Bedlam at Botany Bay

James Dunk’s Bedlam at Botany Bay is a truly innovative book. We are presented with a challenging and confronting history of madness in the early years of New South Wales, constructed from diverse sources including governors’ letters, colonial secretaries’ correspondence, institutional records and private letters. Dunk reveals extraordinary details about how colonial structures, life and circumstances drove people mad, and he invites us to reflect on the implications of the exceptionally coercive nature of a penal colony. [...] Combining meticulous research and compelling writing, James Dunk’s  Bedlam at Botany Bay  offers readers a strikingly original re-reading of early colonial Australia. Beautifully crafted and deeply empathetic, this is a book with genuine literary and scholarly merit. It makes a significant and invigorating impact on the field of Australian history, and deserves to be read and discussed for many years to come.

It’s the history of New South Wales, but not as we know it. The names are familiar, as are the events – Macarthurs, Wentworths, Blaxland, Bligh, rebellion, inquiries, select committees – but by paying close attention to the ‘strong personalities’, ‘eccentricities’ and ‘unfortunate endings’, Dunk puts us in the mirror house, where all that was familiar now feels strange and illuminating of quite a different colony. This is more than a collective biography, a history of whitefella madness, or the bureaucratic and jurisdictional journey to self-government. Dunk’s book reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about how things turn out: this is a rare feat in history-writing.

Dunk’s prose is vivid, reflective and poetic. Thinking through the links between madness and history, he writes: ‘It seems to me that acute madness…is never less than a private suffering – something internal, perhaps incommunicable,which nevertheless clashes with the world. As it does, it opens a vein of history’. This is not a narrowly focused study but an ambitious social and political re-reading of the colony from 1788 to around 1850, looking carefully at the ‘fault lines of society’ that madness throws into high relief, as well as the fortunes and fates of the men and women who were or went mad.

Bedlam at Botany Bay is a beautifully written and evocative account of the fragility and violence of the early colonial years of New South Wales. Its central theme is the eruption and management of madness in the early decades of the colony but in this remarkable account madness also becomes a lens through which to explore deeper emotional, personal and social undercurrents in colonial society: the trauma of being forcibly transported across the world; the travails of long sea voyages; the fracturing of family ties; the tenuousness of colonial settlement; the threat posed by an alien environment; the political upheaval of the early years of settlement that set colonist against colonist, convict against master and soldier against governor; and the violence attending dispossession of the first nations people they encountered.

There is tremendous value in Dunk's book for thinking historically about the role of medicine in establishing social order. While the book begins with a folk understanding of madness that escapes control, its concluding chapters show how 'professionalising doctors displaced lay therapies'. Medicine became part of the moral project of colonisation that sought to control the 'perilous chaos' that madness inflicted on the social and political body, and treat it as an illness.

Image: a128859h V1 Har S Hd 3 View of the Heads, Port Jackson, ca. 1817-1826 by Richard Read Snr, held by State Library of New South Wales