care for the aged poor in australia, 1788–1914

COMMUNITY HEALTH STUDIES VOLUME vrr, NUMBER 3. 1983

CARE FOR THE AGED POOR IN AUSTRALIA, 1788-1914

Brian Dickey School of Social Sciences, The Flinders University of South Australia. 5042.

Introduction

extended aid to In 1823, the Benevolent Society in Sydney

A poor aged man, nearly destitute and unable to help himself. The Committee assisted him with a wheelbarrow and a n axe, since which the man has been able to provide for himself.’

In November 1864 the New South Wales Colonial Secretary minuted that

Clerks of Petty Sessions ... often, perhaps with humane intentions, strain the law so as to commit to gaols as vagrants, and in fact criminals, persons suffering from extreme old age, disease, or general debility. This appears to the Colonial Secretary t o be highly objectionable both on social and moral grounds; and .... also seriously to interfere with prison discipline and accommodation, (and is to be) discontinued.*

In February 1887 John Drew wrote the Colonial Secretary of Queensland stating that though old, penniless and suffering from acute rheumatism, he would not accept a local doctor’s recommendation that he be admitted to the Government’s Dunwich Benevolent Asylum. He would not go there, the doctor explained in a covering letter, because ‘his mind revolted at the idea of becoming a pauper.’’

Michael Garry, aged 61, was admitted to the Government Destitute Asylum on North Terrace, Adelaide, on 16 January 1888.

The admission register note reads:

This man it totally blind. His wife died last week, he is therefore left without any person t o take care of him, except his son who is employed at the Goods Shed North Terrace and who has agreed to pay 51- p.w. towards his fathers maintenance in the D.A.4

He died nearly four years later.

Elizabeth Wilson, widow, of Wentworth, who had ‘eked out a miserable existence for a number of

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years’, was bedridden with rheumatism, while her daughter was also a semi-invalid and her husband out of work. In 1902 she was granted aid of 7s. 6d. per week from the New South Wales government’s Charities Department , the aid renewed periodically until she became eligible for the old age pension on I July 1907.

This essay deals with aged people unable to sustain their lives without outside assistance who lived in various parts of Australia from 1788 to 1914.6 Throughout the period, the key element identifying these people was not their age but their poverty, deriving from their temporary or permanent inability to participate as members of the workforce in a commercial free enterprise capitalist environment. The focus is upon those colonial Australians so poor they could not support themselves or be supported by their immediate family or any other informal network of care. These people became dependent on the provision of some form of support by the community - whether of tools or rations or board and lodging or a cash payment.

The questions which need to be asked about care for these aged dependents in 19th century Australia are how they were identified or selected, who responded in providing assistance and what sorts of aid were provided.

Assessment For nearly the whole of the period the primary

categories were economic and moral, not demographic or physical: assessment and selection of potential recipients of community aid - whether they were aged, infirm, deserted or orphaned - focused first on destitution and then on desert. The causes of destitution were never of themselves sufficient to prompt action, a t least until the 189Os, as we shall see. More importantly, the supporting agencies always sought to act on the basis that they accepted as dependents only those who deserved the aid being dispensed. It was selective chanty - hence the Benevolent Society’s objective of 1818:

... to relieve the poor, the distressed, the aged, and the infirm, and thereby to discountenance as much as possible mendacity and vagrancy,

COMMUNITY HEALTH STUDIES

and to encourage industrious habits among the indigent poor, as well as to afford them religious instruction and consolation in their distresses.’

The capacity to work normally excluded applicants. On and off, so did such morally defined behaviour as drunkenness, previous misbehaviour in the asylum, or prostitution. In practice the records of the principal agencies suggest that those who would otherwise have died were in the end admitted to care: the alternative of public scandal a t such inhumanity was judged too great. As George Allen (long time leader of the Benevolent Society in Sydney) put it, the relief was ‘merely to prevent people from starving’.* As a result the debilitating effects of declining physical capacity so usually associated with ageing (and previous hard living) were after all grounds for accepting applicants as state dependents.

The causes of dependence were rarely reversed in such cases. Orphaned children or destitute families might progress to independence as the biological and social patterns changed, but for older dependents, the future was fixed. Once they became dependents, so they remained, even if they were kept more efficiently. Of the 144 inmates a t the Benevolent Asylum in Sydney at the end of 1830, a mere decade after its opening, 68 percent were over 60,40 per cent were aged 70 or more, six were over 90 and one person a n astonishing 105. Even the poorest could live well beyond average life expectancies of the day if provided with food and shelter.’,

Thus it was not difficult for the administrators to list their charges - especially those in residence - according to such secondary categories as ‘aged and infirm’, ‘blind, rheumatic, epileptic, chronic diseases’, ‘women with children’ and so on: those were the classifications applied after a primary assessment of dependents as both destitute and deserving.

Insiiturional Agencies Two main agencies responded to these

destitute and deserving people. The first was the government in New South Wales, in its imperial guise of gaoler: convicts, and their supervisors a n d d e p e n d e n t s , whatever t h e i r o t h e r characteristics, were government responsibilities unless assigned or paroled. While landowners might give some aid to an aged servant,IO the government had to supply rations for convicts otherwise unable to work.

The second agency, which emerged between

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18 13 and 18 18, was the Benevolent Society of New South Wales.11 The Society was normally supported by the public’s donations and time but Governor Macquarie caused an asylum to be built for it in Pitt Street, Sydney. He explained to Secretary of State Lord Bathurst:

The great number of Paupers, aged, infirm, and old men and women, many of whom are both lame and blind and without any permanent provision, unavoidably entailed in Government a very heavy expense in victualling the greater part of them from the King’s Store; but being homeless as well as pennyless, they still went about begging and often sleeping out a t nights in the open air. I was therefore induced to have a comfortable House and offices erected at the expense of the Government, as a n Asylum for those unfortunate persons, the Government only now victualling from the store such as come out originally as Convicts.!*

This government-supported voluntary agency was an institutional response matched in all the other colonies except Victoria as the century wore on, though with significant local variation. While up t o 80 per cent of the costs of the Benevolent Asylum were borne by the New South Wales government between 1820 and 1862, in Van Diemen’s Land, since there were two agencies, one government, one public, the latter had to struggle on without subsidy. In both Queensland and South Australia the colonial administration itself erected and conducted an asylum: at Dunwich on Stradbroke Island at the mouth of the Brisbane River in Queensland, from 1865; on land bounded by North Terrace and Kintore Avenue, just across from Government House, in Adelaide, from 1852. In Perth aged imperial exconvicts were housed in a barrack below Mount Eliza until they were banished to more distant asylums in the late 1880s. Even in New South Wales, the financial and administrative logic of closer supervision of government funds led in 1862 to the direct takeover by the government of that portion of the Benevolent Society’s work focused on providing indoor care. We can follow its history as a representative case of the provision of institutional care for the aged amidst a conglomerate group of community dependents, in answer t o our third question. What sort of aid?

A board was set up in 1862 to conduct the affairs of these new Government Asylums for the Infirm and Destitute in New South Wales.13 Men were housed in asylums at Liverpool and Parramatta, women in the Hyde Park barracks, all previously used by the Benevolent Society on loan


from the government. The original Pitt St. building was retained by the Society for other aspects of social welfare, notably care for destitute mothers. The work of the government asylums for the aged and destitute expanded rapidly. 624 people were being cared for at the end of 1863 and 1,279 in 1877. Immediate steps were taken in 1862- 3 to make the buildings occupied so hastily in January 1862 more habitable, with the provision of whitewash, privies, windows and gas.14

Life for the old people was not easy, either in intention or practice. The rules drawn up in 1862 permitted snuff and tobacco to the inmates but, on the other hand, no presents were to be made to any inmates, except through the master or matron, nor could drink of any kind be introduced. They were to rise a t six in the spring and summer, and at seven in autumn and winter, and, washed in half an hour, they were to take 45 minutes airing before breakfast. The housework of the asylums was all t o be done by the inmates, often in return for small gratuities. This left short periods of recreation after each meal and time for a weekly bath, with the night’s rest to begin at seven-thirty in the spring and summer and an hour earlier in the cold months. The inmates were to be permitted to attend Divine Service - at Hyde Park they could go to St James’ or St Marys’ with little trouble - each week but they were to return immediately after service and forbidden to bring contraband with them. It was austere, regulated, institutional life within which the inmates would perhaps make friendly informal contacts with another, or more likely, gradually collapse into withdrawn, unseeing apathy followed by physical decline.15

Evidence survives from the 1860s of the care for the aged and destitute in country districts in New South Wales. Four aged and infirm men were sent down without notice from the Maitland Hospital to Liverpool Asylum in 1862. While the Board of the Government Asylums admitted them, they protested that country hospitals, themselves in receipt of government support, should not attempt to evade their responsibility to maintain the poor of their district. The Colonial Secretary, Charles Cowper, agreed.16

The Secretary of the Maitland Hospital persisted, and sought the aid of the Colonial Secretary, in gaining admission in Sydney for the aged and destitute from his district. Besides cost and space, the vital issue was:-

... at this moment we have in the hospital seven or eight persons who are fit objects for the Government Institution, and it is obvious that we cannot keep them here without changing

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character of the Hospital and making it into a poor house .....I7

The Board pointed out that any reversal of their decision not to receive country persons without previous application would only be possible when the Colonial Secretary made further accommodation available a t Liverpool, not as a result of behind-the-scenes representations. With that Asylum full they were again unable to house country paupers. Obviously the Colonial Secretary was unwilling to antagonise country benevolence, for he instructed his department to provide on the next estimates for further accommodation in the Government Asylums.l*.

But the pressure continued: once again the Maitland authorities took the extreme step of sending destitute men unheralded to Liverpool. Like unwanted foundlings they were left a t the gate.19 Further country pressure came from the benches of magistrates. To control their tendency to consign local destitute persons to Darlinghurst gaol as vagrants, confident they would be sent on t o Parramatta or Liverpool, the Colonial Secretary issued the instruction quoted at the beginning of this essay. If the local Benevolent Society could not care for these persons, he went on, they should be sent to the Sydney Infirmary (if ill), or to the government asylums (if suffering from the effects of old age).

The Board of the Asylums resisted the implication that the Benches and Police Magistrates therefore had the power to order admission of paupers without the permission of the Board or its secretary.*O As the Board put it, ‘Government, having gone so far in taking these Asylums under their immediate control, cannot shrink from incurring (expenses)’.*I On 20 March 1865 another circular was sent to the Benches and Police Magistrates by the Colonial Secretary, pointing out that they were not to infer that they had the power to order admission t o the Asylums. This right remained with the Board of Management.

The small country hospitals that were growing out of the earlier dispensary and benevolent societies were unwilling to receive as permanent pensioners the aged and decrepit of their districts. Successive Colonial Secretaries avoided as long as possible the necessity of spending more money but, in the end, they were unwilling to antagonise the country worthies. As always, it was the paupers who suffered while the administration took time t o make up its mind. More and more were crammed into the asylums through 1864-6. As if to underline the story of ad hoc solutions, 46 old people were


sent to occupy the old convict barracks at Port Macquarie in the winter of 1866.22That bleak and isolated place sheltered as many as 190 before it was evacuated in 1869.23

Our knowledge of life in the asylums in the early 1870s is somewhat clearer. The Empire (a Sydney newspaper) began to probe living conditions in them. The Royal Commission of Public Charities (1872-4) actually took the trouble to visit them and take evidence from some of the inmates as well as from the officials.

The practice was to admit people (of whatever age) who were unable through chronic illness to earn a livelihood, those unable to work from the effects of age and, also, some who were still recovering from an illness or operation.24 At the asylum in George Street, Parramatta, 20 beds had been set aside as a hospital ward. There was also a n infirm ward for paralysis cases. The asylum housed about 260 men. Liverpool held most of the chronically ill inmates, especially those suffering from tuberculosis or cancer - about 200 of the 629 men at Liverpool fell into these two categories. Another 200 there lived in a temporary wooden structure which sometimes failed to keep the rain out.25 It appeared that only on festive occasions did any of the inmates eat meat other than boiled.26 The Royal Commission on Public Charities reported adversely on the Hyde Park Barracks. They were crowded and insanitary. The Commission was more critical of the Parramatta Asylum. Its master (Dennis) was inefficient and open t o charges of misconduct and neglect. The sort of thing the Commissioners had in mind was illustrated by the evidence of Edward Rawlings, an inmate who acted as a wardsman:

Lady Dennis received one quart of beef tea daily, equal to 21b. of our meat, daily for seven years, and she never inspects out messes or lines; and allowed the pudding on Her Majesty’s Birthday to be made in a bath previously used by the in1nates.2~

In addition, the bathman claimed three towels had to serve for 130 men.z8

The asylums were overcrowded, facilities limited, staff were scarce and of questionable competence. The life of the inmates was a dull routine. But there was little public reaction:, these unfortunate people might exist in miserable conditions but they were taken care of.

In 1886, the move of the aged woman from the Hyde Park Barracks to a new site a t Newington created a fuss in the Legislative Assembly and

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elsewhere, drawing attention also to claims by inmates and others that this asylum and the two’at Parramatta were being run in ways scarcely favourable to their inmates. The upshot was the appointment of a Board of Inquiry into the Government Asylums with T.K. Abbott, a stipendiary magistrate as chairman and Dr Ashburton Thompson (Chief Medical Officer) and Hugh Robison (Inspector of Charities) as the other members.29

Much detail, some of it nauseating, about conditions of life in these asylums for the aged emerged from this inquiry. The wardsmen in most cases were ‘trusties’, inmates in receipt of a gratuity for their services. They revealed all too often the vindictive passions of such petty authorities and a complete failure to understand the difficulties and challenges of the ageing men and women they had to work with. The revenge taken by the chief wardsman a t Macquarie Street f o r the incontinence of bedridden patients was brutal, degrading and, in at least one case, probably fatal. Control of liquor, accounts and food at Newington were all criticised. The dietary scale was slated for its reliance on cheap liquor and boiled mutton. The lack of specialised medical facilities for eye, venereal, cancer and phthisis cases was underlined. The diet a t Newington was found to be inadequate and boring, served at irregular hours and sometimes without implements. Bed linen was left unchanged for long periods. The matron there was exercising ‘absolute irresponsibility’, a piece of Victorian melodrama in the face of obvious suffering.

The main problems noted at George Street were structural. There was little or no privacy in the toilet facilities. The origins of the “Mill building”, with its wool-greasy floors, made the place unpleasant in summer.

But a n inhuman medical officer aggravated matters. At Macquarie Street the Board castigated the failure to control the lower staff, to secure drugs, to provide extras for sick patients. Possibly one inmate’s death was hastened by the violent treatment he received, while the superintendent and medical officer took care not to hear of it. The Board characterised their attitude as ‘irregular, careless, perfunctory, and devoid of responsible kindness’.

The expanding problems confronting the Manager of the Asylums were, the Board believed, quite beyond him. He had been denied staff. He lacked the medical knowledge he needed. He had failed to penetrate beyond the files and ledgers of his office. His concern for annual reductions in the average cost per inmate had blinded him to ‘abuses


of the gravest character’, while he had ‘relied too much upon the honesty of matrons and has taken no steps t o ensure honesty by making the detection of dishonest act a matter of certainty’.

The whole sordid story shows how the custodial system, the ‘barrack system’, could be abused by sheer routine, by a comfortable development of administrative practices aimed at economy and, apparently, therefore, efficiency, without attention to the needs of the inmates. On the other hand the voicing of these criticisms and Premier Henry Parkes’ unusual degree of action - to the extent of agreeing to the appointment of trained nurses, retiring King and Robison, dismissing two matrons and creating a strengthened, reorganised department, suggest that the community of New South Wales was becoming more sensitive of the welfare of these old people.30 Conditions of life for them were no longer found to be tolerable in comparison with what the rest of society enjoyed.

The developing humanity and civilisation of the community was one pressure for change, expressed in editorials, questions in parliament and the horror of the Inquiry Board. The other pressure was the transformation in the nature of inmates. For them scanty nursing by fellow inmates was no longer acceptable. Nor could grog be the only medication. Treatment, nursing, special dietary, classification were all urgently required. It was a pitiful commentary on life in the asylums that, at the close of an entertainment provided for the old women a t Newington by Quong Tart an eminent business man, and attended by 100 social worthies, when Hugh Taylor, the local M.P., announced that not only should the asylum be under new management, but that they were to have butter to go with their bread, a reading room, honey and treacle, milk and sugar for their tea - this, and no more, should be met ‘with prolonged and shrill cheed.3’

Similar tales can be told of the other major agencies providing institutional care.32 Perhaps life was harshest in Queensland, a t Dunwich, where the inmates appear to have been regarded as deviants by a penny pinching government and a community influenced by isolation, insecurity, a dislike of the colony’s convict past and a firm belief in the truths of free enterprise capitalism. These attitudes were illustrated by the superintendent who wrote in 1871 that they:

are unused to, and are unfit for self control ... Such persons when segregated formed into a small community .... require for their

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government if not positive coercion, a t least the known existence of the power to coerce in all cases of open and flagrant disobedience and delinquency ... (They are) men whom age has not subdued, whose passions are still ardent, and whose evil propensities have all their lives only been curbed by the strong arm of the law .... ( i t was necessary) ‘ to s u p p r e s s insubordination, abuses and vicious and objectionable practices’.33

Ray Evans’ harsh judgement is that Dunwich

was never a seaside resort in the happier meaning of the term .... It was a last resort for its occupants, where a preoccupied society had consigned them with a minimum of bother and expense to itself. Though no legal hold over the inmates existed, their inability to fill an occupational role bound them to the island.34

Community-based agencies As the nineteenth century wore on, as the

colonial communities developed more complex social arrangements, grew in population and prosperity, these basically residual general agencies were joined by more specialised welfare services, some charitably supported, some provided by the colonial governments. Many of them had a role in providing care for the aged, though few addressed themselves to age as the primary issue. Thus there were benevolent societies - for example the Adelaide Strangers’ Friends and Benevolent Society, after 1849, or the Melbourne Ladies Benevolent Society.35 In country districts, as we have seen, hospitals were being established which provided at least some capacity to assess and despatch aged dependents to some other services.

Then there were smaller, more intimate agencies such as the ‘providence’36 run by the Sisters of St Joseph in the poorest suburbs of Adelaide which provided some assistance for aged poor both at home and at the institution. Even G.F. Ardill’s multiplicity of caring agencies in Sydney would have had old men and women along their clients. So too did the Salvation Army and the St Vincent de Paul Society when these agencies began operations among the poor of the capital cities of Australia in the 1880s and 1890s. To them the aged poor were but one source of the queue of destitute applicants for temporary assistance.37

The most remarkable of these services was the ration system unique among the Australian colonies which was developed by the Destitute


and the basis for the New South Wales government’s present geriatric hospital services. Board in South Australia from the mid-1850s. The

central office authorised local district clerks. police officers or stipendiary magistrates to assess local cases, issue ration vouchers and forward the accounts to Adelaide. It no doubt benefited many destitute aged people both in the country districts and in Adelaide, where the Board‘s own officers conducted the scheme. Of the 3515 rations being distributed on 30 June 1888, about 25 per cent were going to aged, infirm or incapacitated adults.38

Equally path-breaking, though unique for a much shorter period of time, were various philanthropic agencies in Adelaide which adopted the technique of erecting ‘cottage homes’ for aged couples. The first such organisation was established in 1872 by the Anglican Dean Marryat and a group of Adelaide philanthropists, both male and female. It has become the Aged Cottage Homes Incorporated. The Society possessed about 60 cottages by 1900, prqviding accommodation to deserving aged. It was joined in the early twentieth century by a variety of other agencies, including the Adelaide Benevolent Society. In many ways these societies were the earliest Australian evidence of a willingness to prqvide care for aged destitute people on the ground specifically of age, though always in association with destitution and desert and still in partly institutional terms.

Another direction in which generalised care for community dependants evolved can be illustrated by reference once more to the New South Wales Government Asylums for the Aged and Destitute. Their population grew from 1 140 on 3 1 December 1874 to 4125 at the end of December 1900. This growth represented a continuing demand for the facilities provided by the asylums and indicated very considerable efforts to house the increased number of inmates involved. Within that general growth there was the development of the medical responsibilities of the asylums: there were about 1600 bed patients among the inmates by 1896. By the late 1880s the officials were acknowledging that reality openly, that asylums were the place where chronically sick people were being sent ‘with a view to relieving pressure on the general hospitals’.J9 The Government’s Medical Advisor reported in the same year that over 10 per cent of the Asylums’ cases were in hospitals, while another 25 per cent required nursing attention.40 By 1890 another government official could describe these asylums as ‘practically hospitals for chronic and incurable diseases as well as homes for the infirm and indigent.’41 It was the basis for his call for extensive new facilities and staff which, in the long run, became the Lidcombe State Hospital

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New Criteria, new services The dominance of colonial governments in

providing the ‘last refuge’ was plain, despite intercolonial variations. Moreover, that refuge was becoming the locale for an increasingly medical model of institutional care by the end of the century. Alongside those services were the public, non-government societies providing mainly rations and other items - such as blankets - for a much smaller number of selected recipients. To them the aged were but one classification among their lists of dependents.

Jill Roe has argued that in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the aged in western communities were seen in a somewhat different light t o that previously. She has suggested that rigours of increasingly industrialised capitalism, combined with extending life spans and growing numbers of older people in western communities, sparked a debate about the care of the aged specifically as aged, rather than merely as part of a diffuse group of economic dependents. In the Australian colonies that same debate occurred, probably for the same reasons. Certainly the increase of more than two hundred per cent in the proportion of the community over 60 from 1861 to 191 1 pointed in that direction.

There was also a desire to shift from institutional to community-based care. It was a concern readily played upon by journalists describing the asylums. In addition, and not surprisingly, public charitable societies such as the Benevolent Society of New South Wales were keen to transfer the burden of long-term care from their accounts to those of the government. There were also eager, individual reformers who had a vision of a more generous, accepting community reaching out to reward the aged pioneers of the nation.42 Roe concisely sums up the multiplicity of pressures which worked on public and parliamentary opinion to produce old age pensions in Australia thus:

To the dawning recognition (of the demographic changes) many groups in addition to the organised working class contributed. They included ambitious colonial statisticians, the first factory inspectors and anxious inner- city clergy .... the first demographic perspectives also coincided with the depression of the 1890s ... (which) produced a straightened economy and effectively redefined the hitherto isolated poor.43


As long as it is remembered that the old age pension still contained elements of selective charity and moral desert in its requirement of good behaviour, and was designed as a limited supplement, not a total living wage, then it can be argued that the aged had been acknowledged to have, as J.C. Neild put it, an ultimate parent in the community at large; or as another warm-hearted politician from New South Wales asserted, the pension would be

A free gift from the State .... to those who have for a fair period assisted to create our civilisation, aided in the development of the resources of the country, and helped to bear the public burdens of the community by the payment of taxis.44

Politicians in Victoria, as Kay Rollison has shown, were far less open to such blandishments and sought to constrict the aged pension much more tightly. Even they, however, were subject to these massive shifts in social vision which were beginning to see the aged as a category precisely defined -over 65 (or over 60 in the case of women) - and outside the work force for that reason alone. It was the first major adoption of a universalist, categorical definition in social policy action in Australia, one which has continued to dominate social welfare expenditures in Australia to this very day.

The Commonwealth government took up the running from New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland on I July 1909. The process of accepting the aged as a category in their own right was confirmed in an expert enquiry conducted by the Commonwealth's learned Statistician, G.H. Knibbs, in 1913. He estimated not only that the take-up rate of aged pensions had increased two and a half times faster than the growth in population generally, but that as many as a third of those qualified by age alone received the pension, a comment if ever there needed to be one on the poverty of the working class during the whole of life. Knibbs urged his conservative political masters to accept the reality that an aged pension had come to stay.45

Conclusion In the long run, the entry of the

Commonwealth government into the field of social

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welfare services was to change the existing pattern of services, lock some into narrow tracks and make others for long irrelevant. State government outdoor relief to the aged poor virtually disappeared. Care for the sick aged became almost totally a medical question. Cottages for the aged poor never gained wide acceptance until another federal government initiative in 1954. Simple asylum care for aged, destitute people was retained for a much smaller proportion of the community than in the nineteenth century.

By 1914 the aged poor had gained a protected place in Australian society outside the market economy. It was a relatively secure, but far from generous place. It was still based on criteria that many believed carried moral condemnation beyond the simple recognition that these aged poor people had been removed from the workforce. It was an arrangement to which a growing majority of the aged population of Australia were to turn.

It was, also, largely a community-based solution, rather than an institutional one. It meant that the aged poor were less visible in the first half of the twentieth century because they were normally able to live in their own homes. Institutional care was used only when substantial physical decline occured or in a small proportion of cases of utter destitution and lack of family support. These arrangements were not challenged again until the 1950s, when care of the aged poor once more became an object of political debate, community action and ' government expense. Institutional care - in retirement villages, nursing homes and hospitals once more attracted widespread interest and expenditure.

Assessment and care for the aged in contemporary Australia continues to generate debate and expense. This paper indicates some of the continuing issues that must beaddressed. Upon what sorts of criteria shall care be offered and accepted? What range of services are required to meet the variety of evolving needs among the aged? What sorts of agencies can be appropriately involved in these services, and upon what financial basis? Finally, if in a more utopian vein, why does Australian society continue to produce aged people without the social and economic resources for self-sustaining life?


I .

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Benevolent Society of NSW. Annual Report 1823. 29 Nov. 1864, Colonial Secretary, In-Letters (CSIL) 64/5744, NSW Archives. Evans, R. Charitable Institutions of the Queensland Government to 1919. MA thesis, University of Queensland, 1969, p. 147. Entry 14/88, in Destitute Asylum, Register of Admissions, GRG 28/5/3 SA Archives. NSW Colonial Secretary, In Letters 07120279, NSW Archives. The detailed sources upon which this study is based include Dickey B. Charity in New South Wales. Ph.D. Australian National University, 1968 and the related journal articles: Charity in NSW, 1850-1914: Outdoor Relief t o the Aged and Destitute. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (JRAHS) 1966; 52: 9-32; The Sick Poor in NSW, 1840-1880 Colonial practice in a n amateur age. JRAHS 1973; 59: 16-30; Hospital services ‘ in NSW, 1875-1900. Questions of provision, entitlement and responsibility. JRAHS 1976; 62: 35-56, together with Dickey B. No Charity There. A Short History of Social Werfare in Australia. Melbourne: Nelson, 1980, see ibid, Dependence in South Australia 1888: the Destitute Board and its Clients. Australia 1888. 1981; 8: 88-96; Some statistics on social welfare in NSW, 1850- 19 14. Australian Historical Statistics 1980; 1: 54-60, Social Welfare: the Government Sector. (with Baker P.) in Vamplew W. (ed.), Historical Statistics of South Australia (forthcoming); Evans R., op.cit., and ibid, The Hidden Colonists: Deviance and Social Control in Colonial Queensland. In Roe J. Social Policy in Australia Sydney: Cassell Australia: 74-100. Roe J. The function of old age pensions in NSW, 1901- 1909. Paper presented t o the 7th International Economic History Congress, Edinburgh, 1978. Rollison K. Groups .and Attitudes in the Victorian Legislative Assemble, 1900-1909. Ph.D. La Trobe University, in which Ch. 9 studies the meaning of old age pensions in Victoria. Cummins CJ. The Development of the Benevolent (Sydney) Asylum 1788- 1855. Sydney: Department of Health 1971; Gash N. A History of the Benevolent Society of

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References

7.

8.

9.

NSW, 1813-1901. MA, University of Sydney, 1966. Kewley TH. Social Security in Australia, 1900-1972. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1973. Brown J.C. Povert-v is not a Crime. The Development of Social Serv ices in Tasmania 1803-1900. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association 1972. Benevolent Society of NSW. Annual Report 1820: 8 and following years to 1878. George Allen giving testimony to the Select Committee on the Benevolent Society, 17 Oct. 186 1 , NS W Legislative Assembly. Votes & Proceedings(V&P) 1861-2; 3: 907ff. Cummins. 6.

10. This is possible, though not established in the case of the Macarthurs: cf Alan Atkinson. Master and servant a t Camden Park, 1838, from the estate papers. Push

from the Bush 1980; 6: 42-60. I I . The process is complex, and has been

analysed by Gash and Cummins. 12. 27 July 1822, Historical Records of

Australia I: Series, 10: 679. 13. Made up of the Registrar General

(Christopher Rolleston), the Clerks of the Executive Council and the Legislative Council, the Collector of Customs and the Health Officer. Colonial Secretary’s Minutes 15295, 25 February 1862, NSW Archives.

14. The request for the installation of gas lighting at Hyde Park was supported by the fact that ‘the old women cannot be prevented from lighting their pipes after the hour of midnight’. Government Asylums’ Board to Col. Sec., 24 January 1866, Colonial Architect building files 1847-66, 21640, NSW Archives.

15. The rules were published by the NSW Government Printer. Regulations ,for the Internal Management of the Government Asylums for the Infirm and Destitute. Sydney, 1862. Copy encl. to CSIL 66/977. This is the typical pattern described by Townsend P. The Last Refuge. London 1962, in which he studies institutional care for the aged in Britain in the 1950s. Much of his description can undoubtedly be applied to life in the NSW Asylums. Compare also the description of institutional life for old people in Melbourne, in Hutchinson B. Old People in a M o d e r n A u s t r a l i a n

254 COMMUNITY HEALTH STUDIES

C o m m u n i t y : A S o c i a l S u r v e y . Melbourne, 1954, esp. ch. 9.

16. Board, Government Asylums to Permanent Under Secretary (PUS), 2 April 1862, CSIL 62/ 1588, NSW Archives.

17. Sec., Maitland Hospital to Col. Sec., 7 June 1864, CSIL 64/3316, encl. to 64/3880.

18. Board, Government Asylums to PUS, 12 June 1864, CSIL 64/3880, and Forster’s minute on it.

19. Board, Government Asylums to PUS, 28 November 1864, in 4/809 1.

20. Board, Government Asylums to PUS, 10 March 1864, CSIL 65/1040, encl. to 78 / 4086, ibid.

21. Board, Government Asylums to PUS, 22 February 1865, CSIL 65/861 in ‘Estimates, I865’, 4/ 565.

22. Board, Government Asylums to PUS, 14 August 1866, CSIL 66/4082.

23. Executive Council Minutes, 69/39, 24 September 1869, with CSIL 69/7093.

24. Royal Commission on Public Charities in NSW (RCPC), First Report, Evidence, q.440, 27 May 1873 (Alleyne HG.), V&P 1874, 6.

25. RCPC, Second Report, p.113, 115. The reports are all in NSW V&P 1874, 2.

26. Ibid., Evidence ‘Benevolent Asylums’, q.54, 21 June 1873 (Wardsman Jamieson); Empire 27 May 1871, reporting Queen’s Birthday festivities.

27. Evidence, ‘Benevolent Asylums’, qq. 1 18-92, 21 June 1873, note on revision.

28. Ibid., q/223 (‘bathman’). 29. Inquiry board into the Government

Asylums for the Infirm and Destitute, V&PV 1886; 2: 402ff. Abbott, a trained magistrate in petty criminal affairs, sought to draw the old men out, and ifanything was predisposed to believe them. Obviously accusations by talkative, broken old men and counter accusations by matrons in danger of losing their posts are difficult to assess. Abbott generally accepted the criticisms, notably of Mrs Hicks at

Newington, of Dr Rowling, Government Medical Officer at Parramatta, and of Mrs Cunynghame at Macquarie Street. Much detail, some of it nauseating, about conditions of life in these asylums for the aged emerged from this inquiry.

20. D. T. 12 May 1887, for public comment. On nurses, Parkes’ minute 4 June 1887, V&P 1887-8; 4: 609. The reorganisation can best be examined in the Blue Book for 1888. The Legislative Assembly debated the matter 7 July 1887, N.S. W. P. D. vol. 27, p. 2727ff.

31. D.T. 14 October 1888. 32. And have been: Evans on Queensland,

Brown on Tasmania, Dickey (forthcoming) on S.A. Less is known about Victoria or W.A.

33. Quoted by Evans. Hidden Colonists. 83. 34. Charitable Instructions. 169. 35. Kennedy R. Poor Relief in Melbourne: the

Benevolent Society’s Contribution, 1845-

36. Foale MT. ‘Think of the Ravens’ The Sisters of St Joseph and Social Welfare in South Australia 1867-1909. BA, University of Adelaide, 198 1.

1893. JRAHS 1974; 60: 256-266.

37. No Charity There, 89-92. 38. Dyson R. The Aged Poor in South Australia

1897-1925. BA, University of Adelaide, 1967, ch. 4.

39. NSW Inspector of Public Charities, Report for 1886, V&P 1887-8, 4, 696-8.

40. NSW Medical Advisor to the Government, ‘Memorandum on the Treatment of the sick in government asylums for the infirm and destitute,’, ibid., p. 613-4.

41. NSW Director of Charitable Institutions, Annual Report 1890, ibid, 1891, 22, 202-5.

42. No Charity 7het-e. 110.123. 43. Op.cit., p.7. 44. OSullivan EW. in the report of the Select

Committee on State Insurance or Old Age and Invalidity Pensions, V&P, 1896,s. 835- 7.

45. No Charity There. 121.

DICKEY 255 COMMUNITY HEALTH STUDIES

care for the aged poor in australia, 1788–1914

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