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