The Lure of the Land

California orange orchard, 1905

'What made you go and work on the land?' I have so frequently been asked the question that perhaps an answer should be attempted. When a reason is completely obvious to oneself it is often difficult to explain it. Since 'because I very much wanted to' will not serve, I must be more explicit. While not refusing the term 'an intellectual' as applied to myself, since I believe in the Mind more than anything else, I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it. The war gave me the opportunity.


The previous war had left me as an Honorary Lieutenant in the Irish Guards, for it had stopped when I was at an Officer Cadet Battalion, and in 1940 I was offered an Army post. Since it was clear to me that I would be given some home job for which I should be entirely unfitted, I asked to be excused in favour of agriculture. This granted, I gained the opportunity of becoming thoroughly implicated in the fields instead of being merely a spectator of them. ~ J.S. Collis, Preface to The Worm Forgives te Plough, Vintage Classics, 2001

‘[E]levated, and pleasantly undulating and park-like; containing several excellent building sites, and a good proportion of excellent farmland.

This was the description of Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, a site of 1289 acres opened in 1911 on the outskirts of suburban Melbourne. The site, a former farm, was expansive. Some sense of the immensity of the land can be derived from correspondence files and newspaper reports. The accounts of a skeleton found in a hollow tree, or the disappearance of a patient in the undergrowth at dusk or the loss of thousands of trees in arson attacks, give an impression not only of acreage but of vast land, hardly the pleasant park-like estate of official reports. By 1948 the site housed an average of 1,528 patients and accommodation for staff across a number of buildings.

By 1999 as Mont Park was closing, it was labelled a ‘psychopolis’, a reference to the sprawl of buildings and institutions across the site which formed the public perception of the place as another world.

The size of the land in no small part contributed to this sense of Mont Park as an alien place. The trajectory of this site from bucolic ‘park-like’ setting, to extensive working farm to a surreal ‘psychopolis’, reveals attitudes not only to mental illness but to a particular view of ‘land’ and rural life central to the ‘Australian’ identity, in the period surrounding the first world war. Its history involves the treatment of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers and the ‘chronic’ insane. This last category included not only people with conditions that are generally recognized as indicative of mental illness such as depression or delusions, but also more broad categories such as senile dementia, alcoholism, intellectual disability and syphilis. For this range of conditions, the rural life was considered the best management method. Of course, any paper dealing with asylums will naturally evoke the work of Foucault on asylums, particularly in critiques of the asylum as an ‘instrument of segregation’  and as ‘convenient places to get rid of inconvenient people.’

Works cited: The Lure of the Land: Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, Anne Bourke, University of Melbourne.