PRESENTING...DANGEROUS TO KNOW: Qld’s asylums and early colonial doctors

Duncan Richardson will speak about his latest book - Dangerous to Know: The beginnings of Queensland’s asylums and early colonial doctors

Photo: Book cover

Medicine in the mid-19th century was on the threshold of life-saving discoveries and developments so a doctor might use leeches to bleed a patient one day and an anaesthetic for an operation on the next. But for mental illness, real treatment was still very distant. Most doctors believed that cold water immersion, straightjackets and brandy would cure a disturbed person. In Queensland’s early years as a colony, the government hurriedly ordered a mental asylum to be built at Woogaroo. Another asylum for the poor and chronically ill was set up on Stradbroke Island. To assess people’s state of mind, a Reception House was opened in the old barracks on Spring Hill. The medical men, with no training in mental illness, would oversee these places, and employ staff based on their physical strength. Lack of skill and effective drugs were not the only reasons why patients received little care. The doctors had other priorities, ambitions, sectarian divisions and professional jealousies. Often described in biographies as medical heroes, many of these men were dangerous to know.

SPEAKER: Duncan Richardson migrated to Australia in 1970, taught in Botswana from 1987 to 1988, and returned to work in Australia as a part-time teacher. His fiction has been published in various anthologies such as Obliquity, Futurevisions, Subtropical Suspense, Lighthouses and Within/Without Walls. In 2008, his verse play The Grammar of Deception was produced and broadcast by ABC Radio National.

Duncan has published several children's books, including readers for Macmillan, Wennabees and Yum-Worms(2005), Revenge (2005), Jason Chen and the Time Banana (2008) and Dinomania (2014). He was a part time English as a Second Language teacher and regularly runs writing workshops for adults and kids. His first history book, “Year of Disaster: Brisbane 1864” was released in 2017, followed two years later by “Captives of the Spanish Lady” about the flu quarantine in 1919, and “Civilising Brisbane” in 2021, about three colonial women who changed the face of the town. Now he will talk to us about his latest book “Dangerous to Know: the beginnings of Queensland’s asylums and early colonial doctors”.