Orientation ClassAn introduction to the subject and Louis Nowra’s Cosi

Administrative details• My name is: Danni Bunker• My email address: teacherdanni1@hotmail.com or

bunker.danielle.k@edumail.vic.gov.edu • Where I live: In the Humanities office, second floor

of the big building.

How to get organised for this class• Go through the unit

outline/expectations/attendance. • It is important that you keep your notes in the

most organised way possible- this is an exam that tests you on the entire year, so you need to ensure that you do not lose anything along the way!

• Depending on whether or not you use your computers for not taking you should divide up sections of your notebook/or folders on your computer to look something like this:

Organising your notes:• Section A: Reading and Responding- Cosi and The

Reluctant Fundamentalist.• Section B: Whose Reality? The Player and A

Streetcar named Desire. • Section C: Using Language to Persuade.

An introduction to the play Cosi• Louis Nowra wrote the play Cosi• It was first performed in 1992• It is set in 1971 Melbourne• The play is semi-autobiographical

(Nowra based the play on some of his own experiences working in a mental asylum)

Australia in the 1970’s

An Introduction to the social context of Cosi

What do we know about Australia in the 1970s?• Class brainstorm

The decade in context:• The political and social unrest of the 1960’s carried

over into the 1970’s. This mirrored social movement throughout other Western countries.

• Widespread protest against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war led to the removal of troops in 1972.

• Prime Minister Gough Whitlam instituted a range of Government reform in his three year tenure. In 1975 he was controversially dismissed.

• The women’s rights, indigenous rights and environmental movements all made progress in the 1970’s.

American and British influences• The Australian identity has continually evolved from over the

decade, from that of a white British colony, to a diverse global culture.

• In 1973, American dominance of the Australian music industry prompted the introduction of local content quotas on radio.

• Government assistance led to a resurgence of the Australian film industry in the 1970s

• Australian television was saturated with American programs in the 1970s, but local content steadily improved in quality and quantity.

• Australian sport held fast to its British roots for many years, but has recently adopted the glitzy presentation and TV-friendly conventions of American sport.

In Nowra’s own words (from the introduction of the play)• “Madness both frightened and attracted me” (p.xvi)• “This (looking at the time the play is set in) was 1971

and the era of R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist whose view of madness was oddly reassuring in a decade going crazy. One of his ideas was that labelling people mad was to stigmatise them, and that many mentally ill people should be allowed to go totally mad- once at rock bottom they would find themselves again” (p.xvi)

• “This was also the era when chemicals began to control many of the wilder excesses of madmen” (p.xvi)

The History of Mental Illness in Australia.

Their actions

are:• Crazy• Nutty• Insane• Barmy• Mad• Batty

People are labelled as:•Fool•Nitwit•Simpleton•Imbecile•Crackpot•Idiot

They belong in the:•Nut house•Loony bin•Funny farm

Attitudes to mental illness can be seen in the language of

‘otherness’

•Psycho•Weirdo•Maniac• Moron•Cretin•Nutter

Definitions of mental illness:• Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, in mid 1800s,

was the first Australian mental institution. Inmates often incarcerated because their behaviour seen to be a threat to society. Symptoms included:

• alcoholism and homelessness• protracted sleeplessness • persistent headache • great depression or exaltation of spirits

without sufficient cause • By the late 1800s, approximately one in

every four hundred Victorian citizens classified as insane.

Psychiatry has had a long history of subjecting patients to bizarre, dramatic and often barbaric procedures. Sometimes intended to restrain patients, but sometimes thought to cure specific conditions

In the 1930s, insulin shock therapy introduced as an accepted treatment for depression and manic depression. At the height of its popularity, administered widely to institutionalised patients.

• In the 1940s electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and frontal lobotomies introduced. Lobotomies were a form of brain surgery used to pacify patients - now regarded as barbaric. The use of Lithium salts (rediscovered in 1949 by Australian psychiatrist John Cade) - an attempt to control mania in chronically hospitalised patients. In the 1950s, antidepressant drugs arrived - used with a range of other drugs for sedative or restraining purposes; stimulants were used to ‘liven up’ patients with depression.

Images of madness:• Look at the following images of ‘madness’.• How have they been portrayed by artists and filmmakers?• Why might they be seen in these disturbing ways?• Is ‘difference’ sometimes socially unacceptable? Why?

This is what a ‘room’ in an 18th Century mental asylum looked

like

This is part of a 20th Century asylum

How might environments like these affect the inmates?

Underground sewer...?

Larundel Mental asylum , Victoria; closed in 1990s

These are some of the methods designed to control, restrain or cure

the mentally ill

Electro-convulsive therapy

How it feels to the patient

The effects of intensive shock therapy – Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest”

Cure or punishment?

‘Productive employment’ for the mentally ill

Sue Sherman MLCOccupational therapy

Artwork by a mental asylum patient...

Vincent Van Gogh

Group therapy session

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest