Overview
- Offers a new perspective on the study of migration and mental illness, focusing on policy makers, customs officers and shipping companies
- Draws on a broad range of bureaucratic archival sources from New Zealand and Australia to provide a policy versus practice analysis of border restrictions
- Accounts for the development of the medico-legal system designed to deal with the 'transient insane'
Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective (MHHP)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book examines the policy and practice of the insanity clauses within the immigration controls of New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia. It reveals those charged with operating the legislation to be non-psychiatric gatekeepers who struggled to match its intent. Regardless of the evolution in language and the location at which a migrant’s mental suitability was assessed, those with ‘inherent mental defects’ and ‘transient insanity’ gained access to these regions. This book accounts for the increased attempts to medicalise border control in response to the widening scope of terminology used for mental illnesses, disabilities and dysfunctions. Such attempts co-existed with the promotion of these regions as ‘invalids’ paradises’ by governments, shipping companies, and non-asylum doctors. Using a bureaucratic lens, this book exposes these paradoxes, and the failings within these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australasian nation-state building exercises.
Reviews
“The contemporary politics of border control make this a timely work—and in the year of COVID-19 perhaps even more so. This is a valuable study of a little-knownadministrative practice, a subject that deserves attention alongside more familiar histories of racially based immigration histories.” (Mark Finnane, Health and History, Vol. 22 (2), 2020)
“Strength of Kain’s book is its ability to bring out paradoxes and contradictions in colonial immigration policy and practice. … this is a good and accessible history of Australasian colonial border control generally, as well as a major contribution to our understanding of the history of psychiatry and mental health in the Anglosphere.” (Philippa Martyr, Reviews in History, February 21, 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jennifer S. Kain teaches History at the University of Newcastle, UK, and is a Research Associate at the Institute of Historical Research, London where she held a 2016-2017 Junior Research Fellowship. She has published in Studies in the Literary Imagination, the International Journal of Maritime History, the Social History of Medicine, and in 2018 received a New Zealand History Research Trust award.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia, 1860–1930
Authors: Jennifer S. Kain
Series Title: Mental Health in Historical Perspective
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26330-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26329-4Published: 17 October 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26332-4Published: 17 October 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-26330-0Published: 03 October 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6036
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6044
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 244
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations
Topics: Australasian History, Social History, History of Medicine, Migration