The 'Colouring of the Psychosis': Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind

Author(s): Caitlin Murray

Source: Health and History, Vol. 9, No. 2, Aboriginal Health and History (2007), pp. 7-21
Published by: Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40111573
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 The 'Colouring of the Psychosis ':
Interpreting Insanity in the
Primitive Mind"

Caitlin Murray

How did Aboriginal people experience and

exhibit mental disease? How did the colouring of
black insanity differ from that of white madness?
And what could the study of Aboriginal insanity
tell observers about the nature of society and
evolution? These were some of the questions posed
by interested white psychiatrists from the late 1 880s
to the early 1920s. In this article, I explore how
Western medical doctors understood Aboriginal
insanity during this period, and draw out some
of the influences and motivations that shaped
their conclusions. I also examine the occasionally
unexpected ways in which interpreting insanity in
the 'primitive ' mind destabilised and reinforced
conceptions of madness and race.

The primitive does as little thinking as possible; a state of affairs

that is reflected in his insanities (J. Bostock, 1923).1

Dr John Bostock made this comment during a presentation to

fellow delegates at the Australasian Medical Congress held
at the Wesley Church in Melbourne in 1923. The conference
was held under the auspices of the British Medical Association
and was opened by His Excellency the Governor General of
Australia, Lord Forster, who was but one of many dignitaries
in attendance.2 Bostock himself went on to have a long and
distinguished career as a professor of medical psychology at the
University of Queensland, but at the time of the 1 923 conference
he was a young medical officer at Callan Park Mental Hospital
* Some of the terms used in this article, such as 'Aboriginal insanity/ 'mental
disease/ 'race/ 'savage,' and 'primitive/ are highly problematic, but reflect the language
used in my sources. Inverted commas have been used occasionally to demonstrate the
constructed nature of these terms, but have been taken out in most instances.

Health & History, 2007. 9/2 7

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8 CAITLIN MURRAY

in New South Wales. The young psychiatrist's comment about

the nature of 'primitive insanity' was part of a paper entitled
"Insanity in the Australian Aboriginal and its Bearing on the
Evolution of Mental Disease."3 There is no record of how
Bostock's presentation was received at the conference, but the
following month a notice in the Medical Journal of Australia
described it as a 'very important paper.'4
Bostock came to the conclusion that Aboriginal people
"did as little thinking as possible,' and therefore suffered
from simple insanities, after a consideration of whether or
not Aboriginal people had reached the evolutionary stage at
which neuroses could exist. There was certainly evidence of
psychosis, in his opinion, but was their cerebral development
compatible with the less severe mental defects? Bostock argued
it was not, and his reasoning is worth quoting at some length.
He started by drawing an analogy between Aboriginal mental
processes and the operation of an old-fashioned printing press,
which 'laboriously printed single copies.'5 Bostock stated: 'Its
supplanter is infinitely more speedy. The blackfel low's thought
issues slowly, whereas the average white is a quick thinker
... So far as I have been able to find,' Bostock continued, "no
estimate has been made of the exact mental age of the aboriginal,
in terms of the higher races, but all travellers are agreed as to
the simplicity of his thought processes.' And finally, claimed
Bostock: 'His emotions as shown by his insanities are of the
crude or "all or nothing" thalamic pattern. There is mania and
melancholia, but the varying lights and shades and halftones of
the white are missing.'6
Bostock's comments bring into stark relief the explicit
comparisons drawn between white and black madness in
Australian medical literature during the early 1920s. White
people suffered from neuroses, Aboriginal people did not.
The white mind was highly evolved, the Aboriginal brain
lowly developed. White madness was complex, intricate
and multifaceted; Aboriginal insanity was simple, crude and
primitive. Bostock's observations were filtered through the
discourse of racial classification and ranking. White European
civilisation represented the pinnacle of human evolution, while
Aboriginal society occupied the base. His interpretation of
Aboriginal insanity was thus framed through a dichotomous
relationship with white madness.

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 9

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex

intersections between race and madness in medical discourse
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this
end I will discuss a series of articles on the subject of Aboriginal
insanity that appeared in Australian and international medical
journals and conference proceedings from the late 1880s
through to the 1920s. I will argue that because the concept
of madness itself is racialised, interpretations of Aboriginal
insanity from the early 1920s disrupted traditional oppositions
between madness and reason, but maintained hierarchies based
on race. In the following sections, 1 will discuss this medical
literature in depth, focusing on two key historical moments:
the 1923 Australasian Medical Congress already mentioned,
and a similar conference held more than thirty years earlier, in
1 889. First, however, my argument requires some elaboration in
order to understand how the discourse of madness is racialised,
and how medical interpretations of Aboriginal insanity both
destabilised and supported long-established notions of race and
madness.
Madness and reason exist in an oppositional relationship.
What is considered normal defines what is considered insane in
society and vice versa, and these constructions can change over
time. Some common dualisms associated with the reason versus
madness paradigm include: rationality versus irrationality,
thinking versus feeling, maturity versus childishness, humanity
versus animality, virtue versus perversity, civilisation versus
savagery, and so on. The white madman is the 'other,' often
characterised in highly racial terms as wild, savage, primitive,
unreasoned, childlike, untamed, bestial and sometimes sexually
promiscuous or deviant.7 The madman's whiteness is thus
contaminated and threatened.
Interpretations of Aboriginal insanity in the early 1920s,
however, complicated this characterisation. Aboriginal people
were already situated as the 'other' to white civilisation. They
were already characterised as crude and simple, childish and
devoid of reasoning, and often sexual and animal in nature.
So rather than being understood as the opposite of normal
Aboriginal behaviour, 1 would argue that Aboriginal insanity was
interpreted as the most exaggerated expression of their innate
primitiveness and savagery.8 The elevation of white madness
in this interpretation was explicit. White madness became more

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10 CAITLIN MURRAY

sophisticated and complex by comparison, thereby losing some

of its negative taint. Interpreting Aboriginal insanity through
the already racialised discourse of madness had the strange
effect of normalising Aboriginal madness and elevating white
madness, thus destabilising the opposition between reason and
madness, while preserving racial hierarchies. I will develop this
argument further when I return to Dr John Bostock and the 1 923
Australasian Medical Congress in the third section of this paper.
First, however, I will trace the development of the Aboriginal
insanity narrative, which begins at a conference held much
earlier, in 1889.

Savage Insanity in a Civilised World:

Dr F. Norton Manning and the 1889
Intercolonial Medical Congress of
Australasia

In 1889, the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia

included in its proceedings, for the first time, a section devoted
to psychological medicine. By coincidence, this conference was
also held in Melbourne, on the grounds of the university. The
officers of the Victorian Lunacy Department were, apparently,
most hospitable to their interstate guests and the conference
afforded many Australian psychiatrists the opportunity to meet
their confreres in person for the first time.9 The section was
presided over by Dr F. Norton Manning, who travelled from
New South Wales to attend the conference. Manning was, at
that time, well established in his career. He was Inspector-
General of the Insane in New South Wales (in his words, the
'mother Colony') and a lecturer on psychological medicine at
the University of Sydney. In his lengthy presidential address
to conference delegates, Manning covered such standard
topics as lunacy law, rates of insanity and asylum conditions.
However, he also presented another, more original paper, this
one entitled "Insanity in Australian Aborigines, with a Brief
Analysis of Thirty-Two Cases.'10 Discussion of insanity in other
races (such as Chinese people and American 'Negroes') had
previously appeared in international medical literature. Prior to
the conference held in 1 889, however, Aboriginal insanity had
not been considered in any depth.

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 1 1

When Manning came to address the subject at the 1889

Intercolonial Medical Congress, he created an account of
Aboriginal insanity that was to prove highly influential. He
reported that insanity was extremely rare among Aboriginal
people in their 'primitive and uncivilised condition. ' l ] He argued
that the Aboriginal race suppressed mental disease by carrying
out the 'great principle of survival of the fittest.'12 Aboriginal
people, Manning asserted, treated their insane in the same way
as most 'savage races9: violent or aggressive lunatics were
slaughtered, melancholic types were allowed to commit suicide,
the demented and helpless were left to die, and those whose
erroneous ideas did not result in offensive acts were left in
peace and sometimes revered as superior and inspired beings.13
He also argued that strict marriage laws prevented hereditary
insanity, while their 'simple and uneventful existence' sheltered
them from worry and strain.14 Manning's account of the rarity of
insanity in Aboriginal society prior to colonisation thus evoked
a savage, yet somehow innocent, time when evolution was free
to operate naturally.
This rarity was, however, but one part of the story. The
narrative continues. According to Manning, after contact with
civilisation, or, more accurately, after contact with the vices of
civilisation, mental disease among Aboriginal people increased
dramatically. The introductionofalcoholandnewdiseases,aswell
as changes of life and habits, were believed to be responsible for
the demise of the race and the increasing incidence of insanity.15
In the colony of New South Wales, Manning stated that: 'We
have ... passed from a period in which insanity was almost
unknown among the native race, to one in which it is almost
twice as common as among the European race.'16 To explain this
increase, Manning described the Aboriginal population of New
South Wales as 'a miserable remnant, supported for the most
part by the Government, afflicted with the vices and diseases of
civilisation, and devoid of the nobler and better characteristics
of the race.'17 Thus, the picture is clear. The noble savage of the
innocent past fell before the wave of civilisation and, unable to
compete, descended into madness.
Manning's assertions blazed a trail through international
academic literature in the following decades. In April 1890,
D. Hack Tuke summarised Manning's paper in the British

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12 CAITLIN MURRAY

Journal of Mental Science.1* In the same month, on the other

side of the Atlantic, a precis of his work also appeared in the
American journal Science, under the section 'Health Matters.'19
Many years later, in 1913, Manning's findings on Aboriginal
insanity were translated virtually word for word by Dr Ziem in
an article entitled 'L' Alienation Mentale en Oceanie' (Mental
Alienation in Oceania), which appeared in the French journal
Archives Internationales de Neurologies In 1922, Manning's
conclusions again crossed the Atlantic. That year the curator
of the physical anthropology department at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, Dr Aries Hrdlicka, published the
article 'Anthropology and Insanity' in the Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease}1 Hrdlicka stated (this time referencing
Ziem) that native life was one of 'little mental stress' with 'no
great struggle for existence' and 'no striving in any direction.'22
He continued: 'The Australians lived largely a higher animal sort
of existence, which did not call for any great exertion on the part
of the brain and nervous system.'23 He repeated the assertion that
maniacs were 'done away with,' the depressed were allowed to
'do away with themselves' and epileptics were 'driven away.'24
Hrdlicka described this as a 'remarkable primitive sort of way
of eliminating the undesirable portions of the race.'25 Hrdlicka
also asserted that the 'advent of the whites heralded a dramatic

increase in mental disease among the Aboriginal population.'26

Finally, quoting Hrdlicka, the influential Australian researcher
Dr J. Burton Cleland repeated Manning's assertion again in a
1928 article on Aboriginal insanity in the British publication
Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.21 Manning's
Aboriginal insanity narrative had become accepted wisdom
by the 1920s, although much of the language had become less
nostalgic. Aboriginal people supposedly led a 'higher animal'
existence, savagely 'doing away with' or neglecting their insane.
After contact with 'advanced' white civilisation, the ignoble
savage succumbed to mental disease.
Having traced the path of Manning's assertions, the obvious
question is: Was Manning right? Was there little or no mental
illness in Aboriginal society prior to colonisation? Did it increase
after contact with Europeans? And how were Aboriginal ' lunatics '
treated? These questions are probably largely unanswerable.
However, it is possible to evaluate the evidence upon which

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 1 3

Manning based his conclusions, as this evidence was fairly

scant. It amounted to four, short, isolated statements written
during the 1870s and 1880s in larger anthropological works on
Australian Aborigines. Phillip Chauncy wrote in 1878: 'I have
never observed insanity, or hereditary or chronic* complaints
among the natives [*except in those vitiated by white people].'28
James Dawson was quoted as stating:

Suicide is uncommon and cases of insanity are rarely met with,

but the Aborigines believe that there is more of it since the
use of intoxicating liquors, and especially since they began to
disregard their laws of consanguinity in marriage.29

In The Australian Race, published is 1886, Edward Curr wrote:

"Gout does not exist, and madness and inflammation of the
brain are almost if not quite unknown.'30 And, finally, George
Taplin wrote: 'I have seen several cases of lunacy among them;
it is not uncommon for the intellect of old men to give way,
and for them to be insane.'31 This brief and often contradictory
evidence was made to fit Manning's narrative. For example, in
order to prove the absence of insanity among Aboriginal people
in their 'primitive condition,' Manning quoted the passage by
Edward Curr. Yet to prove the increase of insanity, he drew
on the statement by George Taplin published in the same
volume. Interestingly, Taplin also wrote that: 'The relatives
of lunatics have no superstitious ideas about them, and treat
them very kindly - they are rather afraid of them.'32 This piece
of information did not, however, fit into Manning's portrayal
of Aboriginal people savagely slaughtering their insane and
was not included in his story. To what extent the isolated
observations of anthropologists who studied specific Aboriginal
groups constituted a reliable body of evidence upon which to
generalise about an entire continent of people over thousands of
years is debatable in the extreme. What is certain, however, is
that the more times Manning's rather embellished narrative was
repeated, the more 'true' it became.
Perhaps, however, the more important (and potentially more
answerable) questions should be: What did Manning and his
followers hope to prove or justify with this Aboriginal insanity
narrative? And, how were Aboriginal people portrayed as aresult?
In a previous address to the Medical Section of the Royal Society

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14 CAITLIN MURRAY

of New South Wales in 1 880, Manning argued that mental anxiety

caused by the strain and pressures of modern living was a chief
cause of insanity among the general population.33 Harking back
to a simpler, insanity-free pre-colonisation society, provided
the means for Manning to critique European civilisation and
prove his argument. The second part of the narrative, about
the fall of Aboriginal people into vice and madness, served a
different purpose. The Indigenous inhabitants, the narrative
implied, simply could not compete with the advanced white
European civilisation. Survival of the fittest was, accordingly,
the ultimate test and colonisation simply nature's way. Thus, the
Aboriginal insanity narrative provided a vehicle through which
Manning could simultaneously critique late nineteenth-century
Australian society and justify its existence. The narrative also
nourished the image (already deeply entrenched in the scientific
discourse of the late nineteenth century) of Aboriginal people as
primitive beings, caught in the modern world yet representing
the earliest stages of human development. This positioning of
Aboriginal people as evolutionary relics proved to be highly
significant when Bostock and his fellow conference delegate,
Dr C. A. Hogg, came to analyse primitive insanity at the 1923
Australasian Medical Congress.

Insanity and the Primitive: Dr John Bostock,

Dr C. A. Hogg and the 1923 Australasian
Medical Congress
The 1923 conference described at the start of this paper
represented somewhat of a peak of medical interest in Aboriginal
insanity (although the subject never really occupied centre stage
in psychological debates). In addition to Bostock's contribution,
another Sydney psychiatrist, Dr C. A. Hogg, presented a paper
on Aboriginal insanity entitled "Twelve Cases of Insanity in
Australian Aboriginals with a Commentary. "34 Bostock explained
this sudden medical interest in Aboriginal insanity by referring
to the supposed "passing9 of the Aboriginal race. Like many
of his contemporaries, Bostock considered Aboriginal people
to be a surviving relic of antiquity. Following the path set by
Manning's narrative, Bostock characterised Aboriginal people
as throw-backs to the primitive stages of human development,

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 1 5

perhaps more animal than human, preserved through isolation

on an island continent. Bostock described this condition as
'Nature's beautiful experiment in encircling Australia with
the high seas.'35 It was generally accepted that in contact with
advanced European civilisation these primitive savages were
destined to die out and become extinct, quietly passing before
the wave of progress.36 This was deemed a great tragedy in the
world of science, for with the passing of the Aborigine went the
chance to understand the early history of humankind. Bostock
told his colleagues at the conference: 'Posterity will judge us
adversely if we let him ["the 'Grand Old Man' of the human
race"] die without taking his full and complete measure.'37 For
Bostock, the task of the scientist was clear - to map out the
anatomical, morphological and psychological characteristics of
the disappearing race. 'Nothing less,' he stated, 'than a complete
psychological-physiological examination should be the goal.'38
While anatomists and physical anthropologists dissected brains
and collected skeletons, Bostock studied what he considered
to be the living specimen. His contribution was an attempt 'to
describe the form of the insanities of the aboriginal, to show
how the colouring differs from the white, to draw inferences
with regard to primitive psychology and finally to demonstrate
in what respects evolution has taken place.'39 In this section,
I will discuss the conclusions that Bostock and Hogg reached
following their psychological examinations of Aboriginal
subjects.
Like their predecessor, Dr F. Norton Manning, Bostock and
Hogg worked on the assumption that Aboriginal people were
primitive beings. However, the papers they presented at the 1923
conference were based on a much more explicit characterisation
of the Aboriginal brain as aprimitive organ. As Bostock's likening
of Aboriginal thought processes to the laborious functioning of an
old-fashioned printing press suggests, the primitive Aboriginal
being was supposedly possessed of a lowly developed cerebral
structure. The history of comparing the weight and form of the
Aboriginal brain and skull to those of other races and hominoids,
such as apes and chimpanzees, in order to 'prove' their
primitiveness has been well documented in studies on scientific
racism.40 Racial theories pervaded many areas of scientific
investigation, including those related to psychiatry. In the early
1900s, the New South Wales Lunacy Department had its own

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16 CAITLIN MURRAY

pathological laboratory in which to study human remains. In the

laboratory's report from 1908, Dr J. Froude Flashman published
a study on the morphology of the Aboriginal brain. He found
the Aborigine to be a primitive member of the human race 'so
far as concerns the occipital region,' and the 'rhinencephalon,'
that is, the frontal region of the brain and the part responsible
for smell.41 Similarly, while working alongside Flashman,
Dr Herman Klaatsch conducted a study on a collection of
Aboriginal skulls in which he described Aboriginal people as a
'relic.9 Klaatsch found that a great number were 'wanting' in the
development of large frontal eminences. The enlargement of the
frontal eminence was supposed to represent the 'transition from
lower to higher types of mankind.'42 Finally, to take an example
directly from the psychiatric literature already cited, Dr Ziem
stated that Aboriginal people had a 'cerveau petit, lobe frontal
moins large, moins long et moins haut, fetj circonvolutions plus
simples etplus marquees'* (small brain, frontal lobe which is less
wide, less long and less high, and more simple, more marked
gyrus or convolutions).43 Aboriginal brain structures were thus
constructed as primitive and lowly evolved in contemporary
scientific and medical discourse.
In addition to anatomical studies of Aboriginal cerebral
structures, the psychiatrists also seem to have been influenced
by international literature on 'primitive psychology.' Bostock,
in particular, made explicit references to the prominent French
psychologist, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in his paper on Aboriginal
insanity. L6vy-Bruhl's major work Primitive Mentality** was
published in English during the same year as the conference,
and may well have served as a catalyst for Bostock 's interest in
the subject of Aboriginal insanity. Levy-Bruhl characterised the
thought processes of all 'primitive peoples,' including Aboriginal
Australians, as mystical, pre-logical and deficient in the powers
of abstract reasoning and reflection. Levy-Bruhl argued that
'primitives' displayed a 'decided distaste for reasoning, for what
logicians call the "discursive operations of thought.'"45 Bostock
mirrored this assertion in his article, stating: 'So far as abstract
cerebration is concerned, there is a lack of "discursive operation
of thought.'"46 L6vy-Bruhl essentially argued that primitive
mentality was characterised by a dislike for logical reasoning.
The parallels between this argument and Bostock's comment

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 1 7

that 'primitives do as little thinking as possible' are clear. When

Bostock and Hogg came to interpret Aboriginal insanity at the
1923 conference, they were following a course set over many
decades by anthropologists, anatomists and psychologists who
dissected Aboriginal brains and analysed primitive psychology.
At the 1923 conference, Bostock vigorously applied the idea
that Aboriginal people were deficient in abstract cerebration and
reasoning power (due to their lowly evolved brain structures)
to his interpretation of Aboriginal insanity. We have already
encountered Bostock's assertions about the lack of neuroses
in Aboriginal people. His arguments were, however, far more
expansive. Bostock characterised Aboriginal psychology as
childlike and simple, stating: 'Just as a child either reacts to
unpleasant stimuli by an attack of hypomania, screaming or
crying or by depression, sulking, so does the aboriginal lack the
finer reactions.'47 Similarly, he asserted that while Aboriginal
people suffered from crude psychoses, such as manic-depression
(bi-polar disorder), dementia-praecox (schizophrenia) and
general paralysis of the insane (a tertiary stage of syphilis),
Aboriginal mental disease did not, he argued, manifest itself
in complex delusions or paranoia.48 Bostock stated: 'The
possession of a high grade systematized delusional system is
only possible with a cerebral development more advanced that
that of the aboriginal.'49 In the case of hallucinations, he claimed
that visual hallucinations were more common in Aboriginal
people than auditory hallucinations, most likely, he argued,
because Aboriginal people lacked an extensive vocabulary.50
Bostock thus painted a picture of Aboriginal insanity as crude,
uncomplicated, childlike and lowly evolved.
A deeper reading of Bostock's observations also exposes the
meanings he ascribed to white madness. The 'evidence' upon
which Bostock based his observations came from comparing a
series of Aboriginal case notes with an equal number of cases
from an 'old "white" case book.'51 He described the white case
book as a 'control,' but this was not an objective, value-free
category. When Bostock asserted that the Aboriginal madman
possessed a primitive cerebral structure and did 'as little
thinking as possible,' he implicitly elevated white insanity to
a highly developed level of complexity. Similarly, by arguing
that Aboriginal insanity was not characterised by complex
delusions, paranoia and neuroses, Bostock implied that these

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18 CAITLIN MURRAY

were characteristic of a much more sophisticated, intelligent

white madness. Somehow, the white madman had become more
complex and more civilised when compared with his Aboriginal
counterpart, who inversely became more simple and childlike.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the work of Dr
C.A. Hogg, Medical Superintendent of the Parramatta Mental
Hospital. Hogg presented his paper alongside Bostock and drew
similar conclusions from his study of twelve cases of Aboriginal
insanity.52 In comparison with white patients, he argued that
these cases showed:

(i.) a want of organization of the sentiments, (ii.) a low form

of perception, (iii.) poor association and poverty of ideas, (iv.)
absence of inquisitiveness and no constructive ability, [and] (v.)
... their native intelligence far below that of the white.53

Hogg also speculated as to the reason why those few Aboriginal

patients who did not die seemed to recover more quickly than
white cases. He reasoned:

Probably their lowly developed brains broke down under a

smaller strain than would be necessary in the case of the whites
and therefore there was less damage to repair and a lower
standard of normality (black) [sic] for them to attain before they
could be considered as recovered.54

Hogg, however, depicted Aboriginal insanity as not merely

simple, but also animal and sexual in nature. Again in comparison
with white patients, he argued that the Aboriginal insane
displayed: '(vi.) little power to appreciate and adapt themselves
to the social standards of honesty and sexual morality et cetera
which are those of the white community, [and] (vii.) strong
and ruling passions of the animal nature.'55 Thus, working on
the assumption of biological inferiority and innate savagery,
Hogg positioned Aboriginal mental patients as more childlike,
more bestial, more perverse and less rational than their white
counterparts. Again, these observations implicitly elevated white
insanity, thereby complicating traditional dualisms associated
with madness, while upholding hierarchies based on race.

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 1 9

Conclusion

Medical discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries drew a specific picture of Aboriginal insanity.
According to the narrative, insanity was a rare occurrence during
the savage yet somehow innocent time of Aboriginal isolation
on the island continent of Australia. However, the coming of the
'superior' white civilisation heralded the demise of this 'savage
race.' Unable to compete and having adopted the worst elements
of civilisation, Aboriginal people succumbed to insanity. The
medical professionals who subsequently interpreted this insanity
in the 1920s worked within the confines of a scientific discourse
that positioned Aboriginal people as primitive, savage, childlike
and bestial. Bostock and Hogg worked on the assumption that
Aboriginal cerebral structures were primitive and undeveloped
in contrast with the highly evolved white brain. In comparison
with white mental disease, they argued that Aboriginal insanity
was characterised by childish reactions, simplicity of thought and
absence of reason, as well as often sexual and animal behaviour.
Yet white madness itself was not normally immune to this sort
of characterisation. Somehow when compared with his black
counterpart, the white madman had become more complex and
sophisticated. Aboriginal madness was thus normalised, while
white madness was elevated to a higher level. The Aboriginal
madman became more savage and more of an 'other,' while the
white madman became less savage and less of an 'other.' Thus,
although the layering of race onto interpretations of insanity
disrupted traditional oppositions between madness and reason,
racial hierarchies were maintained.

University of Melbourne

Acknowledgments
This paper is based on preliminary research presented at the 'Historicising
Whiteness' Conference, University of Melbourne, 22-24 November 2006.
My paper is included in the online conference proceedings: Historicising
Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity
(Melbourne, Vic: RMIT Press, 2007); URL not available at time of printing.
I would like to thank Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Kat Ellinghaus, Ian Anderson,
Joy Damousi, Elizabeth Malcolm and Warwick Anderson for their helpful
suggestions and comments on my work.

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20 CAITLIN MURRAY

1. John Bostock, 'insanity in the Australian Aboriginal and its Bearing on the
Evolution of Mental Disease/* Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, supplement (1924):
459-64, 462.
2. "Inagural Meeting," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, supplement (1924):
5.
3. Bostock, 459-64.
4. "Section VIII- Neurology: Insanity in the Australian Aboriginal,'1 Medical
Journal of Australia, vol. 2 (1923): 644.
5. Ibid., 462.
6. Ibid.
7. For a discussion of the association between wildness, madness and race see
Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea," in The Wild Man
Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by
Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1972), 3-38; also Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of
Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 131-49.
For a general discussion of the 'othering' of the Western madman, see Michel Foucault,
Madness and Civilisation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).
8. Vaughan makes a similar argument in her chapter on African madness in Megan
Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991), 100-28. Swartz also discusses the intersections between race and insanity
in the African context in Sally Swartz, "Colonizing the Insane: Causes of Insanity in the
Cape, 1891-1920," History of the Human Sciences, vol. 8, no. 4 (1995): 39-57.
9. D. Hack Tuke, "Colonial Retrospect," Journal of Mental Science, vol. 35
(1889): 124-28.
10. F. Norton Manning, "Insanity in Australian Aborigines, with a Brief Analysis
of Thirty-Two Cases," in Transactions of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of
Australasia, 2nd Session. Melbourne, 1989 (Melbourne, Vic: Stillwell and Co., 1890),
857-60.
11. Ibid.,%51.
12. Ibid.,%5%.
13. Ibid.,S57-S.
14. Ibid.,%5%.
15. Ibid., 858-9.
16. Ibid.,%59.
17. //., 858.
18. D. Hack Tuke, "Australian Retrospect," Journal of Mental Science, vol. 36
(1890): 276-8.
19. "Health Matters: Insanity in Australian Aborigines," Science, vol. 15 (1890):
219-20.
20. Ziem, "L' Alienation mentale en Oceanie," Archives Internationales de
Neurologic vol. 2 (1913): 240-55, 240-1 . No first name or initial is given in this article.
Title translated by author.
21. Ales Hrdlicka, "Anthropology and Insanity," Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease, vol. 56 (1922): 215-35, 222^.
22. Ibid., 223.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. J. Burton Cleland, "Disease Amongst the Australian Aborigines: Section III-
Epilepsy and Insanity," Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, vol. 31 (1928):
53-9, 262-6, 281-2, 290-4, 307-13 and 326-30, 262.

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 Interpreting Insanity in the Primitive Mind 2 1

28. Phillip Chauncy, "Notes and Anecdotes of the Aborigines of Australia,"

Appendix A in R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria with Notes Relating to the
Habits of the Natives of other Parts of Australia and Tasmania. Vol. U (Melbourne, Vic:
Government Printer, 1878), 254.
29. Manning, "Insanity," 858. Manning does not give an exact quotation, but
rather a summary of Dawson's writing. For the original see James Dawson, Australian
Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western
District of Victoria Australia (Melbourne, Vic, Sydney, NSW and Adelaide, SA:
George Robertson, 1881), 61-3.
30. Edward Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of
Landing in Australia and the Routes by which it Spread Itself over that Continent, Vol. I
(Melbourne, Vic: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1886), 208.
31. George Taplin, "From the Banks of the Murray River, Where it Enters Lake
Alexandrina to the Embouchure of that River and Lacepede Bay," extract number 83 in
Curr, Vol II, 260.
32. Ibid.
33. F. Norton Manning, The Causation and Prevention of Insanity (Sydney, NSW:
Government Printer, 1880), 13-14.
34. C. A. Hogg, "Twelve Cases of Insanity in Australian Aboriginals with a
Commentary," Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, supplement (1924): 455-6, and
vol. 2, supplement (1924): 457-8.
35. Bostock,459.
36. For a good survey of the "passing of the Aborigine* theory, see Russell
McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory,
1880-1939, (Melbourne, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
37. Bostock,459.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. See for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1996) and Richard Glover, "Scientific Racism and the Australian Aboriginal
(1865-1915),*' in Maps, Dreams, History: Race and Representations in Australia,
edited by J. Kociumbas (Sydney, NSW: Department of History, University of Sydney,
1998), 67-130.
41. J. Froude Flashman, "The Morphology of the Brain of the Australian
Aboriginal," in Reports from the Pathological, Department of the Lunacy Department:
New South Wales Government, Vol. 1, Part 3 (Sydney, NSW: William Applegate
Gullick, Government Printers, 1908), 41.
42. Herman Klaatsch, "The Skull of the Australian Aboriginal/1 in Reports from the
Pathological Department of the Lunacy Department: New South Wales Government,
Vol. 1. Part 3 (Sydney, NSW: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printers, 1908),
122.
43. Ziem, 246. Passage translated by author.
44. Lucien Le*vy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1923).
45. lbid.,2\.
46. Bostock,462.
47. Ibid., 459.
48. Ibid., 459-64.
49. Ibid., 461.
50. Ibid., 460.
51. Ibid., 459-60.
52. Hogg, 455-8.
53. Ibid., 455.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.

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