This article explores the utility of using the rich holdings of coronial inquests in the collection of Public Record Office Victoria as fertile sources for exploring histories of place, kin and culture. It suggests ways in which the minutiae of everyday life contained in inquest deposition files provide a unique source enabling the historian to tell stories about ways of life as much as the circumstances of death. Coronial inquiries were established in the British legal tradition, with hotels playing an important early role in both the housing of dead bodies and the holding of inquests. The article further explores a range of examples under the themes of work, place, family and race to analyse the value of inquest files in understanding the experience of individual workers against the backdrop of occupational categories, to research fine-grained local histories, to disrupt racial stereotypes, and to understand family dynamics and extended relationships. These case studies throw light on a range of methodological and ethical issues pertinent to this genre of record, revealing inquest records as a complex body of important public documents with personal sensitivities, both for the historian and their subject.
This article questions stereotypical assumptions regarding why a colonial woman did not leave a situation of domestic violence in colonial Australia. By analysing the 1863 case of Elizabeth Scott, the first woman to be hanged for a domestic violence related murder, I explore how an understanding of Battered Woman Syndrome would have been a means of lessening her sentence, had the syndrome been recognised at the time. Elizabeth was a victim of repeated and sustained domestic violence, commonly termed 'wife-beating' in the 1860s. Similar cases were constantly brought before the local courts and gruesome details faithfully reported in colonial newspapers. Husbands in the Colony of Victoria were routinely arrested and punished for beating their wives in the mid 1800s and into the 1900s. However, the judiciary struggled with how to deter and deal with the abusers. Colonial Victorian common law provided that a husband could subject his wife to punishment or chastisement, so long as no permanent injury was done. Surprisingly, judges dealt with this type of marital violence regularly and often sympathised with the battered partner. Men who assaulted their wives were usually 'bound over to keep the peace' by a short period of incarceration or a small fine with the abuser returning home, often to repeat the beatings. Mysteriously, Elizabeth did not prosecute her husband.
This article is a case study of the way the decision to commute a death sentence was reached. The Big Hill murder attracted intense public interest in 1860 and generated extensive records. These document the processes by which the governor and ministers decided to exercise the prerogative of mercy and commute the death sentence of a convicted murderer; they also record the prisoner’s later attempts to clear his name. The case shows how commutation of a death sentence was influenced by official perceptions of the degree of certainty with which guilt was established, and illustrates the processes that authorities used to reach, and reassess, that conclusion.
From 16 October to 8 December 1950 Victorian members of the Australian Railways Union (ARU) and the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen (AFULE) stopped work. This was the longest railway strike in Victorian history. This article draws on the records of the Victorian railways and unions to explain this unusual strike in which for a time Labor ‘true believers’, Communists and even railways management found a common foe in the Australian arbitration system.
Bundoora Homestead is an ornate Queen Anne style Federation mansion used today as the public art gallery for the City of Darebin. Surrounded by a manicured lawn, River Red Gums and a residential housing estate, it is one of only three remaining buildings of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital that accommodated patients suffering from psychological trauma resulting from the theatre of war. Since its closure in 1993, knowledge of the hospital period had largely faded from living memory. Patient records were transferred to Victorian government departments and the Urban Land Authority cleared the site, and only with fast action by the Preston Historical Society, City of Darebin and La Trobe University, was the homestead saved from demolition. In the year 2000, a grant from the Commonwealth Government Federation Fund allowed for restoration of the building to its pristine condition as it was in the Smith family era (1899-1920), and in 2001, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre opened to the public. This paper reveals the significant role of Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital in the care and management of ex-servicemen who returned to Australia initially after Word War I (1914-1918) in 1920, World War II (1939-1945) and later conflicts. It will outline how the homestead became a mental health facility; it will discuss case studies of some of its patients, and will note the impact of the discovery and application of lithium by Dr John Cade at the hospital in the late 1930s.
This article uses a range of sources in the public domain to tell the story of 'Jill', a state ward in Victoria whose experiences in institutions attracted an enormous amount of public attention between 1952 and 1955. Jill's story became a vehicle for heated debates about the child welfare system, during a period of considerable tension and conflict that preceded significant reform in Victoria. The representations of Jill in the media, and the consequent public interest in her case, led to the creation of records that illuminate how 'female delinquents' were regarded, and dealt with, by authorities in the 1950s. Jill's story demonstrates the difficult transition from a child welfare system that heavily relied on the church and charitable sector, towards a new system with more involvement and oversight from government departments, and the input of 'professionals' from the social work, psychology and criminology sectors. There have been many scandals and inquiries in the history of child welfare in Australia, however the 'Jill' story is unique in its focus on this young woman, rather than general policy issues or conditions within a particular institution. Ultimately, this tragic story demonstrates that the system in Victoria failed to help Jill, and the public interest in her plight was limited.
This paper gives an account of the life and work of John Jones (1836-1909), a Welshman who plied his skills as a stonemason and builder in inner Melbourne during the latter half of the nineteenth century. During his working life, Jones built over 40 homes, predominantly in West Melbourne, including his family home in Hawke Street. Primary historical records available at Public Record Office Victoria have been used to trace the surviving homes built by Jones and to map their location. The earliest surviving property is a simple brick and stone cottage in Hawke Street constructed in 1873. More recent properties built between 1877 and 1889 were generally larger two-storey residences characteristic of the late Victorian era. In his last major project in 1892, John Jones was one of two contractors to build St David's Hall at the rear of the Welsh Church in La Trobe Street, Melbourne. The hall has served the Welsh Church community in Melbourne for over 120 years and in the 1890s was used as a medical clinic for women, which later evolved into the Queen Victoria Hospital.
This paper looks at the involvement of Victoria Police, from 1893 to 1908, in registering and supervising women who came under the control of the 'Infant Life Protection Act' of 1890. The Act was established to regulate 'baby farming', a system in which single mothers would pay other women to look after their infants, while they themselves went back to work to earn enough income for both to live on. It points the researcher to a collection of relatively unknown and previously untapped sources, which provide intimate detail of the lives of working-class women who became 'nurses' and of the mothers who used their services.
The discovery of damaged and burnt volumes in the Victoria University Archives led the authors on an investigation into the circumstances of a fire which occurred at the Footscray Technical School in 1953. Contemporary attitudes to fire protection in public schools, and life in Footscray, as revealed through records of the time, are also discussed with reference to the school.
When a World War I veteran, who has been blinded in one eye on the battlefields of France, drives his car into a tram, he is killed. He leaves behind a wife and three daughters. It is 1937. Tragically, less than four years later the girls' mother also dies froma mysterious illness. The girls, Gwendoline aged seventeen, Marjory aged fourteen, and Heather aged ten, are put under the guardianship of their father's brother, Uncle Jock, a stock and station agent who lives in Kaniva, central-western Victoria. A silence descends over the family as the old ones feel it is best not to upset the girls by talking about their unfortunate situation. Uncle Jock insists the girls are not to be separated. Yet it is World War II and accommodation of any sort is very scarce. So they are boarded in a succession of houses hundreds of kilometres away in Geelong. For Heather, the youngest, it is a dozen homes in eleven years. With only scraps of information and two small photographs she ponders her origins and the cause of her mother's death for over sixty years until unexpectedly, at the age of seventy-two, she is handed a shoebox containing documents that fill in some of the pieces of her story. Inspired by the detailed information contained in the shoebox and the insights these gave Heather into her parents' lives, she and I undertook a genealogical journey to uncover more of her family history. This trip involved visiting relatives, historical buildings, community halls, cemeteries, archives, and key locations from Heather's childhood in order to unearth fragments of evidence until a more precise picture of her past could be drawn. Overlaying this picture is the emotional journey also traveled. Particularly poignant was the discovery of the Coroner's Inquest into Heather's father Donald McDonald's fatal car accident of 1937. Located in the Public Records Office of Victoria these sixteen pages of inquest reveal some surprising details and this one source alone verifies the season, the time of day, the weather, the light conditions, as well as how the accident happened - as recorded in police and witness reports at the time. Coalescing the evidence from the Coroner's Inquest, with interviews, and documents from the shoebox itself I produced a re-enactment of the events of the evening of 9 September 1937, this pivotal turning point in Heather's life, into an eight-minute audio drama-documentary titled Everything Changesi. This paper describes the process of unlocking the evidence, both personal and archival, to produce this work.
This paper offers an overview of public policy in Victoria as it changed its approach to the treatment and prevention of mental illness from the late 1940s to the 1990s. While this has come to be understood as a move away from institutional to community care, I argue that there is still a great deal to understand about how government policy managed this process and how the concepts beneath community mental health have been applied. In this paper I look at the role of psychiatry and suggest that during this period there were a range of ways psychiatrists came to influence public policy. I pay particular attention to the perspectives of the first chairman of the Mental Hygiene Authority, the psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax (1908-2008). I hope to offer insights into the way debates and perspectives about mental health evolved in Victoria by looking at government archives from the period and contextualising them within the internal debates within psychiatry. There are three factors that are suggested as defining features in this policy environment. The first was the move in the locus of treatment from a hospital setting to a community setting, fuelled by improved medication and the high costs of maintaining old and large separate institutions. The second was the changing role of psychiatrists, in response to their increased role in the community. The third was the administrative amalgamation of health and mental health from the 1970s which enabled a generic model of health promotion to become a public policy priority. The paper draws on the available public records to describe the story of how government modified its approaches over time. Records which reflect these policy debates have been accessed through Public Record Office Victoria, the Department of Human Services, and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. It concludes with a recommendation that further research be conducted in this area across State and Commonwealth governments to identify how government achieved a shift in mental health care into the community and what this meant for services, staff and patients.
This article examines the Chinese goldseekers and the historical mining landscape of central Victoria in the context of the locality of Vaughan Springs, situated along the Loddon River in the central Victorian goldfields. The article uses a close reading of legal records and contemporary newspaper and mining wardens’ reports to explore the experiences of the region’s Chinese community. This approach aims to uncover both the nature of Chinese experiences on the diggings and the complexities of an emergent goldfields culture during the gold rush era. By synthesising primary source archival documents with the relic mining landscape of the Mount Alexander diggings, this article seeks out new understandings of Chinese cultural life and practice in the region.
The history of Prahran Technical School is a remarkable story. Created by the Prahran Mechanics’ Institute, the ‘Tech’ opened in High Street in 1915. With both junior and senior sections, a boys’ school and later a girls’ school, it survived for fifty years with barely sufficient funding. Art had always featured as a major stream of study, however, and in the 1960s it became Melbourne’s most innovative art school. In this paper the author shares her experiences of gathering her material and shaping her research.
In November 1922, Bertha Coughlan came to Melbourne from her remote and lonely farm in provincial Victoria. She had no mother, and her father and one remaining brother were not attentive. She had recently broken off her engagement and suffered the removal of all her teeth. Ostensibly, she came to the city to treat her chronic earache. But once there, she took the opportunity to remedy another, more scandalous, health issue. She separated from her negligent father and her disinterested family, and disappeared into obscurity. For years, Nurse Hannah Mitchell had run a lucrative private abortion clinic from her large townhouse in Richmond. In 1922, she was sharing the house with her daughter, her sister, her nephew and her many patients. When her third ex-husband, Frank Bonfiglio, suddenly returned in November to renew his affections, Nurse Mitchell’s reputation and practice were thrown into jeopardy. A dramatic procession of bloody and violent circumstances brought the very different worlds of Bertha Coughlan and Nurse Mitchell together – and to a tragic end.
This article presents the process of researching a book-length biography on Victorian cricketing great Bill Ponsford using primary sources. In particular, the article discusses some of the useful research pathways that are available using PROV records and other collections in preparing such a biography.
