africa within the Cape Medical Corps, includes similar themes.121 Upon admission on 20 March, the attending doctor recorded that he ‘has a grudge against the South African Government. Says old photos are prizes he got in South African War. Talks loudly and incoherently, and incessantly—acts absurdly or violently’. Ten days later he was still ‘delusional regarding some unseen enemy who haunts him’, and 1 month later ‘the unseen enemy persists’. These same delusions continued until December 1901 when it was recorded that he ‘finds fault with the Govt for not treating him rightly. Says he has claims against them’. He was not discharged until 6 April 1903.
While there is clear evidence of persecutory themes focussed on the Australian government in Henry’s delusions, there were numerous veterans of the South African War who submitted financial claims to the government after the war. Repatriation provisions to veterans were complicated by Federation in 1901, when their administration and financing transferred from Britain to the newly formed Australian states, producing significant confusion among both soldiers and authorities.122 In 1905, a Royal Commission was held to satisfy pay claims by soldiers in the New South Wales Contingents in South Africa.123 While it is impossible to determine whether Henry’s delusions were directly related to such claims against political authorities, it is significant that they occurred alongside protests outside the asylum.
Charles K., a private in the Seventh Battalion, Australian Commonwealth Horse and a former stockman, also experienced persecutory delusions surrounding his military service. Charles enlisted for service on 29 April 1902, arriving in South Africa on 22 June, almost a month after the war’s end on 31 May. On 28 June, he left with his contingent from Newcastle, Natal, reaching Albany, Western Australia on 19 July, then continued on to Adelaide and Melbourne, and perhaps also Sydney and Brisbane. On 26 July, Charles was admitted to Kew Lunatic Asylum, Victoria, suffering from ‘mania’.124
Charles’ case notes from Kew identify him as a soldier, specify that his present attack had lasted 14 days, which he was both suicidal and dangerous, and that he ‘imagines people are knocking him about scratching him with their nails. Violent and maniacal. Says a fellow soldier wanted to dig a dead woman out of her grave. Filthy language. Refusing food’.125 His condition was attributed by the attending doctor to ‘excess of liquor’. Alcohol was frequently used by soldiers while travelling to and fighting in South Africa, and the role of alcohol in the lives of traumatised veterans has been the subject of a range of psychiatric studies.126 On 26 July, the doctor wrote that Charles ‘has a suspicious look in his face’ and repeatedly insisted he was not a heavy drinker, concluding that Charles’ memory was therefore defective. On 27 July, he was ‘quarrelsome’, saying that ‘he will dammed soon show us whether his notions are true’, and on 29 July he was ‘restless’. He was released on 21 October after reportedly keeping himself occupied in the asylum garden.
Charles appears on first glance to be suffering from a mental illness caused by military service, however, an article in a local newspaper Western Star and Roma Advertiser dated 21 December 1901 reports that a ‘strapping young lad, Charles’ K. was brought before the Police Magistrate by Constable Edward Byrne ‘on suspicion of being of an unsound mind’. Byrne recounted ‘the various idiosyncrasies to which he was guilty’ and also revealed that Charles had previously been admitted to an asylum. He was remanded for 8 days’ medical treatment.127 An article from the same newspaper on 28 April 1915 revealed that Charles, reportedly from a ‘well-known family’, had died of typhoid and pneumonia at the age of 35.128 Charles was accepted into the Australian Commonwealth Horse contingent despite his past institutionalisation, reflecting the fact that military authorities were often unaware of the previous histories of enlisting men.129 This example also demonstrates that beyond the various influences on the archive, its deterioration, destruction or fragmentary nature can significantly affect the histories that emerge from it.
Conclusion
This article presents several examples of delusional men institutionalised in Australian asylums during the South African War. Some men had fought in the conflict while others had not, however, gendered expectations on men and perceptions of the conflict within Australian society likely influenced the delusions of both groups. The nature of delusions makes any definitive conclusions about the provenance of their specific themes impossible, however, past psychiatric and historical research has found evident connections between the environment surrounding an individual and their experience of delusion. This article has carefully raised events and beliefs surrounding the South African War alongside delusions recorded in asylum case notes to suggest ways the insane male and insane soldier viewed himself within the emerging nation of Australia, and conversely how Australian society viewed him.
These men appeared preoccupied with the South African War, as was much of Australian society, which was reflected within the asylum archive. The subjective influences of attending doctors and the historian reading the archive, as well as the nature of the asylum case book, however, are an essential consideration when ‘dreaming the archive’, in the words of Swartz. It is impossible to determine the exact path from the South African War to the minds of these men, as delusions remain largely mysterious in their formation and content. Similarly difficult to establish is the path from the asylum patient’s mind to the case notes written by their attending physician, or from case notes to diligent historian. Still, it is possible to see late nineteenth-century Australian priorities reflected within asylum case notes, which re-emphasises the importance of the South African conflict in Australian society. This focussed historical study has centred on the responses of institutionalised and delusional Australian men to the South African War, and thus has contributed to past histories of psychiatry and war by demonstrating the various ways one significant national event was able to reverberate throughout the late nineteenth-century asylum.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Georgina Rychner for her help in the early stages of research, and Professor Hans Pols for his advice on an earlier version of this paper. Thank you also to the reviewers for their constructive comments, all of which significantly improved the article.
Footnotes
C. George, HSD285/1/426, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office (hereafter TAHO), Hobart.
Colonel Robert Baden Powell was a British military officer who successfully led military forces through the Siege of Mafeking during the South African War. Lord Frederick Roberts was the second Commander-in-Chief of the British forces during the South African War.
J. T. Cecil, HSD285/2/411, TAHO, Hobart.
Refer Effie Karageorgos, Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Words from the Battlefield (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Effie Karageorgos, ‘Mental Illness, Masculinity and the Australian Soldier: Military Psychiatry from South Africa to the First World War’, Health and History, 2018, 20, 10–29. Effie Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War: Gendered Medical Responses to Combat Breakdown in South Africa, 1899–1902’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2020, 44, 18–32.
P. L. Murray, Official Records of the Australian Military Contingents to the War in South Africa (Melbourne: A. J. Mullett, 1911), 570.
Guenter B. Risse and John Harley Warner, ‘Reconstructing Clinical Activities: Patient Records in Medical History’, Social History of Medicine, 1992, 5, 183–205, 185. Refer also David Wright, ‘Getting out of the Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the 19th Century’, Social History of Medicine, 1997, 10, 137–155.
Louise Wannell, ‘Patients’ Relatives and Psychiatric Doctors: Letter Writing in the York Retreat, 1875–1910, Social History of Medicine, 2007, 20, 56–76; Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Michael Barfoot and Allan W. Beveridge, ‘“Our Most Notable Inmate”: John Willis Mason at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1864–1902’, History of Psychiatry, 1993, iv, 159–208; Allan Beveridge, ‘Voices of the Mad: Patients’ Letters from the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1873–1908’, Psychological Medicine, 1997, 27, 899–908; Jonathan Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine, 1998, 11, 255–281; Sally Swartz, ‘Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives: Challenges to Historiography’, Kronos, vol. 34, 2008, 296; Sarah Chaney, ‘No “Sane” Person Would Have Any Idea’: Patients’ Involvement in Late Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry’, Medical History, 2016, 60, 37–53; Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 232–237. Refer also Hilary Marland, ‘“Close Confinement Tells Very Much Upon a Man”: Prison Memoirs, Insanity and the Late Nineteeth-and Early Twentieth-Century Prison’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2019, 74, 267–291, who has interestingly analysed prison memoirs to provide a perspective on insanity in a penal context.
Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 32.
Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), 16, 23.
Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 158; Porter, A Social History of Madness, 4–5.
Angela McCarthy, Catharine Coleborne, Maree O’Connor and Elspeth Knewstubb, ‘Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910: Utilising Large Data Collection for Histories of Psychiatry and Mental Health’, Medical History, 2017, 61, 358–379, 359.
Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), 8.
Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales, 1880–1940 (Kensington: UNSW Press, 1988); Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
John C. Burnham, ‘Psychotic Delusions as a Key to Historical Cultures: Tasmania, 1830–1940’, Journal of Social History, 1980, 13, 368–383, 369; Beveridge, ‘Voices of the Mad’, 901; Louise Hide, ‘Making Sense of Pain: Delusions, Syphilis, and Somatic Pain in London County Council Asylums, c. 1900’, 19. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2012, 15, 1–20. Refer also Elspeth Knewstubb, ‘Believes the Devil has Changed him’: Religion and Patient Identity in Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, 1882–1910’, Health & History, 2012, 14, 56–76 for a description of religious delusion as a reflection of patients’ religious lives.
David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 197–200.
Rory du Plessis, ‘A Hermeneutic Analysis of Delusion Content from the Casebooks of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890–1907’, South African Journal of Psychiatry, 2019, 25, 1263, 1–7, 3.
Risse and Warner, ‘Reconstructing Clinical Activities’, 194.
Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories’, 262–263.
Hide, ‘Making Sense of Pain’, 4; Refer also McCarthy et al., ‘Lives in the Asylum Record’, 358.
Swartz, ‘Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives’, 300.
Sally Swartz, ‘Asylum Case Records: Fact and Fiction’, Rethinking History, 2018, 22, 289–301, 289, 294.
Tracey Loughran, ‘Shell Shock, Trauma and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2012, 67, 94–119, 116–117.
Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness, 116.
Porter, A Social History of Madness, 3; Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, 18; Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 124; Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 15.
Garton, Medicine and Madness, 115. Some sources that describe delusional symptoms refer to ‘psychosis’, a condition now associated with a range of schizophrenic spectrum disorders. According to Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (East Sussex: Psychology Press, 2005), ‘psychosis’ was used by British medical officers to describe some traumatised South African War veterans. While the definition of ‘psychosis’ has shifted significantly since this time, psychosis is today ‘characterised by delusions, hallucinations and formal thought disorder’, according to the American Psychological Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 827. This article will only mention ‘psychosis’ if it is used by the original source.
Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 2003, 55, 111–133, 114–115.
Refer ‘A Legislator’s Loyalty’, The Border Watch, 1900, 4; ‘Demonstrative Patriotism’, The Bunyip, 1900, 2; Wilcox, 324; Word from the War’, The Barrier Truth, 1901, 2.
“Reception and Dinner of the Medical Professionals of N.S.W.”, Australian Medical Gazette, 1901, 203–205.
D. I. McDonald, “Manning, Frederic Norton (1839–1903),” Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, 1974).
Refer, for example, C. Reismann, ‘Observations Made on Twenty-One Cases of Gunshot Wounds to the Chest’, The Australasian Medical Gazette, 1900, 302; R. Scot Skirving, ‘On the Spread of Enteric Fever during the South African War’, The Australasian Medical Gazette, 1901, 4–7.
John W. Springthorpe diaries, MS9898, State Library of Victoria; Refer Stephen Garton, “The Scales of Suffering: Love, Death and Victorian Masculinity,” Social History, 2002, 27, 40–58 for a discussion of grief and masculinity in these diaries.
Philippa A. Garety and David R. Hemsley, ‘Characteristics of Delusional Experience’, European Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences, 1987, 236, 294–298, 294.
Philippa A. Garety and David R. Hemsley, Delusions: Investigations into the Psychology of Delusional Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10; Glenn Roberts, ‘The Origins of Delusion’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1992, 161, 298–308, 301.
Chris Walker, ‘Delusion: What Did Jaspers Really Say?’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1997, 159, 94–103, 97.
Porter, A Social History of Madness, 232.
German E. Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology since the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89.
Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 93.
Ramin Mojtabai, ‘Delusion as Error: The History of a Metaphor’, History of Psychiatry, 2000, 11, 3–14, 6; J. H. Blount, ‘On the Terms Delusion, Illusion, and Hallucination Part II’, The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, 1857, 3, 508–516, 515.
Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 112.
Ibid., 114.
Porter, A Social History of Madness, 21; Garety and Hemsley, Delusions, 14.
Garety and Hemsley, Delusions, 2; Walker, ‘Delusion: What Did Jaspers Really Say?’, 98; Mojtabai, ‘Delusion as error’, 7.
APA, DSM-5, 87, 114, 126; P. J. V. Beumont, ‘Phenomenology and the History of Psychiatry’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1992, 26, 532–545, 541; Berrios, ‘Delusions as Wrong Beliefs’, 12; Rebecca Knowles, Simon McCarthy-Jones and Georgina Rowse, ‘Grandiose Delusions: A Review and Theoretical Integration of Cognitive and Affective Perspectives’, Clinical Psychology Review, 2011, 31, 684–696, 687; Refer also Aaron T. Beck and Neil A. Rector, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Schizophrenia: Theory and Therapy’, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 2005, 1, 577–606, 583.
Lisa Bortolotti, Delusions and other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28.
Ibid., 28.
Philippa A. Garety and Daniel Freeman, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Delusions: A Critical View of Theories and Evidence’, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1999, 38, 113–154, 113.
Beck and Rector, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Schizophrenia’, 588–589.
Bertram P. Karon, ‘On the Formation of Delusions’, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1989, 6, 169–185, 170.
Darian Leader, What is Madness? (London: Penguin, 2011), 330.
Atwood D. Gaines, ‘Delusions: Culture, Psychosis and the Problem of Meaning’, in Thomas F. Oltmanns and Brendan A. Maher, eds, Delusional Beliefs (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1988), 230–254, 230–231.
Refer Burnham, ‘Psychotic Delusions, 369; Garety and Hemsley, Delusions, 137; APA, DSM-5, 99.
Gaines, ‘Delusions’, 235.
Porter, A Social History of Madness, 5.
Sally Swartz, ‘Fools and Ships: Psychopathology and Colonial Experience in South Africa, 1818–1930’ in Clifford van Ommen and Desmond Painter, eds, Interiors: A History of Psychology in Southern Africa (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2008, 261; Refer also Plessis, ‘A Hermeneutic Analysis of Delusion Content’, 1–7.
A.- C. Leiviska Deland, G. Karlsson, H. Fatouros-Bergman, ‘A Phenomenological Analysis of the Psychotic Experience’, Human Studies, 2011, 34, 23–42, 27, 35.
Refer, for example, Jeffrey L. Geller, ‘Operation Desert Storm and Delusions about the War among Chronic Patients in the Community’, Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 1991, 42, 419–420; U.S. Yaktin and S. Labban, ‘Traumatic War, Stress & Schizophrenia’, Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 1992, 30, 6, 29–33.
Roberts, ‘The Origins of Delusion’, 303.
Uitlander Council, Telegram to CSO, 31 July 1899, GRG24/6/469/813/1899, State Records of South Australia (hereafter SRSA), Adelaide.
Henry B. Higgins, Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 1899, 92, 1777; Henry B. Higgins, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 1902, 7, 9854; Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa 1899–1902 (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 316.
Refer ‘Concentration Camp Lies’, The Worker, 12, , 1901, 2; ‘Pro-Boers’, The Herald, 1900, 6; ‘Word from the War’, The Barrier Truth, 1901, 2; Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, 334. Concentration camps were also created for African groups, but these did not provoke as dramatic opposition as the Boer camps.
Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9.
For examples of donations, refer: Letter to Barr Smith from CSO, 30 December 1899, GRG24/4/77/1899, SRSA, Adelaide; Letter to Mrs CA Horn from CSO, 5 January 1900, GRG24/4/77/1900, SRSA, Adelaide; For an example of parade planning, refer Letter from Town Clerk, Port Adelaide, to CSO, 11 February 1901, GRG24/6/479/1901, SRSA, Adelaide.
R. L. Wallace, The Australians at the Boer War (Canberra: Australian War Memorial & Australia Government Publishing Service, 1976), 246. Letter to CSO, 29 March 1900, GRG24/6/474/1900, SRSA, Adelaide.
Letter from Charlick Brothers to CSO, 23 May 1900, GRG24/6/474/1900, SRSA, Adelaide.
Refer Helena García-Mieres, Noelia Niño-Robles, Susana Ochoa & Guillem Feixas, ‘Exploring Identity and Personal Meanings in Psychosis using the Repertory Grid Technique: A Systematic Review’, Clinical Psychological Psychotherapy, 2019, 26, 1–17.
Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum Male Case Books 1900–1903, 294–295, VPRS 7399/P0001/13, Public Records of Victoria (hereafter PROV), Melbourne.
Refer, for example, AWM, PR01964, Letter by Douglas St. George Rich, 16 November 1901; AWM, 3DRL 7472, Letter by George Harris, 25 October 1900; AWM, 3DRL 7472, Letter by George Harris, 25 October 1900; SLV, MS9662, Letter by Alexander McQueen, 12 January 1901.
Refer Mitchell Library, SLNSW, MLMSS 3858, Letter by William H. Glasson, 10 April 1901; AWM, PR01357, Diary of Charles W. Turner, April 1901; AWM, PR85/40, Diary of Patrick H. Lang, 9 February 1901.
Papers re Members of 5th Victorian Contingent being Sentenced [Court martial] for Insubordination in South Africa, 1901–1902, B168 1902/919, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), Melbourne.
C. John dob c. 1862, HSD285/1/386, TAHO, Hobart.
Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 118.
Richard P. Bentall, Rhiannon Corcoran, Robert Howard, Nigel Blackwood and Peter Kinderman, ‘Persecutory Delusions: A Review and Theoretical Integration’, Clinical Psychology Review, 2001, 21, 1143–1192, 1149.
James Gilleen and Anthony S. David, ‘The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Delusions: From Psychopathology to Neuropsychology and Back Again’, Psychological Medicine, 2005, 35, 5–12, 8.
Bentall et al., ‘Persecutory Delusions’, 1150.
Garton, Medicine and Madness, 116.
Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, 32.
Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, 49; Refer, for example, Chief Secretary’s Office, Letters from T. Shore to CSO, 20 May 1900; 30 May 1900; 18 June 1900, CSD26/1/2, TAHO, Hobart; Chief Secretary’s Office, Letters from Alfred Field to CSO, 16 December 1899, CSD26/1/2, TAHO, Hobart.
Chief Secretary’s Office, Letters from Alfred Field to CSO, 16 December 1899, CSD26/1/2, TAHO, Hobart.
Chief Secretary’s Office, Letters to CSO from Alfred J. Taylor, 3 March 1900, 9 March 1900, CSD26/1/2, TAHO, Hobart.
Callan Park Medical Case books 21 July 1900–13 April 1901, 3/4684, State Records of New South Wales (hereafter SRNSW), Sydney.
Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire, 9; George A. Wood, cited in Ken S. Inglis, ‘The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872–1902’, in A.F. Madden and W.H. Morris-Jones, ed, Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 34; ‘The Boers and the War’, The Border Watch, 1900, 3; Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 330. Effie Karageorgos, ‘Educated, Tolerant and Kindly: Australian attitudes towards British and Boer in South Africa, 1899–1902’, Historia, 2014, 59, 120–135.
Du Plessis, ‘A Hermeneutic Analysis of Delusion Content’, 3.
Refer Knowles, McCarthy-Jones and Rowse, ‘Grandiose Delusions’, 685; Beck and Rector, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Schizophrenia’, 583.
Kew Asylum Male Case Books, VPRS 7398/P0001/16, PROV, Melbourne.
SLSA, D6427(L), Letter by Samuel H. Jones, 6 June 1902’; Refer also SLV, MS9691, Letter by Robert J. Byers, 18 September 1900; 29 October 1900; SLSA, D4869(L), Diary of Martin Maddern, 4 June 1900; Mitchell Library, SLNSW, MLMSS 3858, Letter by William H. Glasson, 2 May 1901.
Rae W. Connell, Masculinities (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 76–77.
Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, Historical Studies, 1978, 18, 191–209. Refer also Linzi Murrie, ‘The Australian Legend: Writing Australian Masculinity/Writing ‘Australian’ Masculine’, Journal of Australian Studies, 1998, 22, 68–77, 70.
Nick Dyrenfurth, Mateship: A Very Australian History (Brunswick: Scribe, 2015), 84.
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend [1958] (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1966), 11.
Catharine Coleborne, ‘White Men and Weak Masculinity: Men in the Public Asylums in Victoria, Australia, and New Zealand, 1860s–1900s’, History of Psychiatry, 2014, 25, 468–476, 473; Lee Ann Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 53.
Beveridge, ‘Voices of the Mad’, 901.
Monk, Attending Madness, 55.
Garton, Medicine and Madness, 116.
Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 116, 125.
Refer Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum Female Case Books 1897–1900, VPRS7400/P0001/12, PROV, Melbourne; Ararat Asylum Female Case Books 1892–1900, VPRS 7401/P0001/5, PROV, Melbourne.
Nicola Smith, Daniel Freeman and Elizabeth Kuipers, ‘Grandiose Delusions: An Experimental Investigation of the Delusion as Defense’, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2005, 193, 480–487.
Refer Knowles, McCarthy-Jones and Rowse, ‘Grandiose Delusions’, 685; Beck and Rector, ‘Cognitive Approaches to Schizophrenia’, 583.
Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 118.
Garton, Medicine and Madness, 116.
Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire, 103.
Knowles, McCarthy-Jones and Rowse, ‘Grandiose Delusions’, 685, 687.
C. George, dob c.1879, HSD285/1/426, TAHO, Hobart.
Refer Bob Nicholls, Bluejackets and Boxers: Australia’s Naval Expedition to the Boxer Uprising (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1986).
Refer, for example, ‘Boxer Rebellion: Looks like Russia’s Work’, The Telegraph, 1900, 4; ‘Foreign Troops in China: Dates of Arrival’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1900, 7; ‘Warships in Chinese Waters: An Immense Number’, The Argus, 1900, 5.
J. T. Cecil, HSD285/2/411, TAHO, Hobart.
J. T. Cecil, B4418, NAA, Melbourne; Murray, Official Records, 570.
Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930 (London: Continuum, 2010), 38; Joanne Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta Books, 1999), 76, 236.
Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, 32, 327; Wallace, The Australians at the Boer War, 84.
Cth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, vol. 1, 1902.
Refer Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD; JC (Kay) de Villiers, Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, Vol. 2 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2008); Karageorgos, ‘Mental Illness, Masculinity, and the Australian Soldier’, 10–29; Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War’, 18–32.
Michael Tyquin, Madness and the Military: Australia’s Experience of the Great War (Loftus, Australian Military History Publications, 2006), 146.
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30; Edward W. Lazell, ‘Psychology of War and Schizophrenia’, Psychoanalytic Review, 1920, 7, 224–245, 225.
Simon Wessely, ‘Twentieth-Century Theories on Combat Motivation and Breakdown’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2006, 41, 269–286, 282; Refer also American Psychological Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-III (Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1980).
Kaštelan et al., ‘Psychotic Symptoms’, 273; David et al., ‘Psychotic Symptoms’, 30.
Coleborne, ‘White Men and Weak Masculinity’, 470.
Refer Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War’ 18–32; Karageorgos, ‘Mental Illness, Masculinity and the Australian Soldier’, 10–29.
Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 159–160.
David et al., ‘Psychotic Symptoms’, 29–30; Mark B. Hamner, ‘Psychotic Features and Combat-Associated PTSD’, Depression and Anxiety, 1997, 5, 34–38, 35–36.
Edgar Jones, Kamaldeep Bhui and Alberta Engelbrecht, ‘The Return of the Traumatised Army Veteran: A Qualitative Study of UK Ex-Servicemen in the Aftermath of War, 1945 to 2000’, International Review of Psychiatry, 2019, 18, 1–11, 5.
Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum Male Case Book, 44–45, VPRS7399/P0001/13, PROV, Melbourne; For record of Henry’s service in the Cape Medical Corps, refer Cape Medical Staff Corps, WO 100/240, The National Archives, London.
Minute book, with index, of Pension Board, South African War, AWM1, 5/5, AWM, Canberra. Refer Effie Karageorgos, ‘An Act of Grace: Reading Gender and Nationalism within Australian South African War Pension Provisions’, Australian Historical Studies. 2022, 53, 75–96.
Minutes of evidence and proceedings [Royal Commission of Inquiry re Claims of Members of New South Wales Contingents in South Africa], NRS-1477, State Records of New South Wales, Sydney.
Murray, Official Records, 532.
Kew Lunatic Asylum Male Case Book, 1902, VPRS 7398/P0001/17, PROV, Melbourne.
SRSA, GRG24/6/372/1900, no. 248, Letter by Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of South Australia to CSO, 20 February 1900; AWM, PR00971, Diary of John C. Cripps, 20 February–4 March 1900; AWM, PR88/1227, Diary of James E. Lawn, 28 October 1900; Refer, for example, Paul T. Bartone, Bjorn H. Johnsen, Jarle Eid, Sigurd W. Hystad, Jon C. Laberg, ‘Hardiness, Avoidance Coping, and Alcohol Consumption in War Veterans: A Moderated-Mediation Study’, Stress and Health. 2017, 33, 498–507; Kyle Possemato, Stephen A. Maisto, Michael Wade, Kimberly Barrie, Emily M. Johnson and Paige C. Ouimette, ‘Natural Course of Co-Occurring PTSD and Alcohol Use Disorder Among Recent Combat Veterans’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2017, 30, 279–287.
Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 1901, 2.
Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 1915, 2.
Refer the case of Marshall R. outlined in Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War’, 15 for a similar case.