Author: Lauren Bryant
Bryant, Lauren, 2019 Secret and Safe: Exploring the archaeology of concealed artefacts from the Ladies’ Cottage of an Australian mental asylum, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Archaeological studies have largely failed to make use of artefacts to try and understand the experiences of individuals living in mental asylums in the past. This thesis examines a collection of objects from the Ladies’ Cottage of Willow Court Asylum in Tasmania in order to consider how artefacts can be used to understand the experiences of individuals from within this institutional context, by considering the behaviours of resistance, concealment, and ritual to exercise agency within a controlling and restrictive environment. A collection of ephemeral, fabric, and other artefacts reveals that despite the restrictions placed on individuals within the environment of a mental asylum during the mid-twentieth century, patients were able to exercise control over their own lives within this system through behaviours like the collection, alteration, and concealment of objects. Though the motivation for these behaviours is difficult to interpret because they were the result of mental illness, this analysis demonstrates the value of studying artefacts from a mental asylum context.
Keywords: archaeology, historical archaeology, Willow Court, Tasmania, Mental Asylums, institutional archaeology
Subject: Archaeology thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2019
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Heather Burke