Aradale the Making of a Haunted Asylum

Palgrave handbook of Incarceration in Popular Media, 2019

The Legend of Madman's Hill: Incarceration, madness and dark tourism on the goldfields. First established in 1864 during the goldrush era of western Victoria, Australia, the Ararat Lunatic Asylum has long stood as a gothic edifice on the crest of the ominously named 'Madman's Hill', overlooking the regional city of Ararat. Built in the Victorian Italianate style, the now abandoned lunatic asylum complex has become the site of a thriving dark tourism industry feeding off public fears of both mental illness and the plight of the incarcerated patients as manifested through folklore, urban legends, media reports and, of course, the ubiquitous legacy of the asylum in popular culture. The complex is the focal point of mnemonic battles over representations of the site. To some it is a symbol of gothic horror and incarceration. For others, its role provides a profound window into the history of psychiatry and the lived experiences of patients and staff. Similarly, for members of Friends of J Ward, the site is a symbol of lost community industry and family heritage. Overwhelmingly, contemporary representations of the site are dominated by a flourishing ghost tour and ghost hunting industry through which over 20,000 tourists per year visit the site. These representations draw on the folklore of haunted experiences tied to the trauma of the former men and women incarcerated at the asylum, yet they are primarily mediated through expectations rooted in the horror and gothic genres of cinema, novels and video games. This paper will examine the process by which this network of popular, folkloric and populist depictions has shaped representations of 'Ararat Lunatic Asylum' as a significant heritage site in the history of the incarceration of the mentally ill in Australia.

Pay Dirt Ballarat Heritage Services, 2019

The original draft for the forthcoming anthology "Pay Dirt! Hidden Gold". PREFACE Transnational and comparative histories have shed new light on boundaries transformed by immigration and economics and opened up significant research into the goldfields and settler histories. With the advent of modern digital technology new avenues are constantly evolving for the current historian. Using new methods and computers for data searches through innovational wikis and digital programs such as NVivo has allowed some researchers to link previously unknown data and ask new challenging questions. By drawing inferences from the particular to the whole, other historians have explored trends and nuances rarely seen before. Combined with theoretical approaches these new ways of historical research delve into the depths of leads and find pay dirt, hidden gold!

Australian Humanities Review, 2018

The memorialisation of expeditions has become an increasingly contested issue in public life both in Australia and internationally. While Antarctica may seem peripheral to these debates, which usually focus on colonial legacies and indigenous dispossession, Australia’s sizeable territorial claim on the continent means that it too must be incorporated into the conversation. In this regard, the stories through which Australians’ early experiences of Antarctica are remembered are important components of the nation’s geopolitical imaginary. Early Australian exploration of Antarctic has popularly been viewed through a frame of heroic masculinity centred on Douglas Mawson, the leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911-14. Despite a recent widening of this view, aspects of the expedition that challenge this perspective are still neglected. This paper focuses on Sidney Jeffryes, a radio operator on Mawson’s expedition whose world-first achievement of wireless connection between the two continents was overshadowed by his mental illness and subsequent incarceration. Seen as an embarrassment to the expedition, until recently he has been largely written out of Australian Antarctic history. The paper draws on a collaboration between a literary studies scholar, a historian and a psychologist to examine Jeffryes’ experiences in Antarctica and on his return, contextualizing them within the power relations of the expedition, and class, gender and colonial discourses of early twentieth-century Australia. We argue that Jeffryes’ story has a call on our attention because, in addition to its own compelling narrative, it enables us to challenge the heroic stereotype that has dominated the memorialisation of Australian Antarctic history.

AICCM Bulletin, 2019

This article recounts the author’s journey through polar and asylum archives in order to tell the story of a forgotten Antarctic expeditioner. A radio operator for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14, Sidney Jeffryes was a pioneer of Antarctic telecommunications, making two-way wireless contact between the continent and the rest of the world for the first time. However, his mental illness during and after the expedition saw him institutionalised and marginalised from Australian Antarctic exploration history. Telling Jeffryes’ story challenges the way we remember Australian achievement in the Antarctic, but piecing this story together is far from straightforward. With published accounts often eliding his achievements or repeating century-old misstatements, documents preserved in archives become key witnesses to his experience. Dispersed, faded, often illegible, and swamped by the masses of irrelevant documents surrounding them, these feel like the noisy signals that Jeffryes decoded in the Antarctic. In attempting to transmit Jeffryes’ story, this article also tells the story of deciphering his messages from the past. For the conservator, the important lesson is that the material documents held in the archives, although at times messy and frustrating, enabled this retelling. Indeed, this messiness was an integral part of their message.

International Journal of Cultural Studies

The article investigates the relevance of geographical imagination in refugee politics in the Mediterranean coast. It is based on empirical research conducted in Calabria, southern Italy, in a small village that in 1997 decided to host over 300 refugees that shipwrecked on its coast. By welcoming refugees the village, Badolato, appropriated politics of hospitality to gain new cultural and economic value for the village that was suffering from high unemployment rates and an ageing population. The story, exceptional as it was, soon attracted international media to cover the story of Badolato. The article depicts developments in the village over the course of 14 years and shows the force and changes over time of media publicity in the process. It points out the relevance of media for the process of geographical imagination and the contradictory and complex implications of the process.

forthcoming

'Things That Go Bump in the Night' will use the framework of analytical psychology to explore the phenomenon of ghost hoaxing as it emerged in the 19 th century goldfields of Victoria, Australia. As a discipline, analytical psychology seeks to analyse and distil the interaction of personal and collective forces that result in behaviour which may appear, at face, to be bizarre and unexplainable. It is committed to unravelling the interplay of conscious and unconscious forces with the expectation that this unravelling may afford both explanation and creative use of that which might otherwise be seen as destructive, frightening, uncontainable and purely negative.

This article employs a Jungian analytical perspective in its exploration of the phenomenon of ghost hoaxing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Victoria, Australia, as observed through its reportage in the print media of the era.

Published in Trespassing Journal, December 2014