In June 1857, Dr Alfred Yates Carr wrote
to his wife and young sons back in
England from the Yarra Bend Lunatic
Asylum, to which he had been committed
three months before. Convinced of his
own sanity and believing himself falsely
imprisoned, he gave Louisa the latest
news on his efforts to secure his freedom
and return home. Before sealing the
letter, he scribbled on the inside of the
envelope “Keep up your spirits and do not
despair, once out of this I do not think
they will ever again succeed in getting me
into an asylum. AYC”.
Aside from a series of short escapes and releases, he would spend the rest of his life – 37
years – at Yarra Bend and Ararat lunatic asylums before he died, aged 73, in 1894. He
never saw his family again.
Carr appealed about his fate to members of the Victorian parliament and visiting doctors
– who did not believe that he had a wife and children, thought that this was all part of his
delusion. After all, he was clearly mad when he claimed that his mother had been
murdered by his brother. Clearly mad when he claimed that the bouts of theft and
violence that resulted in his committal were due to poisoning by Indian Hemp, which
had been surreptitiously introduced into his tobacco by a longstanding foe. Clearly mad
when he claimed to have been viciously beaten by asylum attendants, or kept in solitary
confinement for three days without water.
It was to provide for his family back in England, Carr said, that he put in a claim against
the government for non-payment for his medical services in the aftermath of the Eureka
rebellion. He had been the first doctor to reach the stockade after the guns had fallen
silent and the cries of dying men were the only sounds carrying through the smoky air.
Some thought it was treating the wounded here that had driven Carr mad, for what he
found was a carnage of gunshot and bayonet wounds, horrible burns, one man still alive
despite his brain being visible through his opened head. The government eventually paid
up – but still not believing in the existence of Carr's family, chose to hold the money in
trust for him rather than send it home.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It wasn't Eureka that unhinged him though: the peculiar obsessions and delusions that
assailed and finally overwhelmed Carr were in evidence years before. He had seen
madness from both sides. In England he had been the resident physician at a small,
3
private, rural lunatic asylum at Hunningham –a “mad-doctor”, in the parlance of the
time. In the Antipodes, he found himself a patient, his mind turned upside down.
At Hunningham he worked for the proprietor,
James Harcourt, who sought to bring the
patients back to health through 'moral
treatment'. The asylums of the past had relied
on mechanical restraints such as shackles and
straitjackets to control or punish patients: the
'moral treatment', pioneered at the Quaker-
run York Retreat around 1800, and
popularised in the new government asylums
by John Conolly, sought instead to treat
patients not as wild beasts in need of taming,
but as human beings, to be encouraged back down the road to sanity through the
example of moral and rational behaviour.
An article in the local paper just before Christmas 1848 described the excellent work
being performed at Hunningham House and the number of cures effected there. “Every
testimony we have heard of the mode of treatment pursued in the above asylum concurs
in expressing the constant kindness and attention of the proprietor, Mr HARCOURT to
the unfortunate inmates; as also to the skill and unwearying attention of the resident
physician, Dr Alfred CARR, in ministering to that most deplorable of all afflictions, a
mind diseased.” The encomium may have carried more weight had it not been written by
Carr himself.
All may have continued well had not Carr and the proprietor's wife Susannah detested
one another. A series of petty disagreements blew up one chilly morning at the breakfast
table. Carr joined the couple in the parlour and dragged his chair across the wooden
boards directly between Susannah and the fire, blocking both warmth and light.
Exasperated, she threw down her sewing and looked at her husband, who was moved to
remark on Carr's "ungentlemanly" behaviour. Well, said Carr, Mrs H was certainly "no
lady". She in turn called him a sneak, a mean, impertinent and insignificant fellow, and
made some disparaging comment about his boots. Harcourt called him a liar, at which
point Carr rose from the table and, as Mrs Harcourt fled the room, picked up his chair
and threw it at his employer. With the aid of an attendant, Harcourt wrestled Carr to the
ground, while Mrs H stood in the doorway encouraging her husband with cries of “That’s
right, Harcourt, give the fellow some more, he richly deserves it”.
Harcourt pressed assault charges. The magistrate, hearing both sides of the story, judged
it to be an “unpleasant affair” that “does not amount to much”, and fined Carr one
shilling plus costs.
4
Carr exacted his revenge by writing a long letter to the Commissioners in Lunacy and the
Official Visitors of Lunatic Asylums in the County of Warwick outlining multiple cases of
patient abuse at Hunningham, and calling down on Harcourt’s head an official inquiry.
His claims rehearsed the full gothic repertoire of charges that were increasingly levelled
at unregulated private asylums during the early nineteenth century. Neglect: dying
patients left overnight without assistance. Abuse: patients left naked in unheated rooms
as a form of punishment. Grotesquerie: a female attendant giving a patient a black eye
whilst attempting to rub her nose in her own excrement. Violence: Harcourt striking
patients with a dog whip and a stick.
There was little evidence to support the charges, and the commissioners sensed that
Carr's motives had "not been altogether actuated by a sense of duty", adding that he was
himself "by no means free from the charge of improper treatment of Patients and in
particular of subjecting them to repeated shower baths by way of punishment for slight
inattention to his orders and acts of disrespect to himself”. Harcourt was almost
completely exonerated, Carr humiliated.
The Hunningham affair was later described as the first attack of Carr’s illness. Whilst on
the face of it this was a story of clashing personalities, a brief flare of rage and violence
and a vindictive and drawn out plan for revenge, there are elements of this shabby drama
that were to recur throughout Carr’s life. He was always quick to kindle a sense of
injustice, that the world had done hardly by him. Unable to weigh the true importance of
matters and act accordingly, he turned his private grievances into public affairs, played
out his internal conflicts through committees of inquiry, sought validation from others
that he had truly been wronged. Devoting weeks of his life to seeking revenge against
Harcourt shows the cracks in his personality that were ultimately to become wide
enough for his sanity to disappear into.
His appearances before a magistrate at his assault trial and at a public inquiry into
asylum abuses were his first performances in a role he regularly reprised – the Witness.
He took the stand a dozen times in the next 15 years, both as accuser and defendant.
Hunningham was the first rehearsal for his final and most influential performance, as
the cause celebre in a nine day libel trial in 1862 in which he testified to the abuses
carried in a very different lunatic asylum – in Yarra Bend, Melbourne.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Bowie vs Wilson is a nine day legal wonder, playing
to a full house in the Supreme Court gallery, with
almost verbatim transcripts of lawyer’s speeches
and witness statements published in the
newspapers, ultimately reprinted as a pamphlet
running to 120 closely spaced pages. On trial,
5
apparently, is the seventy-four year old Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic
Asylum, Doctor Robert Bowie, and his management of the institution over the last
decade. But Bowie is in fact the plaintiff, suing the editor of the Argus newspaper for
libel following three articles the previous year. Yes, they were stinging, and made serious
allegations: of patient abuse and neglect, indecency, mismanagement. The first began
Events occur now and again painfully reminding us that in the picturesque bend
of the Yarra, from which it takes its name, there still exists, with all its horrors, as
far as the public knows, the lunatic asylum, and, with all his weakness and
incompetency – to use the mildest terms we can call to mind – the manager Mr
BOWIE
For Bowie they are no doubt the last straw in a long
running feud with the colony’s Chief Medical Officer
William McCrae. For nearly ten years they have wrestled
for control of the asylum, arguing over their widely
differing views on its proper location and the treatment
and condition of its patients, cultivating political support,
testifying before parliamentary committees. Dr Bowie had
taken charge of Yarra Bend during the gold rush. In his
long career as a surgeon in London he had been described
as an “indefatigable friend of the very poor”; assisting
with the founding of benevolent asylums for the
homeless, campaigning for improved sanitation, and
working for the General Board of Health in tracking
cholera cases and inspecting workhouses. His attention also turned to assisted
emigration schemes, and in 1852 he sailed for Australia as ship’s surgeon on one of
Caroline Chisholm’s emigrant vessels, the Athenian. On his arrival in Melbourne the
government was seeking a new Superintendent for the Asylum after several scandals had
led to the removal of the previous administration. At a time when new arrivals were
flocking to the goldfields rather than staying in Melbourne, they would have been
delighted to find and appoint someone of Dr Bowie’s medical experience – despite his
having little direct exposure to lunatic asylums. And initially Bowie’s steady and
humanitarian approach significantly improved conditions at Yarra Bend. It was only
with the arrival of Dr William McCrea, an energetic and reformist Irishman, that Bowie’s
methods were exposed as, well, somewhat old-fashioned.
Had Bowie continued to steadfastly ignore any questioning of his methods or
management, perhaps his feud with McCrea would have dragged along as a matter of no
great consequence. But by displaying yet again his peevish sensitivity to any form of
correction or criticism, Bowie has made a disastrous mistake in providing a public forum
where every detail of his management of the Asylum can be held up and examined in the
most critical possible light.
6
He is well represented though, as the parties settle in to the courtroom before Chief
Justice Stawell on the morning of Wednesday 28th May 1862, by none other than the
Attorney-General, Dick Ireland, ably supported by Mr Fellows and the appropriately
named Mr Billing. For the defence, Argus editor Edmund Wilson has marshalled former
Member of Parliament and noted lawyer Archibald Michie, along with Mr Wyatt and Mr
Wood. ₤3,000 in damages are sought. Ireland begins the proceedings in his round
Galway voice. One of Melbourne’s most persuasive criminal lawyers, his strong suit is a
clever and galloping eloquence capable of carrying him over the holes in his knowledge
of the law itself. He lays out Bowie’s long and devoted service, struggling these last ten
years since his arrival from England despite insufficient resources and the lack of
suitable attendants. “Owing to the gold mania, people were in a considerable state of
excitement; society had not settled down, and Dr Bowie found a vast number of persons,
who from various causes, were labouring under mental disease.” He reads the Argus
reports into the record. They are baseless, Ireland claims, warming to his theme as the
glow of the morning tipple spreads through his ample frame. They rely on the evidence
of witnesses to a parliamentary inquiry that is still in progress, witnesses with no
credibility, “a number of servants dismissed from the establishment for misconduct, and
a number of discharged lunatics” and whose claims have not yet had the opportunity to
be challenged. “The jury must know the effect which articles of this description must
have on the reputation and standing… of a man in Dr Bowie’s position: because these
articles declared that he was guilty, not merely of wilful negligence, but actually of wilful
cruelty.”
Chief Justice Stawell, Archibald Michie, Richard Ireland
Ireland closes his remarks and cedes the stage to his colleague Archibald Michie. A
brilliant parliamentarian of great principle, who some compared to Disraeli, Michie is
temporarily taking a break from office after the electors in his seat of St Kilda
disapproved of both his continuing absences and vocal support of free trade. Lean,
sharp, his hair has long since retreated from the top of his head and blows out in unruly
fashion at the back: he leans gently towards the jury whilst addressing them as if fighting
his way into a strong headwind. His words flow easily, with the style of a practiced
7
raconteur, a mix of “vinegar and honey”. In defence of the Argus and the articles it
published, Michie details eleven ‘justifications’ of the alleged libels that he will seek to
prove. That patients were incarcerated and restrained by being confined in large bags,
overnight or even for days at a time, from which they were not relieved even for calls of
nature. That they were tortured by the extreme use of straitjackets. That in the case of
one patient, this treatment was meted out purely as a punishment for complaining to
one of the Official Visitors who kept a check on patient welfare. That Patrick Mullens,
who had died in the Asylum, was found on inquest to have several broken ribs: had these
injuries been inflicted at the Asylum, he had been treated with “gross cruelty”: if prior to
his arrival, with “gross neglect”. That the Asylum was infested with lice and bugs, and the
attendants cared little for patient cleanliness and welfare, preferring instead to drink and
play cards. That medicines were dispensed unlabelled, and routinely given to the wrong
patients.
He outlines the charge that Mrs Steele, who had been admitted to Yarra Bend suffering
acute grief at the loss of her husband, had been taken advantage of and overpowered by
Bowie’s coachman, Sloane, and subsequently “became in the family way”. That Bowie
not only presided over an establishment where such an outrage could take place, but was
actually aware of the consequences and visited the woman after her release. As one of the
Argus articles put it: “We warn any persons having female friends in the Yarra Bend
Lunatic Asylum, that so long as this crime remains unpunished, they have no guarantee
that those friends are safe from the grossest outrage that women can be subjected to”. It
is, says Michie, the most vulnerable members of society, those deprived of the capacity to
make their grievances known, that merit the attention of the journalist. The press is
obliged to investigate abuses and put their case before the public. This is precisely what
the Argus was doing in this instance.
On that moral high note, Michie calls his first, and star, witness: Alfred Yates Carr. He
appears in the courtroom behind a police constable, and followed by the attendant who
had brought him down from the Bend that morning – blocky bookends for the small
man in between, almost lost inside the blue pilot coat that mark him as the property of
the Asylum. Well-shaven, nevertheless, with moustache neatly cropped. He takes the
witness stand two steps at a time, and in response to the question put to him by the
court, raises his chin, stares down at the room, and gives his name. The faint creak of
wooden floorboards as he shifts his weight from one side to the other, then back again.
His blue eyes burn. The constable and the attendant exchange glances, and the larger of
the two opens and closes his raw red slabs of hands and moves closer to the witness
stand. Is the witness, asks Ireland, with a theatrical glance to the jury, in any state to be
sworn?
This is not the first time that Carr and Michie have crossed paths. It is not even the first
time that Michie has called upon him as a key witness. That was eight years ago, when
Michie, arm in arm with his colleague Dick Ireland, was defending the Eureka rebels,
and Alfred Yates Carr was the first doctor on the scene following the massacre at the
8
Stockade. Then, Michie had hoped that Carr’s testimony would vouch for the
whereabouts of Raffaelo Carboni – but at the critical juncture, the doctor disappeared,
skipping the country. At least this time he has made it to the witness stand.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
After his experiences at the Hunningham asylum, Carr just wanted to get away. With his
wife Louisa, a young lawyer’s daughter whom he had married in London four years
before, he got away as far as he possibly could – New Zealand. They stayed in Auckland
only a few months before returning, though with an addition to the family, a son, Walter.
Back in England he set up a medical practice in a suburb of Manchester, and became a
father for a second time with the birth of Ernest. It was a hard time for a medical man to
make a living in this way, with too many practitioners competing for a clientele. Where
opportunity did abound though, was overseas. In the early 1850s there were large
numbers of migrant ships sailing to Victoria following the discovery of gold. Surgeon-
superintendents were required on ships to look after the wellbeing of immigrants, and
were paid ten shillings per passenger by the Immigration Board. In 1852 Carr took this
route, signing on with the Araminta, a recently constructed vessel and one of several
chartered by the Skye Emigration Society to provide free passage for impoverished
Gaelic crofters to start a new life in the Antipodes: the Society had been created to raise
money by public subscription following the failure of the potato crop and widespread
famine, and also at the behest of landlords looking to clear their lands of troublesome
tenants in order to farm more pliant and profitable sheep. The Araminta carried 392
Gaelic speaking assisted immigrants, mainly in family groups, and set sail from
Liverpool in June 1852.
It was not a happy trip. It was uncomfortable, and though by rights Carr was entitled to
dine properly at the Captains table, the ship was poorly provisioned and he fared little
better than his charges – with whom he was not impressed. “When delivered into my
charge at Birkenhead the emigrants with scarcely an exception were in a most filthy and
disgusting condition, covered with vermin, infected with itch, and literally in rags;
ignorant of the language and in fact more resembling brutes than human beings.”1 His
efforts to reduce the lice problem through sulphur, scissors and comb were only
marginally effective; the passengers often preferred to defecate on the ship deck rather
than the water closets; and attempts to reform this situation led to him being threatened
with violence. Drinking water was contaminate when clothes were washed in the
cisterns. Dysentery and diarrhoea broke out through the inferior quality of the food, and
there was also a measles epidemic. At one stage, 90 passengers (nearly a quarter of the
ship) were ill and requiring Carr’s attention, resulting in an exhausting workload.
Despite Carr’s best efforts, 25 passengers died, mostly young children, and a further ten
were severely ill. The nightmare voyage finished with the ship running aground at Point
Richards on 2nd October 1852, before limping into Geelong.
1 Clarke, W. B. (William Bartlett) 1999. "Araminta": emigrant ship 1852. Bicheno, Tas. : W.B. Clarke, p31
9
Carr had a knack for dispute. He was prickly and paranoid, sensitive to any questioning
of his competence at the best of times, and this was by no means the best of times. When
Assistant Immigration Agent, Dr W.H. Baylie, on inspecting the ship, stated that “a more
dirty vessel than the Araminta I have never inspected”, he worked himself into a fit of
dudgeon. First he questioned the competence of the Immigration Board members who
inspected the ship; then he twice wrote to Hugh Childers, a member of the Legislative
Council, to protest his treatment. And just to fan the flames a bit further, he sent copies
of both of these letters to the Argus, where they were promptly published.2 This
“offensive and improper” behaviour was not calculated to endear him to the Board, and
his card was thereafter marked. Whilst the Board’s report into the voyage gave a positive
assessment of Carr’s performance of his medical duties (discharged with “zeal and
efficiency”), it added:
"But his temper appears to be irritable, hasty and petulant, and the Board
considers that it was fortunate for the peace of the vessel that so few of the
Immigrants could understand English… These infirmities of temper involving as
they necessarily do, a want of judgment and discretion might occasion serious
result in future voyages… Consequently the Board feels unable to recommend that
Dr. Carr be again trusted with the charge of an immigrant vessel, unless as in this
present instance the great majority of immigrants happen to be unacquainted
with the English language”.3
Worse, the Board decided that further investigation was required before it could with
good conscience pay Carr his fee of 10 shillings per passenger (a substantial sum of about
40 pounds in total). Carr pressed his case in increasingly histrionic fashion, piling up
wild accusations that the Board had been surreptitiously searching his cabin, planting
spies, inciting passengers to make complaints against him, all to find a pretext for
refusing him payment.
On the basis of a minor professional slight, Carr had managed to stoke an ongoing and
public fight with a government agency, harm his professional employment options and
spin a bizarrely paranoid, improbable and self-justificatory tale that, it seems, he himself
came to believe wholeheartedly.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Waiting for his government payment, rather than taking ship back home to his family
the prospect of gold drew Carr further away. In late 1852 it seemed that half the world
was heading to Ballarat (including the captain of the Araminta and most of the crew),
and being so close – well, it would be a waste not to at least make a trip there and see
what was happening, surely. By January 1853 Carr’s plans had changed: he would stay a
while, and registered with the Medical Board of Victoria to enable him to practice.4 In
the event, he became enmeshed in goldfields politics, was involved in the events
2 Argus, 9/10/1852 and 13/10/1852 3 Clarke, W. B. (William Bartlett) 1999. "Araminta": emigrant ship 1852. Bicheno, Tas. : W.B. Clarke, p22 4 Stoller, A and Emmerson, R 1973, "Dr John Alfred Carr: A Psycho-Historical Study", The Medical Journal of Australia, p189
10
surrounding the Eureka rebellion, nearly lost his life, and did not return to England for
over two years.
Carr set out his stall at a tent in Eureka. He placed lengthy advertisements in the
newspapers outlining his publications and citing testimonials from English surgeons as
to his being “fully conversant with every branch of his profession” and to his ability and
good judgement as a surgeon.5 A busy goldfield, populated by large amounts of
inexperienced men digging deep holes in the ground whilst frequently under the
influence of grog, provided no shortage of opportunities for the surgeon to practice his
arts of setting bones and bandaging wounds, and Carr’s practice met with sufficient
success that he joined with another local doctor, George Clendinning, to set up a local
hospital. In his spare time there is also some evidence that he dabbled in gold buying
and did his own share of (illegal) prospecting – when he was asked for his license, he
replied “I have not, for I do not consider I require one”, and was promptly arrested,
locked up and fined five pounds.
He also found time to contribute to the Argus as a correspondent, expressing confidence
in the future of the goldfields, but also railing against their administration (“So frequent
are the instances of imbecility and mismanagement on the part of the Commissioners
that one becomes weary of recording them”). He also made the prophetic statement that
“I venture to predict that without some speedy and efficient alteration to the manner in
which justice is administered, that the community will take the law into its own hands,
and the first step will be taken towards separation from the mother country which will
inevitably ensue”. Carr immediately added that separation would be an outcome that he
would “deplore”, but over the course of the year he became progressively drawn into the
politicisation of the goldfields and an outspoken advocate for the diggers’ cause.
As later events would show, Carr’s political allegiances were confused and probably
stemmed from personal grudges as much as from any democratic ideological
commitment. Given his repeated capacity to turn any perceived slight or wrong against
himself into a matter for a personal crusade irrespective of the costs, it would be
consistent that the incident of his arrest for the lack of a prospecting license was the
motive force for his political involvement. With his relatively privileged English
background he certainly did not share much in common with many diggers. At one point
he was even reported to have arranged a duel with the notorious Irish agitator ‘Captain’
Browne.6 Nonetheless, as opposition to the government’s goldfields policies grew, Carr’s
passion and his confident and articulate public speaking led to his appointment to the
central committee of the Ballarat Gold Diggers Association in August 1853. He was to
spend the next few months at the forefront of a movement to have the license fee
reduced and the diggers enfranchised.7
5 Argus 17/1/1853 6 MacFarlane, I (ed) 1995, Eureka: from the official records, Public Record Office, Arts Victoria, Melbourne, p3 7 Argus, 29/8/1853
11
On 10th September Carr appeared as a witness before several members of the Legislative
Council taking evidence for the Select Committee in Ballarat.8 His main contentions
were that the license fee was excessive and that the local administration was unjust. “I
have noticed amongst the persons administering the law a want of ability rather than
anything else, and in consequence of that there has been frequent injustice”, he said, but
when pressed for instances of such injustice he replied that “several came to my
knowledge… but I cannot at present remember them”. The only instance he could in fact
cite was his own arrest for prospecting without a license. His testimony was inconsistent
and self-aggrandising: when questioned about the loyalties of the Ballarat diggers he
initially claimed that “turbulent people” were in the “small minority”. But by the time he
got warmed up, he was claiming not only that “there is a party in this colony… that is
anxious to see this colony converted into a republic”, but that dissatisfaction with the
license fee was so widespread that “at one time I could have raised, had I wished it, a
body of men sufficient to have forced and demolished the Camp.”
Carr was also backward and forwards between Ballarat and Melbourne on the
Association’s business. In September he was part of part of a delegation to petition the
government about reducing the license fee: “from what I can judge of their character by
their conversation and arguments", wrote the unnamed Argus correspondent (possibly
Carr!), "the diggers of Balaraat have been much more fortunate in their selection of
delegates than those on some of the other gold-fields. The Balarrat (sic) deputation
consists of men not likely to foster unnecessary excitement, although prepared to urge
the diggers claims to the farthest”.9 Not the most accurate of assessments, given that
Carr specialised throughout his life in fostering unnecessary excitement. On this
occasion however he was being swept along by the force of public opinion rather than
swimming against the tide. Always the crusader for just causes (however variously and
personally defined), for most of his life he was a tilter at windmills, but the early days of
democratic agitation at Ballarat were a high water mark in his life in that, for once, his
righteous cause was also shared by many others. He attended and spoke at the large
public meetings: at Bakery Hill in November 1853 he had an excited conversation with
Rafaello Carboni, telling him that "Nous allons bientot avoir la Republique Australienne!
Signore." (We will soon have an Australian republic) – to which Carboni replied “What a
farce”.10 Of Carr, Carboni said “The specimen of man before me impressed me with such
a decided opinion of his ability for destroying sugarsticks, that at once I gave him credit
as the founder of a republic for babies to suck their thumbs”, and intimates that Carr
spent the time after the meeting scavenging among the empty bottles in search of booze.
Soon afterwards Carr and Silvester returned to Melbourne to press their objections to
the new goldfields management bill, and managed to obtain audiences with the Colonial
Secretary, the Attorney General (who “in a great passion left the room and broke up the
conference” after Silvester called him a traitor), the Chief Commissioner for the Gold-
8 Legislative Council Select Committee Report on the Gold Fields, D.8, 1853, pp30-31 9 Argus 6/9/1853 10 Carboni, R 1982, The Eureka Stockade, Currey O'Neil, South Yarra, Vic.
12
fields and Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe (who “expressed his appreciation for the
orderly manner in which the people of Ballarat had conducted their proceedings”). Carr
retailed the whole story to great acclaim at a public meeting back in Ballarat. He told the
crowds that he would send copies of the proceedings to the home authorities and
principal London journals in an attempt to sway opinion in their favour: “feeling
satisfied that no sooner would the injustice and tyranny to which they had been
subjected become publicly known in England, then the sympathies of every English heart
would be with them, and the authors of such injustice be called to an account for their
misconduct (Cheers and hear, hear), misconduct which had nearly brought the colony to
the verge of rebellion”. Carr asked “if their delegates and committee still possessed their
entire confidence (Yes, yes and cheers)”, and after he and Silvester were warmly thanked
for their efforts, the meeting endorsed the text of the following protest to be transmitted
to the authorities:
“We, the undersigned, by the power invested in us by the diggers of Balaarat, do
hereby on their behalf most emphatically protest against the proposed Bill for the
management of the gold-fields becoming the law of the land, it being iniquitous,
unjust and unconstitutional, and an infringement upon the rights of freemen,
those freemen being unrepresented in the Council of the colony. Alfred Yates
Carr, Henry Woodthorpe Silvester”
Carr responded to the thanks with a short speech (“happily the danger of civil convulsion
has, for the present and, as I trust, for ever passed away") before leaving the stage to
acclaim.11
This role as the voice of the diggers was clearly a congenial one for Carr, which makes the
subsequent turn of events hard to fathom. In August 1854, he made a fateful decision to
move his residence opposite the new Eureka Hotel run by James Bentley.12 He had only
been there a couple of months when late one night he was called outside to examine a
digger lying in the street. Finding the man seriously injured if not already dead, he
assisted with moving him into the hotel and attempted to treat him, to no avail. Carr
conducted a post mortem examination and concluded that though the body reeked of
spirits, the cause of death had been a blow to the head.
At the coroner’s inquest the next day it became apparent that the deceased, James
Scobie, drunk and in the company of another digger, had been refused access to
Bentley’s hotel. In making a scene and trying their luck a second time they were set upon
by a group of people. A witness placed Bentley at the scene. The judicial inquiry into
Scobie’s death was run by Ballarat Police Magistrate, John D’Ewes, who was widely
regarded to be a business partner of Bentley. D’Ewes conduct in the inquiry was so
blatantly partial to Bentley’s cause that the latter’s discharge was seen as yet another
example of corrupt authority looking after its own at the expense of the life of a digger.
An angry public meeting got out of hand: the Eureka hotel was burnt to the ground.
11 Argus 30/12/1853 12 Argus 4/8/1854
13
The death of James Scobie and the riot at the Eureka Hotel would prove to be the
touchpaper that would light the Eureka rebellion. Carr could, had he chosen, have played
another star turn as the diggers’ champion. All that was required of him was to testify
that the injuries received by Scobie were consistent with a blow from a shovel that
Bentley had been seen carrying. But when he took his turn at the stand he seemed
determine to aid the cause of the accused, giving an obscure disquisition on the effects of
blows on men with empty and full stomachs, and suggesting that Scobie was so “replete”
that even a mild blow such as the head striking the ground could cause death.13
Notwithstanding this evidence, the jury took only 15 minutes to convict Bentley and two
accomplices of manslaughter.
Carr was now a pariah. Was he merely remaining true to his professional opinions, and
failed to read the political winds? Or had the pro democracy movement gone beyond
what he was prepared to accept? At any rate, rumours circulated that Carr had swapped
sides, and gone so far as to be sworn in by the authorities as a special constable around
this time.14 Certainly, as his colleague Dr Clendenning later reported, he “became very
unpopular and distrusted, as he was generally considered an agent of the Government,
and therefore lost his private practice in a great measure”.15
Relations between the diggers and the
government continue to deteriorate. A
group of diggers burns down Bentley’s
hotel: three are arrested. Ten thousand
congregate at Bakery Hill to demand their
release, and the Ballarat Reform League is
created as a vehicle for the digger’s
grievances. Carr makes a lengthy speech on
theories of political representation, which is
poorly received.16 But when the League’s
resolutions are presented to Governor Hotham some days later they are read, then
cursorily filed away with no response. A second meeting is called, and handbills adorn
the diggings advertising a public meeting on Bakery Hill. DOWN WITH THE LICENSE
FEE! DOWN WITH DESPOTISM! “WHO SO BASE AS TO BE A SLAVE”. The blue
Southern Cross flag is raised for the first time. The delegates of the Reform League
report yet more delaying tactics from the Governor, and the diggers become restless. The
meeting votes to burn licenses and to resist any attempt to arrest unlicensed miners.
Commissioner Rede decides to demonstrate the government’s resolve to retain license
fees, and to meet any civil disobedience head on. Troopers are sent on yet another
license hunt the next day, resulting in rioting and violent clashes. Shots are fired. More
troops are sent out to rescue those trying to bring back arrested miners. The diggers
converge on Bakery Hill yet again, and in the absence of the Reform League leadership,
13 Argus, 20/11/1854 14 Bowden, KM 1977, Goldrush Doctors at Ballarat, [Balwyn, Vic.], p77 15 Letter from Clendinning to Robert Bowie, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 11878, Unit 6 16 Molony, J 2001, Eureka, Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic., p94
14
Peter Lalor incites the crowd to
burn their licenses and swear an
oath of allegiance to the rebel
Southern Cross flag. Bizarrely,
given the volatility of the situation
and his own poor standing amongst
the diggers, Carr decides to attend
the meeting as well. Someone from
the crowd recognises him and calls
out his name, he is seized and taken
to be a government spy. A gun is
placed to his head and he is half
walked, half dragged towards the flagpole, perhaps to be lynched. Only the prompt
action of one of the rebellion’s leaders, Timothy Hayes, saves his life.17 After this
experience Carr moved (literally as well as metaphorically) into the government camp for
his own protection.
Following these clashes the diggers constructed a stockade at Eureka under the flag of
the Southern Cross. The result is well known. In the early hours of the morning on
Sunday 3rd December, government troops surrounded and attacked the stockade. Asleep,
unprepared, the details of their defences betrayed by spies, the diggers were overrun
within minutes. Because many of the wounded fled the Stockade, the exact death toll is
unknown: Peter Lalor stated that 14 diggers died immediately and 8 were fatally injured;
a further 6 soldiers and police were also killed.18 The first doctor to arrive at the horrible
scene inside the Stockade was Alfred Yates Carr. He first tended to about 15 of the
wounded who were too badly injured to be moved, and when this was done he went
looking for assistance – but not before souveniring a piece of the Eureka flag, which he
subsequently gave to Dr Clendinning, and which eventually found its way into the
collections of the State Library of Victoria.19 The first man he came across was Carboni,
who despite being one of the leaders of the rebellion had not been in the stockade that
night, and the two of them set up an impromptu hospital in the London Hotel. Carboni
assisted Carr in treating the wounded for several hours, but when the police entered the
hospital to arrest him, Carr made no remonstrance. Carboni was confused, and his later
recollections suggest that he came to believe that the doctor was in the pay of the
government:
“Dr. Carr. spoke not a word in my behalf, though I naturally enough had appealed
to him, who knew me these two years, to do so. This circumstance, and his being
the very first to enter the stockade, after the military job was over, though he had
never before been on the Eureka during the agitation, his appointment to attend
17 Argus 4/12/1854, 21/3/1855; Melbourne Morning Herald 13/3/1855 18 According to a second hand retelling of Carr’s account, he found 12 dead and 12 wounded. Dunderdale, G 1898, The Book of the Bush, Ward, Lock, London, p114 19 http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=MAIN&reset_config=true&docId=SLV_VOYAGER1927110
15
the wounded diggers that were brought up to the Camp, and especially his
absence at my trial, were and are still a mystery to me”.20
Carr spent several weeks treating the injured, including amputating the leg of William
Hardie, an unfortunate livestock dealer who was shot for no apparent reason near the
government camp the day after the rebellion was put down, and died a few days later.
Carr himself had another brush with death in not dissimilar circumstances: when
District Surgeon Williams failed to give a password on approaching the camp, he was
fired upon by a trigger happy sentry, the musket ball missing its target, passing through
the wall of the hospital and smashing into a medicine chest next to which Carr was
reading, striking him with splintered wood.21
This was the final straw. Carr visited a former colleague in Colac for several days, looking
afraid, remaining silent and withdrawn. It was clear that his career in Ballarat was
finished, and he began to make plans to return to England. He was subpoenaed to
appear as a witness at the trials of the thirteen diggers charged with treason, including
Carboni, for whom he could have not only vouched that he was not in the stockade on
the night of the attack but that he also stayed to assist with the care of the wounded. In
Carr’s own account, he could no longer delay in the colony with the “repeated
postponement” of the trials, though he recognised that by leaving the cause of the
prisoners’ for whom he was to give evidence might be “slightly injured”. He had simply
had enough. On the 11th March 1855 the James Baines departed Melbourne for England,
with Carr on board. Archibald Michie and Dick Ireland are left to rely on other witnesses
- and their own famous eloquence - in their defence of the Eureka rebels. No matter: not
a jury in the colony will convict these men. Carboni and his fellow diggers are acquitted.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Eight years later, Carr finally takes the stand. Despite the
passage of time Michie still has a distaste for his star
witness, and hands the examination over to his assistant, Mr
Wyatt. After his initial excitement, Carr settles. Gripping the
rail of the witness stand he recounts, in some detail, his own
ill-treatment and that which he observed against other
patients. Describes a period when he was placed in restraint
continuously for a week: “A strait-waistcoat, padlocked, with
the hands behind, was placed on me in the first instance. It
was put on in such a way as to create actual physical torture.
Over that waistcoat was placed a bag”.
Tell us more about the bag, says Wyatt – how was it put on,
how did you feel?
It was “composed of strong No. 1 canvas, impervious to
20 Carboni, R 1982, The Eureka Stockade, Currey O'Neil, South Yarra, Vic. 21 Argus 13/12/1854
16
water, which was passed over the feet, and slipped up the body, fitting closely, the hands
having to be placed flat against the sides. The bag came close round my neck – so close,
indeed, that even the bugs could not get ingress between the bag and the neck. I
continually passed urine into the bag, and there it was next morning, accompanied
sometimes with faecal matter. The head was not protected from vermin... My own head
was bitten all over with bugs and fleas”.
And why were you placed under restraint?
I had an arrangement, where I could go occasionally to town with an attendant. Feeling
that I was being detained at Yarra Bend for no good reason I obtained an interview with
the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, to plead my case. The next day I also spoke with Doctor
McCrea about the gross ill-treatment of a patient named Lang, and the improper manner
in which inquests were being conducted. Dr McCrea asked me for a written statement:
but before I could provide one I was taken away to solitary confinement and restrained.
The use of “the bag” becomes, through the trial, an iconic issue, a metaphor for patient
abuse and cruelty in all its forms. Is it, as Doctor Bowie contends, a humane form of
treatment for patients who are violent or agitated, who may do harm to themselves or
others, only to be used as a last resort? Or is it a routine form of cruelty, old-fashioned
and barbaric, simply used as a form of discipline and punishment? It becomes
emblematic of two different perspectives on the treatment of the insane, which are
themselves embodied by the arch-enemies,
Superintendent of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum
Doctor Robert Bowie, and Colonial Surgeon Doctor
William McCrea. The two have feuded since shortly after
the latter’s arrival in the colony. After sixteen years
service as a naval surgeon, on his arrival in Victoria
McCrea had been sent to the diggings at Forest Creek as
the local coroner and magistrate. The energetic
Ulsterman so impressed Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe
that in mid 1853 he was appointed to the position of
Colonial Surgeon. By this time Bowie had been in charge
of the Asylum for nearly a year: he had found it in an
appalling state, and despite little experience in the field
had gradually improved aspects of patient welfare and the quality of the site itself, using
patients to build roads, drainage and gardens. However when McCrea, a driven
individual with a huge appetite not only for work but for control, discovered on his
appointment that the Colonial Surgeon’s remit did not extend to the Asylum, he
campaigned vigorously – and successfully – to have this remedied. He then immediately
set about providing suggestions for multiple ways in which things could be improved.
Bowie was unhappy about having his absolute authority over the asylum usurped, and
had a personality that was easily bruised by any perceived criticism. He dug in his heels,
defended existing practice, refused to change. The two soon detested each other.
17
Restraint of patients was one of the old fashioned practices that McCrea saw Bowie as
clinging to, part of the amateur, disreputable and gothic past of asylum practice. It was
normal practice well into the nineteenth century: the mad, deprived of the faculty of
reason that was the essential component of humanity had, some thought, regressed to
the state of animals. Patients who behaved through word or deed in an uncontrolled or
aggressive state were therefore treated in much the same way as dangerous animals –
with shackling and with violence. The chief treatment used by the mad doctor was
“inculcating salutary fear”, a method most famously employed by Francis Willis with
King George III. Willis and his contemporaries believed in the power of “the eye”, the
capacity of the mad doctor to tame the insane with the power of his gaze. He also
believed that “The emotion of fear is the first and often the only one by which they can be
governed. By working on it one removes their thoughts from the phantasms occupying
them and brings them back to reality, even if this entails inflicting pain and suffering”.22
McCrea saw himself as bringing modern, scientific methods to the colony, such as those
advocated by the doyen of British asylum management, John Conolly. Absence of
restraint was part of the new and humane “moral treatment”. On his appointment at
Hanwell asylum in 1839, Conolly said: “In a fortnight there was not a single person
under restraint in the asylum. I instantly removed all the manacles, all the staples to
which those manacles were attached, and sent them to the blacksmith to be forged into
more innocent implements”.23 He wrote a volume titled The treatment of the insane
without mechanical restraints, and in trying to clearly differentiate his own work from
the practices of the past, inclined somewhat to hyperbole: “Indeed it would almost seem
as if, at the period from the middle to near the end of the last century, the
superintendents of the insane had become frantic in cruelty, from the impunity with
which their despotism was attended”. But it was not that those asylum superintendents
who used restraint were innately bad, more that “People not naturally cruel became
habituated to severity until all feelings of humanity were forgotten… by degrees,
restraints became ever more sever, and torture more and more ingenious”. This, in
essence, was the charge against Bowie.
Bowie, though, was proud of the bag as a device of his own invention: “When I was in
practice in Scotland I had the charge of an insane woman, upon whom we could get no
straightjacket or anything else to secure her. I then bethought myself of a sack. We got
one, made it into a kind of dress. And put her into it, and I had the satisfaction of seeing
the woman cured”.24 He believed that restraint was sometimes necessary, and that this
was a far kinder mode than (for example) manacles. Even McCrea was initially inclined
to accept some degree of restraint of patients as a pragmatic necessity. A report in
December 1855 noted that the “causes of restraint were, in some cases, a disposition to
maniacal violence, and among the men self-pollution; but more generally dirty and
22 Scull, A 1993, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, Yale University Press, New Haven, p69 23 As cited in the Argus 16/6/1862 24 A Report of the Inquiry into the Management of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, as detailed in the nine days trial of the action for libel Bowie v. Wilson, 1862, Wilson and Mackinnon, Melbourne (hereafter Bowie vs Wilson)
18
destructive habits made recourse to restraint necessary. In all instances, the Board are
convinced that restraint has been judiciously administered”.25 By 1856 the asylum was
averaging about 19 cases of restraint per month, the “causes for the adoption of restraint
were – 1st. Maniacal violence: 2nd, Dirty and obscene habits of the lunatics: and 3rd,
Tendency to suicide”. It was still though, McCrea thought, something to be done away
with: and over the next twelve months a series of improvements to patient welfare were
adopted, such that McCrea’s next report could take on much more triumph list position.
“Restraint may be said to be abolished in the asylum”! But having so publicly declared
victory in bringing Yarra Bend up to the standard of modern British asylums, any future
horror stories from Yarra Bend could only reflect badly on the Colonial Surgeon. Unless
of course it could be publicly seen that the blame for such practices sat fairly and
squarely with the aged Superintendent.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Carr had only been a patient at the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum for three weeks when
apparently without warning he was restrained by attendants and his head shaved and
blistered. This was not an unusual course of treatment at this time for a range of
illnesses, not just insanity – doctors placed irritants on the skin to cause a blister which
was then lanced, the release of pus being thought to be a way of ridding the body of toxic
substances. Carr however felt that he was being punished for threatening to expose
instances of the abuse of patients at Yarra Bend – specifically, the beating and “bagging”
of a retired French army officer, Hebert, that led to the latter’s death. After being
“treated” in this manner, and believing himself to be illegally detained at Yarra Bend in
any event, Carr attempted to escape. He did not succeed. As a result, he later wrote in a
petition to the government, he was: “placed in restraint, the tortures inflicted under this
latter name and the agony endured were such as to seriously endanger the life of your
petitioner and render him at times unconscious the manner of imposing the restraints is
described in an annexed note. your petitioner was kept under restraint without
interruption from the 6th to the 15th of April as appears from entries made in the official
restraint book kept at the Asylum when it was removed in consequence of the serious
illness of your petitioner. On the 19th restraint was again applied, without cause and
continued until the 23rd, during this time your petitioner was treated with great brutality
by several of the assistants and was constantly most grossly insulted”.26
“How did you respond?”, asks Wyatt.
“On the morning of Sunday, the 26th April, after passing a restless night, owing to the
bugs, Morgan Irwin opened the cell-door and pitched in a tin plate containing my tea
and a piece of bread on the top, just like he would pitch a bone to a dog. I did not like to
have my bread in a sloppy state; I preferred to have it dry, and the tea by itself. I
remarked that I was not in the habit of being treated like a dog. This led to angry words,
25 Victorian Parliamentary Papers C3 1855/56, Report of Visitors for December 1855 26 Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 11878, Unit 4, 1857 petition
19
at the conclusion of which I was induced to spit at Irwin as he was closing the door. He
turned round, and, as I was lying on the floor, gave me a kick in the loins, which had the
effect of pitching me over on to the bed. As I inferred that the next step would be the
introduction of the straight-waistcoat I barricaded my door. In course of time Irwin
endeavoured to force the door. I treated him first to the entire contents of a pot
containing urine and faecal matter. I then struck him on the head with the vessel, the
scar of which yet remains. I then became perfectly passive. I was knocked down, got a
thorough good hammering about the head and shoulders, and was rendered powerless.
Some time afterwards, when lying actually helpless on the mattress, Irwin came and
jumped and stamped on my back with all his force. Had I been lying on the floor instead
of the mattress, bones would have been broken, and in all probability death would have
resulted”.27
Morgan Irwin has brought Carr to the courtroom that day and stands off to one side
behind the witness box, listens to the testimony with a wry smile on his face. In the five
years following this incident, the two have developed some understanding and even a
degree of closeness, Carr coming to have “a great liking for” the older attendant.28 Irwin
himself remained remarkably phlegmatic about the whole affair, even though the head
injuries he received confined him to bed for three weeks. He always strongly denied
kicking or stamping on his patient. Of Carr, Irwin stated that he “afterwards said he was
sorry for what he had done, and hoped that he would not do it again. I said I hoped he
would not; but I knew he was mad, and did not know what he was doing at the time… He
always said he would kill some of us. On one occasion, when he had an attack of
delirium, he said he would kill me, but he would wait for his own convenience”.
However, “During his sane hours he was always very civil”.29
With further prompting, Carr describes other instances of patient abuse which he has
witnessed. For example, the case of patient Lang, held in the solitary confinement cell
next to Carr’s. “Between twelve and one o’clock I heard a footstep in the ward and a noise
as if a chain or buckle were being drawn along the ground. I heard the door of Lang’s cell
open, and a series of severe blows struck… I heard Lang cry, “Enough, enough” and ask
for a drink of water. The voice of an attendant replied, as I believe, “Not a d---d drop.”
The door then closed, and the footsteps retired… On the following morning I had
opportunity of examining Lang’s person, and I observed that one side of his face was
severely bruised, while the other side showed two red lines, as if he had been struck there
with a strap.”
Carr has been talking for over an hour when Wyatt finishes. With each question he grows
more settled, more credible, and the jury begins to see, behind the drab asylum uniform,
the other Alfred Yates Carr, no longer the notorious lunatic but the well educated and
intelligent professional surgeon. Dick Ireland has been contorting his florid face into
27 Bowie vs Wilson, p12 28 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p42 29 Bowie vs Wilson, p58-60
20
various expressions of incredulity for the benefit of the jury. He now has his opportunity
to cast doubt on Carr’s evidence more directly, as he eases an ample frame off the bench
to begin cross-examination. If Carr has grown in credibility with the jury as the morning
has progressed, it is critical that they see him once again as an unreliable lunatic and not
as a professional medical man.
Could you tell us, Sir, whether you have been committed to any asylum as a certified
lunatic prior to arriving at Yarra Bend?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Escaping from the aftermath of Eureka, a long sea voyage back to England should have
been the ideal opportunity for Carr to regather his energies. Instead it enmeshed him in
a melodrama that ultimately assumed a major place in his obsessional repertoire, setting
in place a fixation on seeing a personal tormentor punished before the eyes of the world,
and a quest for justice and self-justification that would ultimately lead him back to
Australia and into the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum.
Travelling on the James Baines was an experience in itself. Her 63 day voyage to
Melbourne had approached the quickest on record, and her captain, Charles McDonnell,
had a reputation as a fine and daring sailor. Unfortunately his concern for the comforts
of his passengers did not match his desire to make the best possible time. The food in the
second and third cabins proved to be bad: the beef was inedible, the salt fish unfit for
consumption, the flour tainted and the biscuit a disgrace. Each passenger was given only
a small allowance of water, even in the heat of the tropics. Creeping dissatisfaction led a
group of passengers, Carr foremost amongst them, to seek some redress. But Captain
McDonnell not only had no interest in the diet of the passengers, he was also running a
lucrative sideline in the illegal sale of liquor, and had a penchant for clapping both crew
and passengers in irons. A sailor who got a little drunk was put in chains for three days.
The captain discovered his chief steward in flagrante delicto with a female passenger:
both were locked up, the woman with a metal gagging iron in her mouth, from which she
was bleeding profusely when released 36 hours later.30 Furthermore, the daring feats of
sailing that allowed McDonnell to achieve such fast voyages seem at times to have scared
the wits out of the passengers, as when he ran at full sail within a stones throw of the
rocks off the Irish coast.31
Carr was also unfortunate enough to run foul of one of the passengers, a Mr Bridgeman,
who presumably knew something – though obviously not very much – of Carr’s recent
history, calling him a ‘Ballarat rioter’ and trying to pick a quarrel with him at every
opportunity. Matters reached a head when Bridgeman accused Carr of theft from his
cabin; Carr called him an ‘impertinent puppy’; Bridgeman kicked him; Carr threw coffee
30 The Morning Chronicle, 24/5/1855; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 25/5/1855; Liverpool Mercury 7/8/1888 31 http://www.eraoftheclipperships.com/page53.html
21
in his face, seized him by the throat and threw him to the ground; at which point
Bridgeman struck Carr on the head with a cribbage board. The matter was brought
before Captain McDonnell, who had already taken a set against Carr for raising the issue
of the unfitness of the passengers’ food, and who applied his favourite remedy to any
shipboard problems by clapping Carr in irons for three days: even more exquisitely
painful as Carr had apparently dislocated a shoulder in the earlier melee.32
Carr reached England feeling that he had been done a monstrous and cruel wrong. He
and many other passengers held an ‘indignation meeting’ at the Angel Hotel in Liverpool
shortly after their mercifully safe landing, to discuss what course of action to take against
the captain and crew. The mood was angry, the space full, and Carr was to the fore. He
proposed a motion, carried unanimously, that a deputation of passengers call on the Earl
of Shaftsbury to ask for his assistance in bringing their complaint before Parliament, and
a subscription to defray legal expenses was also set up.33 It must have seemed to him like
the heady early days at Ballarat when he was a leading figure in the Gold Diggers
Association, spurred on by a wide feeling of public injustice – before things all went to
hell as they had over the last year. Carr could be a passionate fighter for justice – usually
for himself – but there were rare times in his life he became a leader rather than a
Quixote.
Within weeks though, the whole affair had gone as sour as the ship’s biscuit. When
Captain McDonnell was brought before the Government Emigration Agent the court was
crowded to excess, expecting terrible revelations of cruelty.34 They learned nothing more
than the plum pudding seemed to be made out of melted tallow, flour and grease.35 Carr
was not even in attendance – he was out trying to round up witnesses – and by the time
he returned, the magistrate had already dismissed the complaints – much to the
satisfaction of the local mercantile men, if not to the passengers. It should have been
over, but it couldn’t be for Carr until justice had been seen to be done. For the next two
months, long after the other passengers had given up the fight, he continued to write to
senior government ministers and the press, and in a last, desperate roll of the dice,
applied for a warrant to arrest Captain McDonnell the day before the James Baines was
due to leave port. The magistrate described the application as “vindictive” and
summarily threw it out.36
It is odd that after nearly three years away from his family, Carr chose to be shuttle
backwards and forwards between a hotel and the establishment of a Miss Carroll in
Withington (just outside Manchester), where it seems his sons had been boarding for
some time. Where his wife Louisa was is unknown. Carr had other family matters to
attend to though: his mother Mary was dying. She too lived near Manchester, and no
doubt Carr was trying to balance the demands of litigating Captain McDonnell in
32 Manchester Times, 30/5/1855 33 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 25/5/1855 34 Liverpool Mercury, 29/5/1855 35 Liverpool Mercury, 29/5/1855 36 Glasgow Herald, 6/8/1855
22
Liverpool, visiting his children, and visiting his mother. With the strain of these events
he became increasingly fragile of mind and unpredictable of behaviour. A fight broke out
between himself, his brother Frederick and the latter’s brother-in-law, a Mr Brown, in
which Carr struck Brown and was thrown out of the house. He was back, in a quieter
mood, the next evening. A few days later, his mother, angry, gave him books and some of
the family silver, and told him to expect no more from her. She went so far as to tell
other family members to watch that he took nothing else. Perhaps, in the absence of any
obvious income, Carr was broke and had been pressing the family for money. The next
day he waited by her sickbed and refused to allow her doctor to attend, insisting that
another physician be brought out from Manchester. The following day Mary Carr died.
At the inquest the jury found that she had died from a “rupture of a blood vessel in the
brain, produced by violent emotion of the mind” and intimating that it was the distress
caused by Carr’s visits and behaviour that had brought this about. Carr though had other
theories. Distraught, delusional, he claimed that she had been poisoned by other
members of the family. The evening after the inquest he stood before the Manchester
Exchange and read a proclamation accusing his relatives of murder, and was later
accosted by police whilst kicking at a door and waving a loaded pistol around. He asked
them whether “all that party were taken?”, i.e. whether those who had poisoned his
mother had been captured. The constable, knowing him and wishing to calm the
situation, informed him that they were all safely in the Stockport lockups, at which point
Carr discharged his pistol into the ground, handed it over and walked quietly to the
courtroom, where he was charged with being disorderly in the street. He stood in the
dock holding a bunch of flowers that he had grabbed along the way; put his hat on his
head and invited anyone present to try to knock it off; accused the coroner of high
treason; and said to the magistrate “this is the last time you will sit on that bench. I shall
have that place, and you shall have this.” He then threw the bunch of flowers to the floor
and jumped out of the dock before being overpowered. As his mind was obviously
unhinged, two local doctors were brought in to examine him, and shortly thereafter the
former asylum doctor was committed to the Prestwich Lunatic Asylum as a patient.37
The two doctors who signed Carr’s admission
warrant recorded, as the “facts indicating
insanity”, his rambling, incoherent speech, and
the persistent delusion that “he is and has been
in his Majesty’s service & that he has been lately
appointed to some high office by the Secretary
of State”. One also added “shape of head” and
“has the appearance of a person of unsound
mind”: whilst phrenology had relatively recently
ceased to be respectable as a mode of
determining insanity, doctors interested in mental science were increasingly interested
in physiognomy and facial structure as a means of diagnosing different psychological
maladies: but perhaps this is overanalysing the matter, and the doctor just knew a
37 Manchester Times, 18/8/1855
23
madman when he saw one. The asylum case notes tell a further tale of violence and
delusion. Within a few minutes of admission he had managed to punch the head
attendant in the face. He was described as having large whiskers and beard (“altogether a
formidable look”), which were shaved off and he was placed in seclusion. He continued
to state that the coroner at his mother’s inquest had committed treason and that he had
damning evidence against him. He also managed to escape from the asylum though was
soon recaptured and had to be carried the whole way back. After a couple of weeks it was
noted that he was improving in both mental and physical health, and on the 12th October,
nearly two months after his admission to the asylum, he was discharged, and, the case
notes state, “recovered”.
Though this particular bout of mania had passed, “recovered” would be too strong a
term, for the underlying delusional structure was still in place. There is no record of what
Carr did in the year after his release: whether he went to live with his wife and children,
whether he resumed his medical practice. Nor is there any record of how he explained to
Louisa that he had determined to return to Australia to pursue further evidence against
Captain McDonnell and the owners of the James Baines (as it happened, a gentleman
called James Baines, proprietor of the Black Ball Line). Nor any record of how Louisa
took the news. Carr could evidently appear well and rational at this time, as he was
appointed as ship's surgeon on board the Persia. An anonymous correspondent later
wrote in horror that such a notorious madman should be placed in a position of care over
so many lives, but a passenger on the ship stated that “Dr. Carr, from the
commencement of the voyage of the Persia to its end, was all that a medical officer
should be – efficient and gentlemanly; and in one particular case, which all my fellow-
passengers will recognise without further specification, his attention was beyond all
praise”.38
The Persia arrived in Melbourne on 27th January 1857, and Carr set about placing
adverts in the Argus and Government Gazette:
“The Emigration Commissioners having decided, upon the recommendation of
the Secretary of State (Sir George Gray), that the Prosecutions against the Master
and Owners of the ship James Baines, for violation of the Passengers Act, shall be
renewed in every case in which evidence sufficient to warrant conviction shall be
produced. All Passengers who left Melbourne by the James Baines on March 10th,
1855, and arrived at Liverpool on May 20th, 1855, who have not already done so,
are requested to forward, without delay, their names, addresses, and complaints,
regarding Bad Provisions, Sale of Spirits, Ill Treatment, &c., in writing, directed to
Dr. A. Y. CARR, Post Office, Melbourne. Victoria. by order of the James Baines
Legal Redress Committee”.39
Almost certainly the Secretary of State and Emigration Commissioners had said no such
thing, other perhaps than to ask Carr to go away and not come back until he had some
proper evidence to support his claims.
38 Argus 21/2/1857 39 Argus 5/2/1857
24
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Yes, said Carr, after the death of my mother I became mentally depressed, in
consequence of which I was an inmate of the Prestwich lunatic asylum. I remained there
several weeks, and was well treated. I was committed by the magistrates on the grounds
that I was incapable of self-control. I believe the treatment I received there saved my life.
You were not there because you were drugged with Indian Hemp?
No.
But you still believe that this was the reason why you had the attack that saw you
committed as a dangerous lunatic to the Yarra Bend Asylum? Indeed, you wrote a
pamphlet on the subject, claiming that you old enemies from Ballarat had followed you
and introduced the drug into your wine and tobacco?
Yes, I have a strong suspicion that one two or three occasions Indian hemp has been
administered to me.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
On Carr’s return to Melbourne he looked up some old friends. They were surprised by
his appearance, it having been reported in a local paper that he had died in an insane
asylum in England. He stayed with an old school friend, Dr O’Reilly, and the two were
considering going into business together. Matters were going well enough until on a
Saturday morning a few days later Carr “was suddenly attacked with delirium (after
smoking tobacco and eating a small quantity of fruit) the symptoms of such delirium
being precisely similar to the effects described in the second volume of Johnsons
Chemistry of Common Life as being produced by a narcotic intoxicating drug called
Indian Hemp, and much used in India for intoxicating and sinister purposes under the
name of Gunjah” which had “been administered gratuitously for the third time, by some
unknown persons, evidently for the purpose of creating delirium and temporary
madness in the person of one of peculiarly nervous sensibility”.40 Having gone out
shopping saying he was going to buy some vegetables, Carr returned with 300 pounds
worth of goods, including goat, rabbits and champagne. An argument with O’Reilly
ensued, with Carr smashing up the drawing room and giving his friend a black eye.41
Leaving the house he went to the shop of a Mr Ellis and stole a brooch: hearing the shop
owner accuse him of theft, Carr struck him in the head and was promptly arrested, taken
to the police station and charged with theft and assault. After spending the night in a
cell, he was removed to the Eastern Gaol for a week for observation as a possible lunatic.
40 Carr’s descriptions, Age 28/2/1857 and in unpublished MS in Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4 41 Argus 18/2/1857
25
Carr regarded these proceedings – and the fact
that he had not been before a magistrate – as
completely illegal. He also claimed that he was
badly treated in the jail. A few days later he
escaped, only to be recaptured “in a most brutal
manner”. On finally being brought before a
magistrate, various witnesses including O’Reilly,
the gaoler at Eastern Gaol, and the Chief Medical
Officer William McCrae all testified that Carr had
been insane at the time, and showed signs of
delirium tremens when locked up. O’Reilly
though believed that Carr was a monomaniac,
insane on only two points: his views about the
events at Ballarat and those on board the James
Baines. Apart from these areas he was quite sane
and competent to practice medicine. This
evidence swayed the judge, who told Carr that he
would discharge him if he promised to return to
the Persia and put himself under the care of the captain, which he duly did.42 Though
not for long: he soon again took lodgings in town, worked himself up seeking evidence to
prosecute the James Baines affair, and on the 8th March 1857 he suffered another attack.
Following a visit to Dr Howitt in the afternoon he went for a walk in the Botanic
Gardens, stopped for a smoke and it was at this point, he believed, that he was again set
upon by delirium, as a result of the adulterated tobacco. In his deranged state he decided
to visit a Catholic priest at the Elizabeth St church. Whilst waiting he pocketed a watch
from a mantelpiece, proclaimed himself the king of England, got into a scuffle and was
taken away by the police and locked a cell at the Swanston St police station. Appearing
before the magistrate the next day he was clearly not in a rational state, shouting,
banging the furniture and rocking backwards and forwards, before repeating to the
magistrate more or less the same sentiment he had expressed when in an identical
position in England two years earlier – “We’ll change places before long! The last shall
be first, and the first last – at least that’s what Jesus Christ said”.43 He was again
committed to the Eastern Gaol for one week for medical inquiry on the charge of being a
dangerous lunatic, and then at the end of the week, on 17th March 1857, committed as a
patient to the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum.44
Carr’s committal brought, to all intents and purposes, an end to his pursuit of Captain
McDonnell and the James Baines. Perhaps though he had succeeded in putting a curse
on all concerned: the next year, whilst unloading cargo in Liverpool, the James Baines
caught fire and was destroyed; her insurance policy had expired three days before,
42 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4; Argus 18/2/1857; Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p19 43 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 Unit 4; Argus 10/3/1857 44 The warrant from Governor Barkly was not actually signed until a few days later on the 23rd
26
inflicting massive financial losses on the owner; and Captain McDonnell, distraught,
retired from naval service only to die of pneumonia several months later.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Being poisoned by drugs was a recurring part of Carr’s obsessive delusional structure,
though for many years it was opium rather than Indian Hemp (or, as we know it today,
marijuana) that was his focus. It all seems to start on the morning of 14th December 1851.
Carr, in private practice at the time, is called out to treat a young child. Entering the dim,
overheated bedroom he finds the boy in convulsions. Despite Carr’s best efforts, he dies a
few hours later. During the treatment, Carr questions the boy’s mother and discovers
that he was given medicine the night before prescribed by another qualified doctor, Mr
Birks. Sniffing the empty bottle, Carr thinks he detects opiates, and from the boy’s
symptoms concludes that he has died from opium poisoning. He charges Birks with
negligence, of prescribing medicine without examining the patient, and asks for an
inquest: but the coroner returns the verdict of “death by natural disease”, finding no
trace of opium either during the autopsy or in the medicine bottles. Refusing to accept
the verdict, Carr appears before a magistrate in the Salford police court preferring a
charge of murder, conduct sufficiently bizarre to occasion a newspaper article, headed
“Extraordinary Conduct of a Surgeon”. The affair ends with the magistrate telling Carr to
“Leave the court sir; your conduct throughout has been disgraceful”; Carr exits stage left,
promising to take the case to a “higher authority”.45
The notion of a child poisoned by opium strikes us as scandalous. In the mid nineteenth
century however it was a common occurrence. In a society with a far narrower range of
medical options, the use of opium as a cheap and effective painkiller was as widespread
and uncontroversial as the use of paracetamol is today. Its sale was completely
unregulated in Britain before 1857, and it could be purchased over the counter for a
penny in many shops and in a range of forms: pills and lozenges, powders, cordials, and
dissolved in alcohol (laudanum). It was the preferred treatment for a range of ills “from
intestinal to bronchial to menstrual to psychological”, and was also believed to counter
the effects of alcohol and was therefore frequently taken to sober up.46 With such
widespread use and no regulatory control over the strength or labelling of different
mixtures, accidental death through opium poisoning was inevitable (a figure of 140
deaths was given for 1868). The issue was sufficiently well recognised that many home
doctor’s manuals gave instructions for treating opium poisoning via purging.47
45 Bristol Mercury, 27/12/1851 46 Milligan, B 2005, "Morphine-Addicted Doctors, The English Opium Eater, and Embattled Medical Authority", Victorian Literature and Culture, v.33 no.2, p542; Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, Free Association Books, p33 47 Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, Free Association Books, p79
27
Opium not only treated all ills, but was prescribed for all ages. It was widely used as an
“infant quietener”, and there were many soothing syrups available: Godfrey's Cordial (a
mixture of opium, treacle, water and spices), Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir,
Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, Street's Infant
Quietness, Slowe's Infants' Preservative.48 The latter was particularly popular around
Manchester, and could well have been the cause of the death of the child whom Carr was
attending. Whilst there was some middle class disquiet about working class parenting
techniques that involved the use of such preparations, there was equally a popular view
that such ‘cordials’ were stimulants and strengtheners and
actually good for children. But strengths varied from bottle to
bottle, evaporation could further concentrate the mixture, and
children developed a tolerance for the drug, leading to higher
doses. Inevitably, tragedies occurred. What was scandalous
about Carr’s accusations was not that a child had been given
opium, or even that it had been poisoned by the dose, but the
fact that he claimed that it was a doctor who was responsible.
The nascent medical profession was still trying to establish its
authority to control the prescription of certain drugs, such as
opium, and relied on the argument that leaving prescription to
professionals would prevent such tragedies. Carr’s accusation
was regarded in some quarters as being made against the profession as much as an
individual, and he found little support from amongst his colleagues.
Opium poisoning did however become a matter of intense interest to Carr. Within a few
months he published a short article in the Medical Times and Gazette, an account of
“Infantile Poisoning By Opium Successfully Treated”. This time, an extremely similar
case proves to have a happier outcome due to Carr’s treatment using a mustard
cataplasm and bleeding by three leeches. Could it be conjectured that his extreme
response to the first case was conditioned to some extent by a feeling of guilt that his
professional skills had been unable to save the child’s life?
Carr corresponded on the topic with Alfred Taylor, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence
and Lecturer on Chemistry at Guy's Hospital, London, who was preparing an expanded
edition on his work on “Poisons”.49 It is also the theme that provided Carr with the topic
for his final professional paper, “Poisoning by Opium”, in the July 1858 volume of the
Australian Medical Journal, written and published whilst he was a patient at Yarra Bend,
and probably one of the few articles in the Australian medical literature published by a
man who the very same medical establishment had declared to be insane.
Carr’s fixation with opium inevitably raises the question: was he himself an addict?
There are intriguing leads. When he qualified for the Licentiate of the Society of
48 Berridge, V 1999, Opium and the people: opiate use and drug control policy in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, Free Association Books, p34 49 Argus, 17/1/1853
28
Apothecaries in 1843 he listed his address as “China or Indian Army”, and the Society’s
List of Licentiates has “China” as his place of residence. The Treaty of Nanjing had been
signed only a short time before, bringing to an end the First Opium War in which the
British army had forcibly opened several Chinese ports to trade in order to continue the
importation of opium to pay for Chinese tea. Perhaps Carr had sensed an opportunity for
furthering his career in the new colony of Hong Kong. Perhaps he had joined, or
intended to join, the East India Company as a surgeon: though the Company had by this
stage lost its monopoly on the China trade it was still active in the area. The need for
surgeons was certainly intense: whilst few British soldiers died during fighting in the
Opium War, many perished from fevers and dysentery. Carr’s own father was a military
man, perhaps a further prompt in this direction. But it is not clear whether he made it to
China or not. It is tempting to imagine the young man working as a surgeon at one of the
British controlled ports and seeing first hand the effects of extensive opium
consumption. We could imagine him experimenting with the use of opium as a medical
treatment, either smoked or in the form of laudanum. We could imagine him an opiate
addict, a not uncommon fate for a nineteenth century surgeon, though not as well
documented as the “luxurious” or “stimulant” use of the drug by romantics such as De
Quincey and Coleridge from which we tend to draw our picture of opium addiction. We
could speculate about his experiences with the drug and the root cause of his later
insanity. But this is all it would be: imagination and speculation.
It was not opium, though, that Carr believed had brought him through the gates of Yarra
Bend – it was Indian hemp. It is an interesting choice: there was little knowledge of
cannabis in Europe before the 1840s, and even in the 1850s it was not readily available.
Carr though claimed to have administered it medicinally as a treatment for melancholia,
so it is not impossible that he had firsthand knowledge of its effects, which presumably
were sufficiently similar to his experiences during his attacks for him to conflate the
two.50 He could though have
relied on the extensive
descriptions of its effects that
were increasingly to be found in
the medical literature. In
responding to a question from
Ireland about the effects of
Indian hemp, Carr cites James
Finlay Weir Johnston’s classic
1850s textbook The Chemistry of
Common Life rather than
personal experience: he would
also almost certainly have been
acquainted (being fluent in
French and up to date with the
50 Bowie vs Wilson, p13
29
literature) Alexandre-Jacques-François Brierre de Boismont’s Des Hallucinations,
published in 1845.
Carr obviously saw a strong similarity between these accounts and his own symptoms,
and they are therefore worth some attention as the closest thing we have to a description
of Carr's own experience of insanity. According to Johnston, in his chapter “The
Narcotics We Indulge In”, “haschisch” is “the increaser of pleasure, the exciter of desire,
the cementer of friendship, the laughter-mover, and the causer of the reeling gait… taken
in moderation it produces increase of appetite and great mental cheerfulness, while in
excess it causes a peculiar kind of delirium and catalepsy… taken in doses sufficient to
induce the fantasia, as its more remarkable effects are called in the Levant… The sun
shines upon every thought that passes through the brain and every movement of the
body is a source of enjoyment… When first it begins to act, the peculiar effects of the
haschisch may be considerably diminished, or altogether checked, by a firm exertion of
the will, ‘just as we master the passion of anger by a strong voluntary effort’. By degrees,
however, the power of controlling at will and directing the thoughts diminishes, till
finally all power of fixing the attention is lost, and the mind becomes the sport of every
idea which either arises within itself, or is forced upon it from without. We becomes the
sport of impressions of every kind. The course of our ideas may be broken by the
slightest cause. We are turned, so to speak, by every wind… The errors of perception, in
regard to time and place, to which the patient is liable during the period of fantasia, are
remarkable”.51 De Boismont administered haschisch to his experimental subjects,
recording their experiences. The descriptions run to several pages, but the following
sample is representative: “Interrogated as to his sensations, M. B. said that they were
very voluptuous. He felt particularly gay and happy; he wished to be alone in a quiet
place; he had great repugnance to speak or to move; all countenances appear to him
ridiculous… My hearing was prodigiously developed; I heard the sound of color - green,
red, blue, and yellow sounds struck me with perfect distinctness. A glass upset, the
creaking of a chair, or a word spoken, howsoever low, vibrated and resounded like the
rolling of thunder… All kinds of Pantagruelic dreams passed through my fancy; goat-
suckers, storks, striped geese, unicorns, griffins, nightmares, all the menagerie of
monstrous dreams, trotted, jumped, flew, or glided through the room. There were horns
terminating in foliage, webbed hands; whimsical beings, with the feet of the arm-chair
for legs, and dial-plates for eyeballs; enormous noses, dancing the Cachucha, mounted
on chickens' legs. For myself, I imagined I was the paroquet of the Queen of Sheba, and
imitated, to the best of my ability, the voice and cries of that interesting bird”.52
But was there a connection between the use of hemp and insanity beyond a perceived
similarity of symptoms? De Boisment's text is a model of scientific curiosity and does not
harp on moral concerns about the use of the drug, but does draw a causal relationship:
“Let it not be forgotten, that Madden and Desgenettes saw several lunatics in the
hospital, at Cairo, who had lost their reason simply from the use of haschisch. Quite
51 Johnston, JF, 1856, Chemistry of Common Life, p103 52 De Boismont, A 1859, On Hallucinations, Henry Renshaw, London, pp335-341
30
recently, the papers called attention to numerous cases of mental alienation noticed at
Constantinople, owing to the use of haschisch”.53 The links between haschisch and
insanity were even more closely drawn by another French doctor, Jacques-Joseph
Moreau, who published "Hashish and Mental Illness" in 1845, the same year that De
Boismont published his work on hallucinations. Moreau proposed an organic aetiology
for insanity purely on the basis of the similarities in how the two were experienced, and
believed that to experience haschish hallucinations was equivalent to entering into the
mind of the mad without becoming insane: as a result, he tested the drug in various
doses on himself. Pure speculation again, but if Carr had access to the drug to prescribe
to his patients, might he too have indulged in similar experimentation: perhaps, even, on
the day that he was overcome with delirium in the Botanic Gardens after stopping for a
smoke?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Ireland’s strategy begins to take effect. Once started on the topic of Indian hemp, Carr’s
composure begins to unravel. Shifting from one foot to the other, redder in face, louder
in voice. “Mr Ireland, when our Saviour worked miracles, the Jews said that he was
possessed of a devil, and was mad. Was Jesus Christ mad or not, Mr Ireland?”. The
Attorney-General baits him mercilessly, as the scene becomes reminiscent of the dark
days at the Bethlem hospital when the insane were exhibited for the amusement of
visitors:
“The ATTORNEY-GENERAL. – Are you acquainted with the present Emperor of
the French?
Witness. – I am not aware that I ever set eyes upon the man in the whole course
of my life.
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL. – Are you acquainted with any of the Plantagenet
family?
Witness. – The Plantagenet family is generally presumed to have ceased to exist.
Such is the result of my reading history.
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL. – In fact you never knew any of them?
Witness. – Never knew what?
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL. – Any of that family.
Witness. – I decline to answer that question at present [The witness here became
exceedingly incoherent in his statements... In the midst of his remarks he took up
a book lying beside him, and wrote in it with pencil the words “Alfred Yates
Plantagenet.”…
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL. – Are your family connected with King Alfred the
Great?
Witness. – I can’t say positively. Recollect I am on oath now…
[The Attorney-General here proceeded to put a number of questions to the
witness as to whether he was acquainted with the Duc de Barry…]
53 De Boismont, A 1859, On Hallucinations, Henry Renshaw, London, pp342
31
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL intimated that he had no further questions to put. He
also told the witness (apparently ironically) that he had answered everything most
satisfactorily…” 54
Morgan Irwin steps forward to lead Carr from the box, who mutters some indistinct
remarks about the Attorney-General which are not captured by the court reporters, and
leaves the room.
Given this performance, could Carr’s statements about patient abuse be taken at face
value? Michie insists that the testimony is reliable on these points. Carr suffers, he says,
from monomania. It is, he suggests, “possible for a man to have a monomania on one
subject, or upon two or three subjects, and yet to be perfectly sane on all others”.55 But
did monomania exist? When Hamlet had claimed I am but mad north-north-west;
when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw – could such a statement
possibly be true? Michie brings forward various experts to support the view. Not so, says
Ireland, reading from Dr Burgess’s work “Relations of Madness”: “Nor should the idea of
partial insanity be received or entertained, for where there is monomania there is total
madness”. He buttresses the point with his own witnesses, such as Dr Edward John
Wilson, who claims that if a man is mad on one or two points you cannot trust him on
any other. Much to the enjoyment of the gallery, Michie slowly dismantles him in the
cross-examination with wit and historical allusions: when Martin Luther saw the devil
and threw his inkpot at him, was he mad on that subject? (yes) So do we need to
disregard his entire theological output as the ravings of a madman? Etc. In giving his
evidence, did Dr Carr appear as natural and reasonable as any other man? Yes. Michie
lands another blow: Dr Wilson, it seems, is a personal friend of Dr Bowie who has stood
in for him at Yarra Bend when he was sick, and treated him for his carbuncles. Hardly,
gentlemen, a neutral opinion on the subject?
Several other witnesses weigh in with their assessments of Carr’s reliability and
character. John Basson Humffray, MLA, was a former digger who had no reason to have
a liking for the man, but nevertheless stated that “I have known Dr Carr some years. I
first saw him in November 1853. For long periods he has been perfectly rational and
lucid, and able to attend to his professional duties. When enjoying a long lucid interval,
he was always recognized as a man of capacity and talent… I have known occasions when
he has had to be taken care of on Ballarat. That was not the result of any excess. I have
not seen him drink more than half a dozen times when the practice of drinking was very
prevalent on Ballarat”.56 Chief Justice Stawell describes him as “the most impulsive,
pugnacious man naturally that he ever saw. He appeared to be a man determined to
speak everything he thought without restraint”.57 And a pithy view from the man in the
courtroom who had known Carr the longest: James Harcourt, formerly of the
Hunningham asylum in England, some years since emigrated to the colony of Victoria,
54 Bowie vs Wilson, p13-14 55 Bowie vs Wilson, p25 56 Bowie vs Wilson, p82 57 Bowie vs Wilson, p113
32
and currently running a private asylum in Pascoe Vale: “He was sane when I first knew
him. He is insane now. I consider him a clever man gone mad”.58
The members of the jury will have to make up their own mind.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
When Michie claimed that Carr suffered from monomania, he was not simply expressing
an educated lawyer’s opinion, a diagnosis convenient to the legal case at hand.
Monomania was a well established category of insanity, and listed as Carr’s “form of
mental disease” on his inscription as patient number 487 in the Register of Patients at
Yarra Bend. Other labels for forms of mental disease at the time included mania,
religious mania, melancholia, dementia, imbecility, idiotcy and epilepsy, a range of
conditions (including congenital intellectual disability) that are today seen as quite
distinct. In the 1850s there was still a wide range of views on the origins of mental
illness. Some accentuated “moral” causes (what we would now see as psychological) such
as religious enthusiasm, grief, excessive mental excitement due to too much study,
disappointed love; and some accentuated physical causes such as intemperance,
sunstroke or syphilis. A distinction was also made between predisposing causes such as
hereditary illness (“taint”) or various developmental problems, and “exciting” causes that
directly brought on the illness. William Willis Mosely, in an influential 1838 work
outlined 31 different exciting causes, from the general (sunstroke, “blow on the head”) to
the highly specific (number 28, “the fearful associations of being awoke from sound sleep
while the house is on fire”). The patient Case Books from Yarra Bend provide more detail
about the supposed causes of the illness, and are a mix of the predisposing and exciting:
“hereditary domestic anxiety”; “Too close relationship of her parents, she being the issue
of first cousins”; “intemperance”; “Dissipation and bad company”; “Disappointment in
love”; “Childbirth” – these all, of course, from the female case books, the earliest
remaining. Sadly, the case book containing Carr’s records is no longer extant.
Whilst Carr was diagnosed with monomania, Dr Bowie initially had little information to
work with in unravelling its cause. The Register of Patients has many columns of
information to be filled in, but apart from noting that Carr was a pauper and married,
the rest were left blank: Family, Occupation, Native Place, Residence, Previous
Residence, Habits of Life, Religion, How long insane, If disordered before, supposed
causes, If dangerous or destructive, Lucid Intervals, If under restraint during this attack,
State of Bodily Health. It is easier now than it was then to dig out some of the facts of
Carr’s early life, and hold them up to the light: but they are little more than coordinates
putting him at a particular place and time: the whys and wherefores, which, for Carr, are
not easy to establish even at the best of times, are at this point nonexistent. He was born
to an army captain, John Carr, and his wife Mary (nee Yates), and was christened in
Mayfield, Staffordshire on 8th May 1821. Elusive from the beginning, he first appears
under a different name – John Alfred Carr. He decided upon a medical career and
58 Bowie vs Wilson, p34
33
pursued this course with diligence and no small degree of aptitude. As part of his
medical training he spent twelve months at Charing Cross Hospital in London, and in
what may have been the first of his overseas voyages, a further six months at the ancient
Hopital de la Charite, just over the river from the Louvre in Paris, during which time he
became familiar with both the French language and the work of French physicians. He
duly qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons on 6th May 1842 and a
Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries on 13th April 1843.59 By his own lights he was in
Germany at some stage in 1843, qualifying at the noted medical school in Heidelberg as a
Doctor of Medicine.60
We have already speculated as to whether he spent time in China, but the next we see of
him is his marriage to Louisa in May 1845, at which point he has also adopted his
mother’s maiden name, appearing on the marriage certificate as John Alfred Yates Carr;
the John soon to be dropped. He sets up a medical practice in Kensington, which
appears in the Medical Directory in 1845 and 1848, but not for the two years in between:
another unaccounted gap. By 1848 he is once again building his career in England,
publishing two articles on cholera in the Lancet.61 At which point, as we have seen, he
also makes his first close acquaintance with a lunatic asylum, as a doctor at
Hunningham.
The predisposing causes of Carr’s illness remain, though, obscure. Of the events which
had made him who he was we know nothing: nothing of his relationships with his
parents and siblings, nothing of his childhood humiliations, youthful interests and
reading. Whether he was happy with his family and chosen career we have no idea. By
the time he appears more fully in the records, the cracks are already showing: in his
obsessive pursuit of Dr James Harcourt at Hunningham; Dr Birks as a poisoner; Captain
McDonnell. Diagnosis from the records 150 years after the fact is fraught and
speculative: but if we had to find any modern label to attach to Dr Alfred Yates Carr, it
might be that of paranoid schizophrenia.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
He was certainly not in a good state as he was taken by cart the several miles from
Melbourne, up the Heidelberg Road, over the Merri Creek and then off down into the
600 acres of land almost entirely surrounded by water, the creek and a long looping
stretch of the Yarra River. Bouncing down the rough track on the high ground looking
back to the bay, he passes “through the big gates”, then down between rows of oak
saplings towards the new Asylum buildings. The asylum is less than ten years old, with
the rough look of a place that expanding more quickly than can properly be planned.
Originally designed to accommodate about 60 patients, the seeming epidemic of insanity
that has swept through the colony during the gold rush has seen its numbers swell to
59 Lancet, 1842, p256; Records of the Society of Apothecaries 60 Argus, 17/1/1853 61 Lancet, v10 1848, “Cases of Malignant Spasmodic Cholera”; Lancet v11 1849, “Remarks on the Theory and Treatment of Asiatic Cholera”
34
over 300. Many believed that gold fever itself was a cause of madness, if not directly
through an excitation of the nervous system, then at least indirectly through sunstroke
alcoholism.
The three bluestone buildings are well made enough though. Carr is taken for processing
to the two story doctor’s residence and administrative block, which is flanked by the
early male and female wings. He bounces out of the cart, warmly shakes the thin, grey
haired man by the hand and says “I am very glad I am with you, Dr Bowie”. The latter,
unsmiling, replies “Well, if you behave yourself, you will have no reason to regret it”.
Back out into the white March light, gusts of hot wind whipping the dust, Carr is taken
past the gardens, a man in patient garb shouting a non stop mixture of instruction and
invective at his co-workers. Down to his room, past the more haphazard additions in
brick and wood, past what passes for an exercise area, an enclosed strip of dirt where
patients huddle in the strip of shade against the wall. Before stepping inside his small
room, he looks around this far corner of the Bend, the brown river close by, its high far
banks and cliffs another round of enclosing walls beyond the moat.
Yarra Bend had been chosen as an Asylum site because of its seclusion and peacefulness.
For those who were free to visit and leave as they pleased, it was an attractive location.
Bowie himself was of the opinion that it was “the most admirable site for a lunatic
asylum I ever saw… The grounds are extensive, the views are varied, you can go to
different parts of the reserve and have most beautiful views”.62 This was a opinion shared
by other visitors. The poet R.H. Horne visited the site in 1853 and announced that the
"situation of the Asylum at the Yarra Bend is the perfection of selection for such a place
(comparable with the Botanical Gardens); combining features of nature, beautiful in
themselves, and admirably open to the improvements of art. It is at once airy and
sheltered, equally picturesque and commodious, well wooded, well watered, and
removed from the turmoil and distractions of every-day life".63 The Argus, visiting the
site in 1854, agreed: “we do not think a more charming spot could be found in the
colony. Those who have visited it will bear us out in this assertion; those who have not
should do so without delay. Let them stroll along the pleasant pathway (the work of
inmates, by the bye) which has been made on the side of the river, and whilst gazing at
that river gracefully streaming along beneath its undulating and grass-covered banks -
whilst looking at a landscape the very perfection of natural beauty - if they can truly feel
that such a spot is gloomy, they may take it as a sure indication that they ought forthwith
to place themselves under Dr. Bowie's care.64 This view was also later expressed by the
Illustrated Melbourne Post, which described the site as “one of the most picturesque and
characteristic bits of Australian scenery to be found in the colony”, and included a
picture showing the Superintendent's residence looking much like a cheery country
house surrounded by parkland.65
62 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1858 Select Committee report, p12 63 Argus 14/3/1853 64 Argus 28/12/1854 65 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 25/6/1862
35
Yarra Bend looked different when seen
through other medical eyes. Dr McCrea,
for example, striding through the grounds,
inspecting the buildings, checking every
detail, seemed to take a set against the
place from the beginning. Part of the
problem was that it was simply too small.
It would be easier, some thought, to just
start over again with a large new, barrack-
style building after the latest British
designs, rather than continue to extend the hodgepodge of wooden cottages.
But McCrea also found the location bad: “the opinion of all modern writers of any
authority… [is] unanimously in favour of an elevated position, with a commanding
prospect”, he said, and immediately began to agitate for the construction of a new
asylum on the opposite bank of the river, high on the Kew hillside, where patients could
take in views and healthy air. “When it is considered”, he wrote in his annual report to
Parliament, “that nearly one-third of the lunatics it contains are “melancholy”, it is
obvious that, in an asylum for the insane, a site which commands an extensive and
cheerful prospect is an absolute necessity”. 66 Yarra Bend, by contrast, was a place of low
prospects, lacking cooling breezes and suffering “damp exhalations” from the wet winter
grounds. John Conolly, undoubtedly a writer of authority in McCrea’s terms, was in
favour of building on a “gentle eminence”: but whilst views were desirable, he said, they
were really only beneficial for educated patients: “Those whose faculties have never been
cultivated derive little satisfaction from the loveliest aspects of nature, and experience
little emotion amidst the grandest. The sun rises and sets, the stars shine and fall, the
hills reflect all the variety of brightness and shadow, of wildness and of verdure, and yet
are scarcely noticed with more than mere passing attention. But when education has
called the higher faculties into life, impressions upon them, even from external nature,
become powerful for good or ill, and in the case of a mind diseased, may act as remedies,
or aggravate the malady. 67
Dr Bowie, though, had become attached to Yarra Bend, had invested considerable time
and labour in its improvement. He had no desire to start over. Views? Pah, they might be
pleasing to the eye, but they also incited a desire to escape. Healthy breezes? On the
contrary, the current site protected the patients from cold winter winds. Another
battleground on which the two men could fight. The best site for the asylum became the
subject of a Board of Inquiry in 1857, and then a parliamentary select committee in 1858.
The descriptions of Yarra Bend in the reports from these inquiries is a litany of misery:
“The old stone buildings are built like gaols, the day-rooms dark and gloomy, lighted
66 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum 1856 67 Conolly, J 1847, The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane, J. Churchill, London, p8-9
36
only at one end by a barred window, situated too high for the inmates to look out of…
liable to the serious objection of being immediately contiguous to the river, the
precipitous banks of which overlook it from the opposite side… The prison like buildings
and gloomy outlook of the exterior of the present asylum is sufficient to produce
depressing effects upon the healthy; but a survey of the interior arrangements exhibits a
series of wretched places, utterly unsuited to the purposes of such an establishment…
Day wards without windows… Long narrow yards, alternately dusty and muddy, ill
drained, with lofty fences, sufficient to exclude all prospect, but not sufficient to prevent
escape”.68 Indeed, one would think it akin to the House of Ussher. Consider Poe’s
opening lines: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the
year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on
horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as
the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I
know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable
gloom pervaded my spirit.”
In the late nineteenth century it was argued that Australia did not have enough history to
support a genuine local Gothic literature. Where were the crumbling castles and ruined
abbeys? But they were looking in the wrong place: the authentic colonial gothic is to be
found not in the stories in The Australian Journal but in the parliamentary papers
covering government inquiries into carceral institutions such as asylums and prisons,
not only for the descriptions of their physical locations but for their often sensationalist
catalogues of violence and abuse, depravity and misery. Rational arguments for
institutional improvement only took the matter so far: the increasing employment of
Gothic rhetoric drove home the point at a deeper level. The Gothic form was peculiarly
apt for this purpose: at the height of its popularity in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the Gothic novel had dramatised the triumph of modernity over a
past that was depicted as corrupt and imprisoning. Set-piece Gothic locations, old, grey,
haunted, and gloomy, were generally institutions of established political and religious
power: castles and stately homes, monasteries. Not, strangely enough, asylums, which
would give full scope for the
genre’s themes of extreme mental
states, hauntings and power: not
until Renfield, Dracula’s slave and
accomplice, is committed to Dr
Seward’s mental hospital in 1897
does the asylum take its full place
in the Gothic novel.
Like so many trends in Australian
colonial asylums, the use of Gothic
rhetoric was pioneered by British
68 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1856/57 Report of the Board Appointed to inspect the YB Lunatic Asylum and to report upon the accommodation required; 1857/58 – Select Committee report
37
reformers. The rising medical profession aimed to establish a clear distinction in the
public mind between the gloomy horrors of the privately run asylums of the past, and the
clean, light, modern asylums managed by trained doctors. W.A.F. Browne's 1837 What
Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be was a key text in tracing this difference, involving
lengthy descriptions taken from earlier parliamentary inquiries about the conditions in
the older institutions: his prurient hints at the results of mingling male and female
patients in the one building; his descriptions of the apparatus of restraint, patients kept
like animals in a menagerie by "bolts, bars, chains, muffs, collars, and straight-jackets";
patients dying because of force feeding, bleeding and drugging; moving into florid
hysteria with passages such as "No representation of blind frenzy, or of vindictive
ferocity, so perfectly realizes, or apparently justifies, the ancient theory of
metempsychosis, of the belief in demoniacal possession, as the maniac glorying in
obscenity and filth; devouring garbage or ordure… Females of birth drink their urine…
Outlines of high artistic pretensions have been painted in excrement; poetry has been
written in blood, or more revolting media".
The message was continued by Conolly, whose descriptions of an old style madhouse
could also read like passages from Poe: "The untrodden lawn, the dusty and desolate
courts, the paved yards, the wretched sheds, the lonely outhouses, together with the
closed doors and windows of a private asylum, often give to such places an external
character which makes the visitor regard them with dread, and the passer-by speak of
them in whispers. The idea of their entrance is connected with that of the fatal gate,
which whoso entered left all hope behind. If a patient is visited in such a house, the
unlocking of doors, and the threading of long passages, and ascent of gloomy stairs, with
the close atmosphere of apartments filled with patients sitting by the walls, oppressed
with indolence and monotony, are all features too familiar to those who knew such
houses before later improvements penetrated into them".69
So when members of a parliamentary committee inquiring into the merits of the Yarra
Bend and Kew sites asked a visiting doctor “Do you think that it is desirable to have the
asylum placed where there is nothing but dark precipices and sullen waters?”, they were
hoping, it seems, for the whole asylum to be swallowed by the river as “the deep and
dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of
Usher ."” – to be replaced by the light, airy, structured spaces that were a more
appropriate ground for the project of modernising the medical treatment of the insane.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The gothic mode is in evidence as Archibald Michie calls the next witness to the stand to
testify about conditions at Yarra Bend. As Carr is led away, his place is taken by a former
patient, Robert Coates, who needs no prompting to talk. The asylum’s ‘alarming
gardener’ spits out the words at a rate of knots in a broad Kentish accent, his verbal kites
69 Conolly, J 1847, The construction and government of lunatic asylums and hospitals for the insane, J. Churchill, London, p58-59
38
flying higher and higher on the winds of his own rhetoric. The attendants are all drunks,
they eat our food, what’s left of it after Dr B has fed his chickens and his friends; the
attendant who gives out the medicine, why, he is there only to pay off a gambling debt
to the Doctor’s son, doesn’t know the first thing about what he is doing, it’s a miracle
no-one has died; dirty, yes, I should say so, I caught 523 bugs in a single night, kept em
in a jar and gave em to Dr McCrea the next day, something should be done about it, the
walls of the rooms are just covered in excrement, they never wash it off, just whitewash
right over it; post-mortem examinations you say? Don’t rightly know what you call
em, but I’ve seen a right mangling of bodies carried on in the dead house, yes, I’ve put
skulls out of the way of other patients meself, oh yes, bones in the gardens, the patients
were apt to trip over em at night unless I picked em up, yes, I’ve seen portions of bodies
hanging on the trees there until the stench was so sickening and offensive we could
scarcely bear the place…
The court by this stage is in a degree of uproar. Chief Justice Stawell restores some order
with his gavel, and adjourns the first day of the trial. Crowds stream from the public
gallery in excited conversation.
The next day Michie brings forward a succession of witnesses, mainly former attendants.
Samuel Wainwright, who had worked at British asylums and left Yarra Bend on good
terms, describes drunken attendants, filth, poor management, and Bowie’s utter lack of
control over, or knowledge of, what was happening there. Food was mixed together into
a black mess and patients ate with their fingers, Bowie finding knives too dangerous.
One day he found “a pannikin containing the brains of a man. It was in the day room,
where we had our food. I was looking for a pannikin to drink with, and reaching this
down, smelt what it contained. Goode said – “Its old So-and-so’s brains” (I forget
whose). Dr Bowie told me to bring them”.
Mary Steele, the unnamed subject of the Argus’s article hinting at a patient becoming
pregnant by a member of the asylum staff, takes the stand. Yes, she had been a patient at
the asylum for over three years, after her mind became affected following the death of
her husband. After she was discharged she continued to work at the asylum, in the
laundry. Sloane, Bowie’s coachman, had surprised and overpowered her in one of the
cottages. Several weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant, and left her
employment. Dr Bowie nevertheless heard rumour, came to visit her, found out the full
story. He was clearly upset, and dismissed Sloane immediately. When her child was
born, she gave it to Sloane’s family – he was a married man – but it died two months
later.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Day three of the trial, and a witness with a very large axe to grind, one that has been a
long time in the sharpening: Dr William McCrea, with hours ahead of him to inform the
assembled gathering of every detail demonstrating Dr Bowie’s unfitness for office, his
39
outmoded practices, his false opinions. His view that Yarra Bend is a suitable location for
an asylum is merely one example. Settling his large and angular frame behind the desk,
he is the embodiment of a modern medical authority as he chooses to discuss instead the
absence of “any comprehensive plan for the amusement and instruction of the lunatics”.
Modern “moral” treatment required patients to maintain, insofar as possible, a normal
social life. Rather than sequestration and inertia, physical and mental activity was
encouraged, not least because it reduced the time that patients might spend dwelling on
gloomy matters. What McCrea found on his arrival was a single piano, kept in the Bowie
residence, and the odd game of cricket. There was no backgammon, no draughts, no
games with dice – Dr Bowie said that the patients would swallow the pieces. There were
no books or writing instruments – Dr Bowie said that the patients would only destroy
them. “He seemed to have a great deal of fear of some sort”, said McCrea. His picture of
a man who had lost touch with developments in the field reflected the testimony
previously given to parliamentary inquiries, for example by the Official Visitors, Drs
Richard Eades and Edward Barker, who were charged with providing some independent
external oversight of the Asylum. Asked to describe Dr Bowie, they remained polite:
"carefully conscientious as far as his knowledge goes", though perhaps “a certain want of
the creative or imaginative faculty”.
Over time, with the help of constant urging from McCrea, Eades, Barker and others,
improvements were gradually made. Dominoes, cards, bagatelle, draughts and chess
were introduced, all apparently without disaster. A billiard room was created, and whilst
some claimed that it was only the odd attendant who played, the poor condition of the
table attested to more vigorous use. The poet Richard Henry Horne, who was a regular
visitor to the asylum and seemingly a friend of Dr Bowie, reported that Carr was one of
the more skilled users of the table, having been accustomed to playing billiards in his
earlier life.70 For more physical exertion, the men were encouraged to play cricket,
skittles or leapfrog; the ladies had the option of battledore & shuttlecock (a precursor of
badminton). For the musically minded there were weekly concerts and dances, and even
a dramatic society formed by attendants for the amusement of patients. Quieter pursuits
included attending prayers and reading, though apparently Bowie’s fears of regular
damage to the books was in fact accurate.
Of all the amusements engaged in by asylum patients, cricket attracted the most notice
from visitors. The game itself was somewhat different from the modern version: bowling
was done underarm, the wicket had only two stumps, the overs were four balls long, and
the whole affair was as much an excuse for gambling as anything else. The colony had
taken up the sport with enthusiasm from the earliest days, with the Melbourne Cricket
Club founded in 1838, and games moved to what is now the site of the MCG on a
Richmond paddock by 1853. Matches were widespread across Melbourne, including the
Yarra Bend asylum, though in the latter case there was a clear divide between attendants
and patients: “With regard to the cricket, it would appear that the attendants
sympathized with that English nobleman who kept a salaried bowler to bowl for him,
70 Bowie vs Wilson, p50
40
because it generally happened that the attendants were ‘in’, and the patients ‘out’, or
fielding as it was called. The patients were thus kept running about for the purpose of
feeding these attendant batters with their balls. This arrangement, this running about for
the luxury of the batters, was scarcely fair play”.71 Nor were the "teams" necessarily of
ordinary size: one visitor stated that "I have seen a hundred of them [patients] playing at
cricket at a time; and attendants were posted in various parts of the field to prevent any
of the inmates escaping".72 Equipment was a constant problem: bats were knocked
together by the Asylum carpenter in between making coffins, but the untreated wood
tended to split almost immediately.73
By the time of Carr’s arrival then, daily conditions for the patients were much improved
on what they had been, and there was no shortage of activity with which to fill the day.
After his initial attacks had passed, his treatment was a cut above that of the other
patients. When not suffering from one of his episodes, Carr was quite congenial, and was
accorded the respect due to a fellow medical man who had fallen on difficult times. In
many respects he was treated as a visitor as much as a patient. A year passed. Carr was
not subjected to further ill treatment, but nor was he released. He spent much of his time
walking, and was in fact “treated with great kindness… I was rambling about the ground
without an attendant, doing what I pleased”, having given his word as a gentleman that
he would not attempt to escape. He was even on occasion allowed into town in the
company of an attendant to visit the opera or for other purposes.74 He was fond of a
game of bagatelle with the attendant John Harbottle, a dab hand at billiards and a
regular at asylum balls, known for his quadrilles and always conducting himself as a
gentleman.75 In Carr's own words, “during the first period of my detention, I had not the
slightest ground or cause of complaint. I was perhaps treated more kindly than any other
patient in the establishment”.76
The special privileges accorded to Carr were some compensation, it was no doubt felt, for
one of the other major defects of the Yarra Bend asylum: whilst it was possible to
separate patients based on their illness – the maniacs and the melancholics being kept
apart for example – it was poorly designed to separate patients on the basis of their
social class. Paying patients and the well to do might be placed in the same area as
convicts and labourers.77 Whilst all sufferers of mental illness were widely considered at
the time to be in a pitiable state there was nonetheless the sense that for certain types of
people the madhouse was, regrettably, a more likely destination than for others: the
temperamental Irish, with their emotional religion; inebriates, and other members of the
lower orders who lacked the self control and moral compass that a good upbringing
instilled. But what was one to make of the sober, middle class, Protestant male who went
71 Bowie vs Wilson, p10 72 Bowie vs Wilson, p50 73 Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS7459 letter dated 27/2/1858 74 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p7 75 Bowie vs Wilson, p42, p50 76 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p6 77 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1857/58 Select Committee report, Bowie evidence 26/1/1858
41
mad? Clearly this could only be the result of some external force rather than a moral
weakness: ‘sunstroke’ was a common diagnosis.78 And once stricken by such an awful
fate, it was adding insult to injury to treat them the same as the ‘undeserving mad’.
According to the testimony of Dr Stillwell, "Although wholly or partially insane, educated
men have, to some extent, the same habits and modes of conversation as when they are
sane: therefore, being associated with uneducated men would be a source of annoyance
to them, and whatever annoyed them would have a bad effect on the brain”.79 When Dr
McCrea was asked whether “a Chinaman and a doctor of medicine, both lunatics…
sitting side by side… would be prejudicial to the recovery of, say a superior person”, he
replied that “There is not the least doubt of it; it must be a cause of irritation”.80
Throughout this Carr continued to find ample time for writing, to family, solicitors and
the authorities. He still had papers with him “having reference to my mother” and
“concerning the proceedings which were taken in England against the owners of the
Black Ball line of packets”, so was evidently still pursuing these cases.81 Three months
after his arrival he was still confident that he would soon be released, that Dr Bowie was
diligently working to this end, and that it was just a question of the necessary paperwork
being signed. His recent experiences of being bagged and beaten had only sharpened his
desire for freedom. He wrote to the Governor asking for his case to be expedited; to
Parliament, making a claim against the government for his work in treating the wounded
after Eureka; to Parliament again, a long petition outlining the history of his case and
asking for release; he pressed his case with the Official Visitors. He wrote to his former
Ballarat medical colleague Dr Williams, now in Queenscliffe asking whether he might
visit: “if any one you for example will sign an undertaking in the sum of £100 that I will
not commit a breach of the peace I can be allowed to go to Queenscliff 'where I shall be
out of the way of mischief' & without any attendant, once I am away from Melbourne
there is no danger of my getting into a scrape.” Williams never had the chance to take up
this offer, as Bowie failed to send the letter. And he wrote to his wife: do not come out to
assist. Louisa must stay in England lest she arrive in Melbourne to find that he has
already caught another boat home. “Keep up your spirits and do not despair, once out of
this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum. AYC”. The
tone and sense of these documents is often lucid, but it is clear that Carr is still saddled
with delusions about painful past events: in one extraordinary passage he asks Louisa to
tell his son Walter that he has discovered that Walter’s grandmother was poisoned by
aconitine and not strychnine as previously thought – but they “must not mention this to
any one as on my return this whole matter must be investigated, and I have just
completed a very long account of all the symptoms and circumstances of her death.
Which will be sent to the Secretary of State by this mail - & you must not even tell Miss
Carroll lest the murderous Howard(?) Carr should take the alarm”. The language in these
documents is certainly self-justificatory and the retelling of events one sided; it is
78 Boucher, L 2004, "Masculinity Gone Mad: Settler Colonialism, Masculinity and the White Body in Late Nineteenth Century Victoria", Lilith: A Feminist History Journal v.13 79 Bowie vs Wilson, p38 80 Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1860/61 Evidence of McCrea 21/3/1860, p556 81 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p8
42
sometimes wild, with words and sentences frequently underlined for effect; often
distraught – but then, who would not be distraught if imprisoned in an asylum for two
months whilst believing themselves sane?
Carr never resiled from the belief that his incarceration at Yarra Bend was illegal. Even
taking the witness stand in 1862 he commenced his testimony “I come now from a
certain bastile, commonly called the Yarra Bend lunatic asylum”. Whilst there is no
evidence that his committal contravened the laws of the time, his case certainly
highlights the fact that it was much easier to get into an asylum than out – asylums being
socially convenient places to keep the troublesome and indigent from making public
nuisances. It also highlights the extraordinary power of asylum Superintendents over
their charges, the power to treat, to punish, and to set free. Viewed from the inside, this
could appear tyranny and despotism: John Clare, the English poet who spent his later
life at Northampton asylum, described the superintendent there as “Doctor Bottle imp
who deals in urine / A keeper of state prisons for the queen / As great a man as is the
Doge of Turin”. Dr Conolly harked back to the bad old days, when “the superintendents
of the insane had become frantic in cruelty, from the impunity with which their
despotism was attended”. The picture appeared different, of course, if you were in charge
of an asylum: Browne's What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be painted in its final
chapter a vision of the ideal asylum that effectively case the superintendent as a
philosopher king, ruling benignly over a harmonious, hierarchical society in miniature.
This world, where the mad and depraved are made docile, tractable and submissive to
authority was clearly a vision attractive to the ruling class: "Browne's stress on social
harmony and tranquillity; his claim to replace violent repression, conflict and strife by
moral suasion, docility, and willing submission to authority, even among the depraved
and unruly; his practical demonstration of the powers of 'reason and morality' when
allied to a new form of 'moral machinery' – these constituted a potent advertisement for
the merits of reformed asylums run by practitioners initiated into the mysteries of moral
treatment and medical psychology".82 The new asylum management did however
constitute “a prodigiously effective set of techniques for imposing and inducing
conformity, and incorporated a latent (and rapidly realized) potential for deterioration
into a repressive form of moral management”.83
Browne was not unaware of the dangers of this level of control and power, noting that
"the popular belief that asylums have been employed to gratify the cupidity or malice of
interested or indifferent friends, appears not to be without foundation. Men who were
sane, or who scarcely displayed a shade of eccentricity in their conduct, have been
entrapped, imprisoned, and confined, in defiance of the most active interference made in
their favour".84 Carr found himself in a similar situation: apparently without symptoms
82 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry, Routledge, New York, p.xxxix 83 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry, Routledge, New York, p.xliii 84 Scull, A 1991, The asylum as Utopia : W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry, Routledge, New York, p.113
43
for the best part of a year, yet unable to secure a release. He initially believed that Bowie
was on his side, and that it was McCrea who was the obstacle. Over time however he
began to change his views on who was friend and who was foe. Perhaps it had become
clear that Bowie’s verbal support had not translated into any practical action; perhaps he
sensed that he was merely being humoured. Certainly it was McCrea’s view that Bowie
was preventing Carr’s release, writing in 1858 that “he has been repeatedly examined
with a view to his being discharged, and the last two times I saw him I would have
discharged him had Dr Bowie deemed him cured. Dr Bowie does not consider him fit to
be at large in this colony, but would be very glad to get rid of him if he could be sent
home. If I could conscientiously discharge him I should be very glad, as I am quite tired
of him”.85 Bowie for his part believed “Dr Carr to be more rational now than he has been
for many years, but I am confident if he remains in this colony and be subjected to
excitement he will soon again be a dangerous, a highly dangerous, lunatic. I consider it
would be an act of Charity to send him home, and from what I have ascertained I do
believe he has strong claims on the Government”.86 Perhaps during his own
examinations of Carr, McCrea felt it fitting to tell Carr that he personally thought him
sane, but that Dr Bowie did not, feeding an animosity that could only cause Bowie
problems.
For Carr was not merely writing letters petitioning for his release as he scribbled away at
his desk, he was also documenting instances of patient abuse. Somehow he had gained
access to the Restraint Book, which listed all details of patients who had been restrained,
and for what length of time, and made his own copies. Having experienced restraint and
physical violence at Yarra Bend himself, Carr once again chose to project his own
personal situation into a broader injustice, and commenced a crusade to make the
mismanagement of the asylum a matter of public notice. Copying from the asylum
records was one technique, but he was also recording what he believed to be beatings
dished out to other patients. Just as he had taken arms against tyranny and abuse of
authority at Eureka and again on board the James Baines, so he would bring down Dr
Bowie.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
His representations to McCrea and the Official Visitors having so far been unsuccessful,
Carr chooses a more direct way to bring to the attention of the authorities the treatment
received by himself and others at Yarra Bend. Proceeding down William St in the
company of an attendant on one of his trips into town Carr effects “a slight ruse” on his
unfortunate companion and manages to slip away. His destination is a two story brick
building containing the town offices of both the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly and the
Chief Secretary John O’Shannassy. He manages to obtain an audience with Sir Henry by
the simple expedient of presenting his card to the aide-de-camp. After doing so “I was
requested to enter my name in the usual visitors’ book to the Governor, and after waiting
85 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/565 letter 58/3480 86 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/565 letter 58/4329
44
some time I was admitted, in due course,
to His Excellency. I placed in his hands
copies of some five or six letters, which I
believed had been suppressed, and His
Excellency promised to peruse them, and
stated I should receive a reply in due
course… At that interview I was neither
unduly excited nor even in my
conversation in the slightest degree
disrespectful to him; nor did I create the
slightest feeling of alarm upon his
mind”.87 He also has a few words to the Chief Secretary whilst there. Carr is ostensibly
following up the progress of both his financial claims against the government
(Parliament has decided to pay him £150 for his services at Eureka, though Carr is
asking for £1000) and the matter of when he might be discharged. These letters almost
certainly also include his account of the unsavoury occurrences at Yarra Bend.
On his return, Bowie is furious. That a patient has been able to escape and confront the
Governor in such a manner is highly embarrassing. On the flimsy pretext that Carr is
obviously “excited”, he uses his despot’s powers to order that he be immediately bagged
and placed in solitary confinement until further notice. Carr is placed in a cell in the
bluestone B (refractory) ward set aside for the most violent and noisy patients, shackled
and bagged, becoming all the while more desperate. On one occasion Carr bites an
attendant’s finger so hard that blood runs down his beard, and cries “Murder!” as he is
then set upon. He is given no water with which to wash.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Dr William McCrea leans forward in frustration and some degree of anger as he recalls a
visit to Yarra Bend in September 1858 in the company of Eades and Barker. This is what
I found, he growls. Dr Carr had been in the bag for seven days. I conceived the treatment
improper and barbarous and I ordered Dr Carr to be taken out of the bag immediately.
Dr Carr was perfectly quiet and perfectly rational. Myself and others had urged Dr Bowie
for quite some time that as restraint had been abolished in nearly all asylums in
England, so it should be here. He would have none of it. He did not believe in it, as the
patients would tear their clothes and cause unnecessary additional expense to the
institution.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The Official Visitors to the Asylum are given the task of making a full inquiry into Carr’s
treatment. Plump bewhiskered Richard Eades and stolid grey Edward Barker are
longstanding and respected pillars of the Melbourne medical establishment, and have
87 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p20
45
been making monthly trips to Yarra Bend for several years, slowly cajoling Bowie along
the path to reform. They returned to the Bend the day after their visit with McCrea but
"to our surprise and astonishment found Dr Carr again confined in a bag & straight
jacket fastened behind with padlocks and his hands bound behind. We liberated him,
held an inquiry, found Dr Carr’s statement correct & caused his removal to another
ward".88 Whilst it did become apparent that Carr had found a way out of the straitjacket
after two days, and only pretended to be still restrained by it when attendants entered
the room, on examining the attendants Eades and Barker found nothing to justify Carr’s
treatment over the last week. In upholding Carr’s claims, their report was a huge blow
for Bowie and seriously undermined his credibility. Bowie wrote to McCrea to justify his
actions, his indignation and his loathing of the troublesome Carr both palpable: “he was
put under restraint, because I knew him to be impulsive, violent, highly dangerous, and
wholly regardless of human life, and that I was afraid he might injure or kill some of the
inmates of the asylum; or, if he could escape, perhaps offer violence to His Excellency
the Governor, into whose presence he might again intrude. His insane pride, and morbid
craving for notoriety, justify the latter apprehension… Dr Carr is a cunning lunatic, and
can control himself to a certain extent for a time, but the time is too uncertain to allow of
any dependence being placed on him… I have nothing more to add on this subject,
except that the removal of Carr from a refractory ward, to a quiet one, against my
remonstrances, has greatly aggravated his insanity and had a bad effect on other
patients, and that his excitement has been greatly increased by allowing him to peruse
the mass of papers he had collected and call to memory events, which to effect a cure,
ought to be as much as possible forgotten”.
Responded McCrea: “your own indisposition about this time is the only excuse I can
admit for your share of the blame… in future you will never allow any patient to be
placed unnecessarily in restraint, nor permit such patient to remain one minute longer
restrained than is absolutely required.”
Stop interfering, says Bowie: leave Carr to me. “I know the man I have to deal with, and I
feel assured I can manage him”. For Bowie the feud has become personal and
consuming. In his assessment, the patient is, “even in his sanest moments a bad man,
and truly contemptible”. Being left to the Superintendent’s mercies was unlikely to end
well for Carr.
But events had already escaped from Bowie’s control. Melbourne society was still small,
personal, professional and political networks are intertwined. Both McCrea and Bowie
have their supporters in Parliament to pick up the cudgels in the ongoing fight for
control over the asylum. Carr’s treatment ignited the smouldering dissatisfaction with
Bowie’s behaviour. The Member for East Bourke, Augustus Greeves (“a painstaking man,
who, with … a fair share of small ability, and a great ambition for public fame or
88 Public Record Office Victoria 1189/571 V5984 62/W5173
46
notoriety, has given all his time … to the study of public questions”89) took up the case in
Parliament and moved for the appointment of a select committee “to inquire into the
condition and management at the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum”. Strangely, Bowie’s
defender in chief was none other than his future tormentor Archibald Michie, member
for Melbourne. Presumably he is here speaking from conviction, and at the libel trial for
coin. “The House”, he said, rising from his seat in the Legislative Assembly, “should
pause before they proceeded to stigmatise the character of one of the most benevolent
men in the community, and probably cause his utter ruin”. The Member for East Bourke
was “laboring under some extraordinary hallucination as to the man of whose treatment
he was speaking”: Carr was “not only a lunatic, but a very dangerous one, and perfectly
incurable” who had written a tract alleging that “not only were the people of Victoria
leagued against him, but that wherever he went there was a conspiracy to poison him,
and that he could not go to a restaurant to eat by injurious devices were used to poison
him with “Indian hemp.”” Further evidence was adduced regarding Carr’s unreliability:
he had “endeavored to incite the other patients to mutiny, and had said ‘You know they
can’t hang us, we are all lunatics’ (Laughter) – a remarkable instance of the cunning for
which lunatics were proverbial”. Bowie had other supporters in the Parliament whom he
might have wished had remained quiet: George Evans “believed Dr Bowie was very much
indebted for his successful management to the exertions of his wife, a lady of the highest
attainments, and the daughter of the celebrated civil engineer, Symington”.
Michie’s eloquence notwithstanding, the House voted for the establishment of a select
committee to inquire into the management of Yarra Bend, which met for the first time in
January 1859. It was effectively a dress rehearsal, closed to the public, for the libel trial
over three years later. Carr was the first witness called. The committee itself was chaired
by Greeves, but contained staunch Bowie defenders such as Michie and O’Shanassy, so
as Carr told the story of his experiences at Yarra Bend he was put under pressure by
some hostile questioning. His testimony though, while occasionally shocking in its
content, was calm and lucid. O’Shanassy’s presence was particularly extraordinary, as he
was at the time Chief Secretary of Victoria, yet here he was cross-examining certified
lunatic Alfred Yates Carr. Carr outlined in detail (no doubt aided by notes he had copied
from the asylum restraint book) not only his own violent mistreatment, but the beatings
he had heard administered to other patients. How could he be sure of what he described,
asked O’Shanassy – after all, he only heard, not saw, these incidents – could these cries
have just been the ‘involuntary’ cries of patients? No, said Carr, “I had become perfectly
familiar with the sounds of all the screams and cries of the patients”, and he knew what a
beating sounded like. His extensive evidence ran over two days, and despite cross-
examination, he painted a picture of routine violence committed on patients by
attendants, with Dr Bowie culpable in his lack of vigilance and lax administration of the
asylum.
89 R. W. G. Willis, 'Greeves, Augustus Frederick Adolphus (1805 - 1874)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp 292-293
47
The committee called further witnesses, many of whom would also reprise their evidence
in 1862: alarming gardener Robert Coates, describing Bowie as “more like a wax figure
than the Superintendent”, claiming that the asylum balls were a pretext for “violent and
indecent romping”, and that Bowie had banned the Bible, as it was “the worst book you
could read”. Over the period of a fortnight the committee heard from several witnesses,
all hostile to Bowie. It is unclear whether witnesses to speak in his favour were due to
testify: but his saving grace was that before the committee could report to Parliament the
O’Shanassy government fell and the committee was dissolved. It was over two years
before the evidence of Carr, Coates and the various attendants would see the light of day.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The months began to pass, Carr remained in good health, was frequently given to visiting
town and interacting with many citizens of good standing, who thought him perfectly
sane, as did Dr McCrea and the Official Visitors. Why then, he asked, was he still being
held as a patient at Yarra Bend? A handwritten note from McCrea in the Public Records
Office dated July 1859 reads “I certify that Dr Alfred Carr has recovered from his mental
affliction and is now of sound mind”.90 Why was this not acted upon? Did McCrea,
against his better judgement, accept Bowie’s view that “however sane Dr Carr may
appear to you at the present moment, it is only a lucid interval, and if he goes out he will
be violent tomorrow”.91 Bowie harboured a monstrous grudge against Carr for the
trouble he had caused and the damage to his reputation. But things are far from black
and white: as Bowie himself later said, his life would have been much simpler had he
been able to discharge Carr and forget about him entirely.
Carr remained a patient at Yarra Bend throughout 1859, and by December it was over a
year since he had displayed any symptoms. Ultimately it was too much for McCrea. “If a
man had been twelve months without any proof of insanity, I think you would be most
unjustified in keeping him in an asylum”, he said.92 Over the protests of Bowie, he and
Dr Webster examined Carr and declared him sane. After nearly three years of trying to
secure his release, on 2nd December Carr found himself outside the gates of Yarra Bend
asylum, a free man once again.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The defence rests. It is time for Attorney-General Ireland to come to Bowie’s defence, to
counter what the jury has so far heard with his own witnesses. He has twice as many,
which surely counts for something, he says. Medical men are brought forward to testify
that mechanical restraint of patients, if carried out under proper supervision and in a
humane fashion, is in fact necessary. Families of patients, and even the occasional
former patient themselves, testify to Dr Bowie’s kindness and the good treatment
90 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6 91 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p569 92 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, 3/5/1860
48
received. Regular visitors to the asylum such as clergymen and builders are asked
whether they have seen the horrors spoken of, body parts strewn around the ground,
filth and stink – and no, they haven’t, they have always found it a well regulated
establishment. Many current attendants also testify, hardly the most impartial of
witnesses given that attendant abuse of patients is one of the issues under investigation.
The testimony of attendant Elizabeth Powell, whilst on the subject of conditions at the
Yarra Bend Asylum, expressed equally well the proceedings at the Supreme Court:
“A dramatic society was formed by the attendants, for the amusement of the
patients. (Laughter).
The CHIEF JUSTICE – Was there tragedy or comedy?
Witness – Both.93
Many attendants were also questioned as to Carr, his behaviour and treatment. They
describe him as, at times, violent. In his rages he has threatened to murder Dr Bowie, to
tear the attendants to pieces. They all recall Carr striking an attendant on the head with a
pannikin – but who was struck, and when this incident occurred, varies with every
witness. At other times he has dined and drunk with the attendants in a most sociable
manner. John Thomas Smith, another Official Visitor, regretted the former laxity
allowed to Dr Carr, as in the opinion of the Board of Visitors he is now “the most
dangerous man in the asylum.” Since his testimony before the court he has been
particularly bad: “If a person went into his cell now, I believe Dr Carr would strangle
him, from what I saw of him last night… He was striding about the room and swearing in
a most fearful manner”. Nonetheless, when cross-examined, even the medical witnesses
were forced to admit that when giving his evidence, Carr gave every impression of being
completely sane.
Finally, on the seventh day, the prosecution calls Dr Bowie to the stand, to rebut the
accusations in his own words, and to show to the jury that here is no monster or even
dotard, but a caring man with a difficult job. Though white haired and slight of frame,
there is still a spryness to his step as he crosses the courtroom floor. How was the Bend
when I arrived in 1852? It was a miserable place. The buildings sat in a bog, there were
no roads or gardens. Despite the lack of proper staff and the never ending influx of new
patients, far beyond what the asylum was designed to hold, it is now a much much better
one. Yes, Dr McCrea and others had made suggestions for improvement. No, these have
not been helpful – had we been left to continue without his interference the place would
have been much better. Bowie is proud of the bag, being an invention of his own
devising. No, it is never used as punishment. Sometimes to keep the patients warm, in
fact some of the attendants go into the bag voluntarily because it is so warm and
comfortable. Has he tried the bag himself? Well, admittedly no. Dr Carr? He has been
treated very well. No, I’m not sure what happened when he was kept in the bag for a
week, there was some misunderstanding, I was unwell at the time. Yes it was true that Dr
Carr was kept in a cell without a ‘convenience’, but that was because he had in the past
thrown the contents at an attendant. Dr Carr’s evidence is worthless, that tale he told
about Lang being beaten was pure delusion, a malicious delusion, I never saw a mark on
93 Bowie vs Wilson, p39
49
the man. Yes, I had two patients tied together for a few days, but they were plotting an
escape, it was done for the purpose of making them tired of each other’s company and
preventing future association. The patient Patrick Mullens who died, he was already
much bruised from his time in the gaol when he came to us, and certainly his ribs were
broken before he came. No, I have never put a man in restraint as a punishment, and I
trust I never will.
Under the gentle questioning of his legal team, Bowie counters accusation after
accusation. The following day is a different matter. Archibald Michie launches an acerbic
cross-examination, his sharp thrusts leaving Bowie looking all of his seventy years and
more: uncertain, contradictory, defensive and peevish. He becomes muddled in the
details of the cases he has referred to, and it transpires that the asylum records do not
support him in some instances. Yes, yes, he admits, sometimes the records are not kept
as well as they should be: after all, “I have a great deal of writing and a great deal of
walking about to do”. No, the buildings are not riddled with vermin, that patient who
claimed he had collected all those bugs, had “not done it in a straightforward way… he
had employed agents to collect them all over the building”. Laughter ensues. That will do
just as well, says Michie. Even Ireland can’t resist – it was, then, a kind of joint venture
of the lunatics? Pressed about his treatment of Carr, he admits to having him restrained
for “insolence”, and because he knew him to be violent, even though he hadn’t been so at
the time. “I always used mildness, except when other treatment was required”.
Substantial discussion ensues about whether Carr had broken his “parole”, or word as a
gentleman, in going to see the Governor. Even Chief Justice Stawell is irritated with
Bowie by this time. The jury is allowed to ask a question: given that Carr is a man of such
violence, has he ever attacked another patient. No, Bowie doesn’t think so. He steps
down. The plaintiff’s case rests.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Bowie had done his best to prevent Carr’s release, believing that he had not really
recovered and would suffer a rapid relapse back in the outside world. The December day
when the latter finally walked out the Bend after nearly three years was a Friday, a hot
day, a windy day, the sort of day when a man walking back from Yarra Bend into town
might well need a drink. Carr’s account is meticulous in its documentation of his alcohol
consumption: “on Friday Dec 2nd I drank one glass of sherry at the house of Dr Barker
the only other refreshment I took that day consisted of oranges purchased at
Collingwood – on Saturday Dec 3rd took about noon one wineglass of sherry – in the
afternoon I visited the botanical gardens, I there drank water only, I met and conversed
with Mr Horne, the author, who can testify to my sobriety at that time 4pm. Upon my
return to Collingwood I took beaten up with an egg one glass of sherry to relieve the
fatigue after my walk – at 7pm I called upon Dr Barker who accompanied me part of the
way to the house of the Dean of Melbourne, with whom I remained until nearly 11pm, I
was at this time perfectly sober an orange and a glass of ale with my supper was all I took
50
after leaving the house of the Dean”.94 Others had a different story. Carr had gone to stay
with Samuel Wainwright, a former asylum attendant who had, however, left Yarra Bend
before Carr arrived. He was seen drinking with Wainwright and another former patient,
Robert Coates: the three men, strangely enough, who were called as the first three
witnesses in the libel trial.
According to Wainwright, on the evening of the day after his release Carr “made the
acquaintance of a women who lives in Collingwood Flat” and went back to her house for
a brief while; he returned to Wainright’s house drunk, woke him up in the early hours
and was rambling on about arresting Bowie and the former Chief Secretary John
O’Shannassy.
According to Carr, he was stone cold sober, and was on his way to church for
communion when the cab he was in took him to the Little Collins St police station where
he was arrested at Wainwright’s charge so that the latter could embezzle the money Carr
had left with him.
According to Wainwright, Carr was in such an unstable state when he left the house that
he followed him around the city until he could get him to a police station, and Dr McCrea
was called.
According to McCrea, Carr said when he entered his cell, “I arrest you Dr McCrea”, and
had later been very violent and destroyed all the bedding in his cell.
According to Carr, none of this was true.
Whichever way, on Monday 5th December, three days after his release, Carr was
readmitted to Yarra Bend. “He was a perfectly sane man the day before he went out, and
the day after he went out he was perfectly mad”, said a perhaps slightly chastened
McCrea, who believed that alcohol was the cause of his relapse. Eades thought it had to
do with nervous excitement about his release and return to England. Wainwright was of
the opinion that it was due to excitement brought on by sex and drink.95
Whilst free from Yarra Bend, Carr had submitted an advert to be placed in the Argus,
which appeared on the day he returned there. It may be taken perhaps as some proof of a
disordered state of mind for a doctor advertising their practice to state that they had just
been released from a lunatic asylum.
It did not take long for the feud between Bowie and Carr to reignite. In January the
Visitors found Carr back in restraint, not only in a padded cell but also in a
straightjacket, sweltering on the hottest day of the year. Carr was attending a church
94 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 4 95 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6
51
service at Yarra Bend when one of the attendants forcibly removed him; a scuffle ensued,
Bowie was called and a furious argument broke out in which it seems, in the heat of the
moment, Bowie made some accusations that Carr had poisoned his own mother. Wild
with fury by this time, Carr struck the Superintendent and was dragged off to the padded
cell where he was later seen, quieter by now, by both the Visitors and by Dr McCrea. He
showed them the injuries which had been inflicted on him by the attendants. He had also
had his chamber pot removed after he threw it at one of his tormentors, and his cell
stank in the summer heat with the smell of his faeces and urine in a corner. (Bowie’s
view: “There is no doubt this cunning patient performed the functions of nature in his
dormitory to cause annoyance, and excite commiseration on which to found a charge
against his attendants”.96) He was still being goaded by Bowie, who was reproved by
both Visitors. Dr Eades told the Superintendent that “That is not a proper mode of
addressing or speaking to a man that has been insane; I think it calculated to excite him
by throwing back his mind on his own hallucinations”. The other Visitor, Dr Barker, was
equally convinced that Carr’s treatment was punitive in nature: “I did not think that the
state I found Dr Carr in would ever be justified by his state, and that it could not be for
curative treatment; it was a thing that would rather tend to increase insanity than to
decrease it”.97
McCrea, Eades and Barker started to intervene directly on Carr’s behalf, and in turn Carr
continued to provide ammunition for the anti-Bowie forces. The editor of the Argus was
now a regular visitor, was allowed meetings with Carr which Bowie was not permitted to
attend, took notes. Bowie reminded McCrea that “while his vanity is inflated” by these
visits “I consider Dr Carr’s recovery is retarded, the regulations of the Asylum broken,
and the difficulties of my office greatly increased… even in his lucid intervals his
delusions are only dormant, and easily roused into furious, raving mania. There is not a
more dangerous lunatic in the Asylum, for what he wants in physical strength is made up
in cunning and malevolence”. Bowie’s communications to McCrea and others at this
time overflow with anger and self-justification. After all, he had warned them not to
release Carr and look what had happened – but despite this, he was still under scrutiny
and attack and many people it seemed were taking Carr’s part against him. “I am not
aware of having ever treated Dr Carr harshly. On the contrary I have granted him every
indulgence”.98
Meanwhile the parliamentary select committee into the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum
reconvened, and took evidence from others who shared a different view. Dr Eades stated
that “any man to be a superintendent of an asylum should be a man of the greatest
degree of patience, and a very great amount of self-government mingled with a decided
kindness of manner on all occasions, and incapable of being moved by anything said or
done by a patient”. Asked whether Dr Bowie was such a man, he replied “In some
respects, no”.99 Alongside the Committee, Parliament continued to debate whether to
96 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 13 97 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p562 98 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 11878 unit 6 99 Select Committee evidence, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, D31 1860/61, p573-574
52
settle Carr’s claim of £1000 for services rendered at Ballarat, which was strenuously
opposed by those Members who had fought, in some cases literally, for the diggers’ cause
at Eureka, including Peter Lalor, John Humffray and John O’Shanassy.
With a turn of the political wheel, though, Bowie’s fortunes greatly improved. As the
Nicholson government collapsed the until recently little known Richard Heales was
installed as Chief Secretary in a coalition government in which he was dependent on
John O’Shanassy for support. Both were Bowie supporters, and Dr McCrea was promptly
informed by letter that the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum would be removed from his ambit
as Chief Medical Officer and Dr Bowie given complete control. No reason was given
other than that it would “conduce to the better regulation of the Asylum”.
On the 14th June 1861 however, the Select Committee released a progress report – brief
in itself due to lack of recent progress under the new government, but appending all the
evidence collected up to that point from Carr’s first appearance before the committee in
early 1859. All the charges against Bowie and his management, from Carr and other
patients, from McCrea and the Official Visitors, from disaffected former asylum staff: all
rolled off the presses of the Government Printer to be laid before the public for the first
time and bring the case of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum back into the public eye once
again. The Argus seized on the report, which, it said “brings to light many of the ugliest
facts of the ‘management’ of a public institution ever man had to reply to. It is positively
sickening to read evidence to be found in almost every page of this report. Were its
suppression consistent with our duty to the public, and especially to the unhappy portion
of the public that finds its way into this den of horrors, no sentence from this book would
ever soil our columns”: media confections of prurience, titillation and outrage evidently
having a long and illustrious history.
Bowie was aghast, defending himself to the Chief Secretary against the “series of
distorted facts and groundless assertions have been reiterated against my management
of the Yarra Bend Asylum”. The Committee, he said, had been driven by political
circumstances, had only taken the evidence of peculiar witnesses and had refused to
examine other witnesses whose names Bowie had put forward in his own defence.100 He
did everything in his power to further discredit Carr and to justify his treatment of him.
Carr had been making threats against the Chief Secretary and the Governor: according to
another MP, “I was talking to a gentleman in Collins-street, when I was tapped on the
shoulder, and somebody called me by name. I turned round, and saw Dr Carr. He had a
three-pronged fork in his hand. He said, “Seventeen years ago, I stabbed a man in the
thigh with a fork; but the proceedings were informal, and broke down. You can tell John
O’Shanassy to look out. If I don’t have justice done to me, I shall seek another interview
with His Excellency the Governor.”… He then told me he was the Duc de Berry. I made
no observation, except to calm his mind, and walked on.”101
100 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS1189/569, letter dated 28/6/1861 101 Bowie vs Wilson, p82
53
. . . . . . . . . . . .
At almost exactly the same time that he
was said to be the most dangerous man in
the asylum, Carr managed to have
published in the Argus a short letter on one
of the most newsworthy issues of the day,
Burke and Wills. It contained helpful
suggestions to the Howitt rescue
expedition about how best to treat the
scurvy that the explorers are likely to be
suffering from (if found) through the use of
mustard and cress seeds.102
It would normally perhaps be unusual for a
newspaper to publish such a letter from an
asylum patient, but in this case the
correspondent was both known and
trusted. He had, after all, been supplying
the editor with information for the three
inflammatory articles that would shortly be published.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Just after lunch on the eighth day: all witnesses have been heard. An animated Michie
sums up, for the benefit of the jury, the case for the defence. Dr Bowie has “confounded
altogether the character of one institution with another. The lunatic asylum at the Yarra
Bend is not – at any rate, it ought not to be – a gaol”. He spends considerable time
establishing the credibility of Carr’s evidence: its consistency with evidence he gave to
the parliamentary committee three years before; its consistency with the asylum’s own
records. The plaintiff has called witness after witness to discredit Dr Carr, but from his
admirable demeanour whilst giving evidence, the jury can see that he is an educated and
accomplished man, deserving of their credit. Dr Carr has given us painful testimony of
the absolutely intolerable misery that attends being restrained in the bag for days at a
time, yet Dr Bowie, who has never even tried one on, sees fit to make jokes about it. He is
not charging Dr Bowie with being a cruel man, not perhaps naturally a tyrant, though
perhaps a thoughtless and careless one, not naturally a very sagacious man, and one
who, not having had the advantage of studying modern British asylums, resorts to the
worst practice of the worst times in the worst establishments of the olden period. He
refused to take good advice, saw censure in every suggestion, like an obstinate woman,
gentlemen!
102 Argus 2/7/1861
54
“I confess I should have liked – confronted as I am with the grievous mortality which
seems to beset this institution – some more circumstantial accounts of these cases: but
we have them not. We have them, gentlemen, merely in this obscure form – that they
arrived one day, that they were put to bed a few days afterwards because they suffered,
that they died, are buried, are forgotten”. To claim that Patrick Mullens died from
injuries received before his arrival flew grossly, revoltingly in the face of the evidence. “It
was monstrous that this poor unfortunate man should be taken to this place, rapidly
passed to death, and then his history to be over, and no more to be heard of him". The
poorest amongst us must receive justice, and it is the role of the press to expose their
cases to public scrutiny so that justice may be had. A “vast number of atrocities must
have occurred – atrocities to miserable wretches rapidly passing into a state like that of
wild animals, till they leave their tormentors never to rise again. Houghton digs their
grave, another individual washes the body, and instant and it is all over. The tragedy,
gentlemen, of these facts is elsewhere. Many an old father or mother can guess, perhaps
– getting a glimpse into these matters from inquiries of this kind – that in some
wretched place, far away in Australia, some poor son or daughter is lost, never more
heard of, and probably last seen or known of there.”
Michie speaks for three hours to the jury and to a spellbound gallery. As he resumes his
seat, immense cheering breaks out amongst the spectators.
The following morning Ireland takes up Bowie’s case. It is all very well playing to the
passions of an audience, he says, like my colleague yesterday, but I ask you to take note
only of the facts. The jury will have seen that the defendant’s witnesses were mainly
lunatics and discharged servants, persons inferior in quality of those speaking in favour
of Dr Bowie, who in their calm demeanour, their respectability, their credibility, and
impartiality, must have the jury’s preference. Who could believe someone like Robert
Coates? His yabber-yabber in the box showed that there was a screw loose somewhere.
He tells us about trees dangling with the remains of bodies just like the Chinese lanterns
at Cremorne Gardens, and of men’s skulls and bones lying about the ground, but no
other witness can support this evidence. As for Dr Carr, his rambling account seemed to
conflate multiple different episodes. The Attorney-General asks the members of the jury
to apply their own good sense about his reliability. Do they really believe that a man can
be insane on one point only, and sane on others? Dr Carr never showed himself insane as
a professional man, but would they turn to him for medical treatment? He was sorry,
though, for the way he had to treat him in the witness box, in putting some of those
questions to him, for he has heard that Dr Carr has been bad ever since. The other cases
are easily dealt with. Mary Steele was not, as the Argus implied, a patient of the
institution under Dr Bowie’s care. Patrick Mullens never made a word of complaint, so
how could Dr Bowie know that he was nursing broken ribs? Yes, Dr Bowie had had
occasion to place violent patients in mild and humane restraint, but members of the jury
should remember how this was dealt with in the past – he reaches down, clanking, holds
aloft a heavy pair of iron manacles – Dr Bowie had submitted a mild mode of restraint
for a revolting one, and for this he was described as a monster of cruelty. Doctor Bowie
55
has served the public cause for ten years during a most unsettled state of society, Was he
now to be charged – an old man, the father of a family, and whose foot was now on the
brink of the grave – was he to be charged with brutal inhumanity for political purposes?
His client was not seeking money – only the exemplary damages that would vindicate his
character, having passed forty years in his profession without a stain on his reputation.
I have now done my duty, said the Attorney-General to the duty, and I ask you to do
yours. Slight applause breaks out as he resumes his seat, immediately stifled.
Chief Justice Stawell sums up. He runs through all the arguments, but seems quite
favorably disposed to the defence. He asks the jury not to make a judgement on the basis
of misguided sympathy, just because Dr Bowie is an old man – he is also a public man,
and public property. The jury does not have to decide whether monomania exists – just
whether they believe Dr Carr, and whilst the doctor seemed to be the most impulsive,
pugnacious man that he ever saw, his evidence, if not the truth, was certainly a most
touching tale. The judge himself goes so far as to describe the bag as cruel.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the jury retires. After deliberating for two and a half
hours, they return, and the foreman takes the stand. The verdict – on those counts
relating to Mrs Steele, they find for the plaintiff, Dr Bowie, and award £100 damages. On
all other counts – the jury finds for the defendant.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The Argus was quick to claim victory: “The verdict of the jury in the case of BOWIE vs
WILSON is a triumphant vindication of the rights of the Press, in the exposure of public
abuses”. There was “no shadow of a reason why a lunatic asylum in Victoria should be in
anything inferior to a similar establishment at home”, arguing that the press should hold
the government to the sort of civilised standards expected in Britain, and that in doing so
the paper had acted “purely out of public motives and for the public cause”. Despite the
insinuations of the plaintiff’s legal team: “The picture was not heightened or over-
coloured in any of its details. It comes out with even a more prominent ghastliness in the
evidence of Dr Bowie, his attendants, and patients – a picture of horrors such as makes
the blood run hot in our veins – a picture of the madhouse as it was in the old times,
when madness was a crime and the madman a wild beast – a picture as dirty as it is
horrible, and with a comic side as well – such a one as HOGARTH might have drawn
ninety years ago, and only the old Bedlam or Bicentre could have matched – before
humanity had struck off the chains from the madman, and reason had taken him in
hand… As for the superintendent of the asylum himself, he almost claims our pity, for
the display he has afforded of his own utter helplessness and imbecility… a poor, feeble
old man, with no natural propensity for cruelty, and possibly with the best intentions…
pottering about among his pigs, patients and poultry, with a nearly equally divided
56
affection – a very POLONIUS among mad doctors… a man great in little things, and with
a decided genius for all the petty mechanics of his calling”.103
The case had a piquancy that attracted the attention of newspapers from across the
colony, who were only too happy not only to retail the stories of abuses of power in the
purplest prose at their command, but also often to preen themselves at being part of “the
press”, and hence share in some small part the glory due to the Argus on the occasion of
this particular triumph.
For example, the Bendigo Advertiser. “In the exaggerated and distorted representations
of the proceedings in lunatic asylums, which we often meet in novels, we find nothing
really more painful than the revelations disclosed in this trial, or anything so graphic and
interesting as the plain and unvarnished statements of the witnesses. There are all the
materials of the tales of horrors - cruelty even to death, gross negligence, filthiness,
dishonesty, and lust. Add to these, glimpses of the human nature of the world outside the
walls of the asylum, professional pedantries and jealousies, official neglect, and
legislatorial purblindness and ignorance, and we think we have a chapter furnished to us
of life in Victoria in 1862 such as can scarcely be paralleled for interest and variety. It is a
shocking reflection that in this era of civilization, in the very centre of one of the most
intelligent and well-informed communities in the world, which has lavished money in
the effort to relieve its distressed and unfortunate members, of whatever description,
such a state of things should have existed in the asylum at the Yarra Bend as has been
disclosed by the evidence at this trial”.104
The trial afforded no shortage of satirical material for Melbourne Punch. Cheap puns
abounded about “getting the sack”, “Bowie knives” and bedbugs, and “the bag” also
became an icon of madness that could be applied, for
example, to the colony’s legislators.
Bowie though was not without many friends and
supporters, who were appalled by the outcome, and
after the Argus’s description of the trial had been
published in pamphlet form they released a rejoinder
of their own. Rebutting some of the individual
charges they claimed that the whole trial was stacked
against Bowie, who “not only to contend against a
partial journalist, a given-to-change lawyer, a jury
deficient in knowledge and acumen, but his counsel
had to submit to improper dictation on the part of the
Chief Justice!”105 Michie was portrayed as a Judas for
defending a case at odds with his formerly expressed
103 Argus 7/6/1862 104 Argus 9/6/1862 105 A companion to the 'Argus' report of Bowie against Wilson, right versus might, 1862, William Robinson, Melbourne, p9
57
opinions, for the sake of the money – showing perhaps a certain naivety about how
barristers actually make a living. A testimonial was appended, signed by eighteen of
Bowie’s colleagues in the medical profession, praising his many years of public service
under difficult conditions. He was also supported by The Illustrated Melbourne Post: “Dr
Bowie will find the thinking and unprejudiced portion of the public, ready to accord to
him the character of a humane and conscientious public servant… a large amount of
clap-trap and exaggeration was brought to bear against him”. Most of the problems
described in the trial were not down to Bowie, but rather due to the poor class of staff on
which he was forced to rely to carry out the everyday running of the institutions: “not
only is it impossible at present to obtain a high class of attendants for the most repulsive
of almost all occupations, but that even in our domestic circles we are compelled to put
up with such servants, and with such services, as would in England be held altogether
intolerable”.106
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Carr and Bowie both returned to Yarra Bend, each in their own way broken men, the
former increasingly agitated and violent, and the latter, despite the support of his
friends, exhausted, shocked, distressed that after all his years of work, his word counted
for less in the eyes of a jury than the ravings of a madman. Nor was there any respite for
Dr Bowie, as public scandals around deaths at the asylum continued to mount. Just over
a week after the trial had concluded, Charles Jenkins, formerly a driver to members of
the Melbourne Club, was admitted. He died three days later. The inquest was reported in
extensive detail by (unsurprisingly) The Argus (“We venture to append it as a climax to
the hideous picture lately laid before the public of Victoria”107), and displayed yet
another unedifying spectacle of mismanagement and finger pointing. The inquest found
that Jenkins had died of maniacal exhaustion and peritonitis: but also that his death was
hastened due to receiving simultaneous and quite contradictory treatments from Bowie
and his assistant, Dr Callan. The former tried to stimulate the patient, applies blistering,
prescribes opiates: the latter tries to lower the patient with cold baths, calomel, taking
blood. The two never communicate, nor record their treatments in the medical book. At
the inquest, they unashamedly point the finger of blame at each other.
Misery heaped upon misery for Bowie. On the day that the jury delivered its’ verdict on
the Jenkins inquest, a critically ill patient named John Turner was released from the
Yarra Bend Asylum back to his own house, where he died three days later. Turner, a
wheelwright from Prahran, had fallen on financial difficulties, become “intemperate”,
and finally exhibited such wild behaviour that it attracted the attention of the police. By
the systems of the day, such cases were not able to be taken directly to the asylum, but
first had to be taken to the Western Gaol for a week for medical observation, prior to any
certificates of insanity being signed. Turner had spent three weeks at the Gaol, where it
seems he had suffered ill treatment, before being released into the care of the Asylum,
106 Illustrated Melbourne Post 25/6/1862 107 Argus 30/6/1862
58
where he stayed for a further nine days prior to his discharge. Much like the libel trial of
the previous month, the inquest into Turner’s death excited significant public attention
and ran for several days, and though this time the Western Gaol was the main focus of
public and media attention and opprobrium, the patient’s treatment at the asylum was
also closely scrutinised, with the Coroner remarking on the “vast amount of
discrepancies which existed in the evidence as to the condition, treatment and
everything connected with the deceased while in the asylum”.108
Even now, Carr returns like a revenant to haunt Bowie’s peace of mind. During the
course of the inquest, Turner’s two teenage daughters and eleven year old son were
brought (incredibly, awfully) onto the witness stand. They received a visit from Dr Carr
at their house in Prahran, they claimed, to pass on a message from their father whilst he
was in the asylum. He was dressed in asylum clothing, stayed with them for four hours
before departing, and seemed quite rational. Impossible, says Bowie. Dr Carr could not
get out without his knowing, and even if he had, he would have done some mischief and
ended up in police hands in no time. Both siblings though corroborate their sister’s
evidence: “I recollect a man from the Yarra Bend calling at our house on a Sunday, at
about half-past seven. He stayed till about twelve o'clock. He said he had a message from
father, which was, that we should go and see him on the following Sunday. He had on
prison clothes marked L. A., and said he was not allowed to wear his best clothes. His
name was not Brown, Jones, or Robinson. It was Carr. He was a short thin man, with a
slight moustache and beard. The man seemed to talk very sensibly, and said he was
going to Little Brighton to see his sister … He had a pilot coat on, and white trousers,
also a cap with a peak on it, also L.A. under the arm. He said he left the asylum at six
o'clock in the morning, and got a car. He had blue eyes. I should know him if I saw him
again.”
The consistency of description from the three children was damning, and they could
have no reason for making the story up. Carr had again made Bowie look like a fool.
When Eades and Barker next made their way out to Yarra Bend for their regular visit
several days later, they found Carr lying on the floor of a windowless stone cell, nine feet
by six and a half, in the refractory ward, where he was being kept for 21 hours a day.109
Nothing, it seemed, had changed in the four years since they and Dr McCrea had first
found Carr in such a state. They ordered his immediate release and an attendant
especially assigned to his care, reporting that they were of the opinion that Dr Carr’s life
was being endangered, and that he was “imprisoned not so much for curative means, as
for those of retaliation, and punishment, under which we found him rapidly sinking”.110
Bowie made a feeble protests to the Chief Secretary, writing in a broken, spindly hand
with fractured grammar and a wounded, defeated tone. “I am sorry you should have so
much trouble with the Asylum, it did not use to be so when I was left intermedelled with.
108 Argus 24/7/1862 109 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571, 62/ V4477 110 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571, V5984 62/W5173
59
It was then said the best proof all was going on well was when they scarcely ever heard of
us”. Carr was still an “outrageous madman” who had tried to attack a visiting doctor just
the other day. Dr Black’s recollection was somewhat different, that Carr had said to him
“I think I have seen you before in Ballarat”, and had merely attempted to get out of bed
when he was immediately “assaulted” by the attendants: a violent struggle followed and
the cell door was locked with Carr greatly agitated and beating against it. Said Black,
“Picture to yourself poor Carr… emaciated as he is… requiring such a course of treatment
in the presence of 5 or 6 powerful men, how necessary must be the aid of bags and
ropes… moral courage is so much wanting… it is very sad that a gentleman and a
member of our profession should be left to the mercy of such keepers”.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Bowie proposed another solution to the problem of Dr Alfred Yates Carr: why not
transfer him into the care of Dr Harcourt at his institution in Pascoe Vale? This
suggestion was, in the view of the Official Visitors, was “cruel and unworthy… for we are
aware that Dr Bowie knows that one of the earliest maniacal seizures with which Dr Carr
was attacked occurred in Dr Harcourt’s Establishment in England, & was attended with
unpleasant results”.111 Yes, the same James Harcourt for
whom Carr had worked at Hunningham and with whom he
had quarrelled so violently, having lost thousands of pounds
on his ventures in England, had emigrated to Australia six
years earlier and set up another private asylum a few miles to
the north of Melbourne. Harcourt was also well aware of the
difficulties at Yarra Bend, and wrote to the Chief Secretary
offering to take over the management of the Asylum, free of
charge, for a temporary period until a new Superintendent
could be brought out from England. With Bowie’s physical
health and state of mind both seemingly in decline, the offer
was gratefully accepted, and on 22nd August 1862 Dr Robert
Bowie received a letter informing him that “the Government have come to the decision
that it is essential to the interest of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum that you and Dr
Callan the Assistant Superintendent should be relieved from the duties of your respective
offices”.112 Bowie refused to go quietly, protesting the legality of his dismissal in letters to
Governor Barkly, His Grace the Duke of Newcastle Secretary of State for the Colonies,
and Earl Shaftesbury, Chief Commissioner of Lunacy.113 He remained in the
Superintendent’s residence with his family, and when Harcourt arrived to take over,
threatened to throw him out as a trespasser. It was several weeks before the will of the
government was finally brought into effect and Harcourt picked up the reigns.
111 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189/571 V4626 62/V4984 112 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1095 113 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1095
60
A strange symmetry. The young Dr Carr had worked for Harcourt tending the patients at
Hunningham, where he was to have the first of his attacks of paranoid and sometime
violent mania, and in an act of revenge instituted a full scale inquiry into the asylum by
the Lunacy Commissioners. Fourteen years later, at the furthest ends of the earth, James
Harcourt became the head of the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum as the result of a public
inquiry which Alfred Yates Carr – this time as a patient – had again played a critical role
in instituting.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
What Carr thought of Harcourt’s appointment – whether it dredged up old injustices,
anger, delusions – is unknown. After the libel trial his own voice disappears from the
records, absent from the letters preserved within the Public Records Office and from the
evidence transcribed by secretaries to parliamentary committees or court cases. We last
hear him stepping down from the stand at the Supreme Court: “I am Alfred Yates Carr,
and I want a writ of Habeas Corpus”. “No further questions were put to the witness, who
then left the box, uttering some remarks in reference to the Attorney-General, which
were not distinctly heard”.114 From this point until the end of his life – another thirty
years into the future – we have occasional glimpses of him, with decreasing frequency,
either in the short and hurried notes of institutional documentation or as a passing
reference in the newspapers as a result of his periodic escapes.
Immediately following Harcourt’s arrival at Yarra Bend, Carr was assigned an individual
attendant, and once over the stresses of the libel case entered another period of calmness
and lucidity – to such an extent that some of his old privileges were reinstated, such as
walking in the neighbourhood, fishing, and visiting town (why, it was asked in
Parliament, was the government employing an attendant full time to escort Carr to the
opera?). However on the 21st November, Carr took advantage of being left alone for a few
minutes whilst his attendant answered a call of nature. His escape took him as far as
Brighton, possibly under the delusion that his sister resided there. After a few drinks and
for reasons no-one could fathom, he broke into a chapel and its attached school house
and demolished everything in the place. On the completion of his handiwork he tore a
page from one of the children’s books and posted it in the window. It read “Do Nothing
Rashly”. He was recaptured and returned to the asylum.115
Disturbingly, during the four days he was at large, he had also made threats to kill the
Governor, Chief Secretary O’Shanassy and other eminent persons: said O’Shanassy in
the Legislative Assembly “Care would be taken that Dr. Carr did not escape again; and he
(Mr. O'Shanassy) felt personally interested in his being properly secured. (Laughter.)”.116
So it was no doubt met with some degree of surprise and trepidation when Carr escaped
again three days later. This time we have no record of any outrages committed, and when
114 Bowie vs Wilson 115 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189 unit 572, Argus 5/12/1862 116 Argus 5/12/1862
61
he turned himself in at the house of a Mr George O’Connor, the latter wrote to
O’Shanassy passing on a message from Carr that he had “never had the slightest
intention now or at any other time of doing you the least personal injury on the contrary
he has expressed very great admiration for you generally”.117 Enough was enough said
Harcourt – Carr had forfeited his privileges through his recent behaviour, and would
henceforth be treated like any other patient.
These escapes and recaptures were tracked in the asylum’s Discharge Register. Three
years later, on 17 May 1865, a line in this weighty ledger reads “Discharged Cured”.
Three months later, on 29 August, he was readmitted. On where he had been during this
time, what he had done, why he had failed to return to Louisa and his family in England,
and why he was ultimately brought back to the Bend, the sources are silent.
Carr was discharged cured again in 1866, promptly “caused considerable disturbance at
a number of churches” and was immediately readmitted.118 He wrote to the Governor on
Christmas Eve 1872: the clerk receiving it simply noted the subject as “Mad” and referred
it to the Chief Secretary. The next year Carr was widely heard to say that he intended to
"get out and have a slap at the Governor". When it was discovered that he had
disappeared one Saturday morning, information was promptly sent to police authorities,
and Carr was arrested on the road to Sandridge in the early afternoon.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
He was still writing to the Governor, but did he still write to Louisa? Did he ever stop?
Did she still write to him? When did she and his sons Walter and Ernest stop believing
that he was ever coming home? From the one letter of Louisa’s that has been preserved,
she had already found herself in difficult circumstances as far back as early 1858: unable
to pay the rent, she was relying on the charity of Carr’s family to support them in a
couple of rooms at the back of a house in Ealing. I parted with all my best clothes but I
don’t mind that a bit. At the time of his mother’s death Carr had quarrelled badly with
his family, but it is a Henry Carr, who Louisa describes as a “great dear angel” who has
been supporting his wife and children. Louisa herself was unable to work because of
bronchitis, but was hoping to get a situation as a governess at a school when she
recovered. Of the children, they “are both very well & Walter is of great comfort to me,
when he awakes and finds my breathing bad he jumps out of bed lights the fire and
makes me a cup of tea without the least noise, he helps me a great deal & wished he was
a man that he might cash a deal of money for me. Ernest is rather delicate but grows
better they never forget you in their prayers”. Walter sent his own note: “My dear Papa, I
am glad you are well and wish you were here to play at ball in the fields with us, you
must bring me a wheelbarrow when you come home, make haste, and bring Mamma a
Parrot that will talk… Ernest sends lots of kisses me too. Your Affectionate Son, Walter S
Carr.” By 1861 the family had taken up lodgings on one floor of a terrace house in
117 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 1189 unit 572, 62/Y8275 118 Argus, 28/5/1866, 29/5/1866, 27/6/1866
62
Camden, and Ernest had gone away to school: in the census for this year, Walter’s
occupation is also listed as “Scholar”, so there must have been some money to support
the children’s education. The census also shows a Louis Carr living with the family, aged
7 and born in Paris. The timing of his birth does not fit with any of Carr’s visits to
England, which may suggest that Louisa remarried were it not for the fact that the
census shows no man living with her and she is described as the “head of household”.
She is also still using the surname Carr, though one wonders about the role of the “great
dear angel” Henry Carr. Perhaps Louis was simply the child of another relative or friend,
taken into the family.
It is all conjecture. After the 1861 census Louisa and the rest of the family simply
disappear. No record of her death, or remarriage, or emigration can be found.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Yarra Bend had been Carr’s home for thirty years when the decision was made to
transfer him to Ararat asylum, a little over 200 kilometres to the west of Melbourne. He
was admitted to Ararat on April Fool’s Day 1887, aged 65 going on 66, and described as
being dangerous, destructive and suffering from chronic delusional insanity. He was
moved with 26 other patients, almost certainly to the newly opened ward for “criminal
lunatics” opened at the disused Ararat Gaol. The case notes mark him as being “full of
delusional ideas as to identity”, as being “treacherous”. To the end, his delusional
complex about drugs and poisoning remained intact: at times is very much excited and
occasionally charges other patients with trying to poison him. In 1892 he is described
as being “if anything, more demented than formerly”. The next note, two years later: The
same. The final, terse, note on 26th June 1894 reads “Found dead in bed this morning at
7am. Cause of death: Disease of Heart and Pleurisy”.119 The post mortem examination
nearly throws up a final irony: the body was inspected by a Dr Bowe, and were it not for
the missing “i” one could almost think that the former Superintendent of the Yarra Bend
Lunatic Asylum had returned from beyond the grave to see with his own eyes whether it
was true that his old nemesis was really dead.
119 Public Record Office Victoria VPRS 7403
63
No trace could be found of friend or relative and Alfred Yates Carr was buried as a
pauper in an unmarked grave in the Ararat cemetery. He was 73 when he died, and it
was over half a lifetime ago that he had written to Louisa “Keep up your spirits and do
not despair, once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into
an asylum. AYC”. Half a life lived as a free man; six years as a cause celebre and catalyst
for government inquiries into the management of the insane; and then thirty two years
of obscurity behind asylum walls. He was forgotten to nearly all, including his old friends
at The Argus: despite the copy he had generated for the newspaper, as both author and
subject, his death passed without comment. His old sparring partner, Dr Robert Bowie
had long since passed away in 1869, and been followed to the grave by those who had
championed his cause at one time or the other: Drs Eades and Barker, John Thomas
Smith and Augustus Greeves. Dr McCrea still had five years to live, but was seeing out
his peaceful old age at his home in Richmond. It was left to the local paper the Ararat
Advertiser to provide the obituary for “an old colonial celebrity”.120
120 Ararat Advertiser 29/6/1894