Tracing Families for Maintenance Payments

Abstract

In 1889, at the Intercolonial Medical Congress held in Melbourne, Dr W L Cleland, Resident Medical Officer at Adelaide’s Parkside Asylum, made extensive comments about the economic management of Australian asylums for the insane. He asked why it was that asylums had failed to collect more in aid of maintenance from patients’ friends and relations. ‘Considering the well-to-do character of the Australian labouring classes’, he said, ‘It surely ought to be one of our Australian features, that the relatives or friends of nearly every patient should be able to contribute something’.¹ Cleland’s many suggestions and schemes for colonial institutions were roundly described as ‘too idealistic’ by the medical gathering. That same year, the brother of a woman committed to the Auckland Asylum some years earlier, declared himself ‘unwilling and unable’ to contribute the cost of her care. He had a family of his own; the woman’s husband was working in Sydney, and her father-in-law had also left the colony for New South Wales.² This family story echoes many others found in the archives of the four public institutions examined in this work. Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, while the collection of maintenance payments was improved, public asylum attempts to elicit full payments from families and friends consistently failed.