TY - JOUR
T1 - Secret and safe: The underlife of concealed objects from the Royal Derwent Hospital, New Norfolk, Tasmania
AU - Bryant, Lauren
AU - Burke, Heather
AU - Ireland, Tracy
AU - Wallis, Lynley
AU - Wight, Chantal
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the Derwent Valley Council for inviting us to work at the Royal Derwent Hospital, and the New Norfolk community for continually supporting us. Haydn and Penny Pearce kindly allowed us access to the Ladies? Cottage collection and the building. Flinders University students helped to catalogue the original collection, and Lauren Davison, Danica Auld and Bob Stone helped to collect the intact mound. Tasmanian State Library staff in Hobart were helpful with archival research. Lauren Bryant thanks Peter Davies and Edwina Kay for their comments on the original thesis around which this paper is based. We also thank the three anonymous peer reviewers and Lynn Meskell for their helpful and constructive comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/6/1
Y1 - 2020/6/1
N2 - This paper focuses on a collection of objects deliberately concealed beneath the verandah of a ward for middle-class, female, paying patients at Australia’s longest continuously operating mental health institution, the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania. Cached in small discrete mounds across an area of some 50 square metres, the collection was probably concealed in the mid-20th century and contains over 1000 items of clothing, ephemera and other objects dating from 1880 to the mid-1940s. In achieving a possessional territory of such magnitude, this patient achieved a level of personal self-expression that is rarely encountered archaeologically, particularly within an institutional context. Analysis of this collection as an ‘underlife’ illuminates both functional aspects of the hospital and the hopes and desires of this particular, though still anonymous, patient and her vibrant world of things.
AB - This paper focuses on a collection of objects deliberately concealed beneath the verandah of a ward for middle-class, female, paying patients at Australia’s longest continuously operating mental health institution, the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania. Cached in small discrete mounds across an area of some 50 square metres, the collection was probably concealed in the mid-20th century and contains over 1000 items of clothing, ephemera and other objects dating from 1880 to the mid-1940s. In achieving a possessional territory of such magnitude, this patient achieved a level of personal self-expression that is rarely encountered archaeologically, particularly within an institutional context. Analysis of this collection as an ‘underlife’ illuminates both functional aspects of the hospital and the hopes and desires of this particular, though still anonymous, patient and her vibrant world of things.
KW - historical archaeology
KW - total institution
KW - asylum
KW - concealment
KW - personal belongings
KW - Historical archaeology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079425261&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1469605320903577
DO - 10.1177/1469605320903577
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079425261
SN - 1741-2951
VL - 20
SP - 166
EP - 188
JO - Journal of Social Archaeology
JF - Journal of Social Archaeology
IS - 2
ER -