James Dunk

Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales and tracing its wild path changes the way we look at our colonial history. What happened when people went mad in the fledgling colony of New South Wales? In this important new history, we find out through the tireless correspondence of governors and colonial secretaries, the delicate descriptions of judges and doctors, the brazen words of firebrand politicians, and the heartbreaking letters of siblings, parents and friends. We also hear from the mad themselves. Legal and social distinctions faded as delusion and disorder took root -- in convicts exiled from their homes and living under the weight of imperial justice, in ex-convicts and small settlers as they grappled with the country they had taken from its Indigenous inhabitants, and in government officers and wealthy colonists who sought to guide the course of European history in Australia. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, unravelling and collapse. Bedlam at Botany Bay looks at people who found themselves not only at the edge of the world, but at the edge of sanity. It shows their worlds colliding.

Bedlam at Botany Bay

Barbara Brookes

Paper has been the material of bureaucracy, and paperwork performs functions of order, control, and surveillance. Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy explores how those functions transform over time, allowing private challenges to the public narratives created by institutions and governments. Paperwork and bureaucratic systems have determined what we know about the past. It seems that now, as the digital is overtaking paper (though mirroring its forms), historians are able to see the significance of the materiality of paper and its role in knowledge making – because it is no longer taken for granted. The contributors to this volume discuss the ways in which public and private institutions – asylums, hospitals, and armies – developed bureaucratic systems which have determined the parameters of our access to the past. The authors present case studies of paperwork in different national contexts, which engage with themes of privacy and public accountability, the beginning of record-keeping practices, and their ‘ends’, both in the sense of their purposes and in what happens to paper after the work has finished, including preservation and curation in repositories of various kinds, through to the place of paper and paperwork in a ‘paperless’ world. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.

Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy

Knowledge Making

Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales and tracing its wild path changes the way we look at our colonial history. What happened when people went mad in the fledgling colony of New South Wales? In this important new history, we find out through the tireless correspondence of governors and colonial secretaries, the delicate descriptions of judges and doctors, the brazen words of firebrand politicians, and the heartbreaking letters of siblings, parents and friends. We also hear from the mad themselves. Legal and social distinctions faded as delusion and disorder took root — in convicts exiled from their homes and living under the weight of imperial justice, in ex-convicts and small settlers as they grappled with the country they had taken from its Indigenous inhabitants, and in government officers and wealthy colonists who sought to guide the course of European history in Australia. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, unravelling and collapse. Bedlam at Botany Bay looks at people who found themselves not only at the edge of the world, but at the edge of sanity. It shows their worlds colliding.

James Dunk

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