Willow Court Flight - by Sandra Potter
Island | Issue 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
‘Flight of ideas – A form of thought disorder in which a rapid flow of thoughts occur, flitting from one topic to another usually with transitions based on arbitrary conceptual or verbal links. It is often seen in a manic episode and occasionally in certain forms of schizophrenia.’
— AM Colman, Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 2015
‘If it is worth a thought it is worth recording.’
— JJ Cowburn & R Cox, New Norfolk’s History & Achievements, 1981
erasure
Dr Charles’s almond-sized head is gouged to a blu-tack grey. ‘His wife Jean,’ smiling under scratches, stands by his side in a smart stripy outfit, hands behind her back. The scene is on The Avenue, near the parking area for the schmick restaurant at the street’s southern end.
change
The Australian Heritage Council notes that Willow Court illustrates a succession of treatment philosophies.
Invalid Depot. Lunatic Asylum. Hospital for the Insane. Mental Diseases Hospital. Lachlan Park Hospital. Royal Derwent Hospital | Dubious Magnet for Tourists | Intractable Problem for Council.
In 2011 the New Norfolk Council’s consultants recommended ‘a complete makeover of the “Willow Court brand”.’
trees & etc
The Court’s two large weeping willows (cut down in the 1960s) were described in 1885 as the most graceful and symmetrical of their kind in the colony. Lady Jane Franklin planted them in the quadrangle of The Barracks which housed patients until 1952. The Barracks front onto The Avenue, the road splitting the precinct. The Avenue is lined with elms | Elm Avenue | Elm Street | a nightmare thereon.
How to tame the involuntarily leaps and segues of the mind?
roll call (1820s to 2000)
— convicts, including as staff, and one a survivor of more than 2000 lashes
— others sick, injured, immobile, abused, violent, addicted, vagrant, distraught
— those declared insane or mentally ill or something else by mostly someone else
— criminals – and individuals who weren’t but during their stay became
— a child born eight years after her mother’s admission
— those with dementia and others vulnerable or unable to care for themselves
— in 1836, Mary-Anne (then 7), Agnes (31⁄2), Hugh (3) and George (3) – children of patients
— in 1963, 90 youngsters labelled defective
— ex-POWs and other traumatised war veterans, some still in uniform, some still marching
— individuals operating outside the mores of the times
— individuals with siblings unaware they were there or alive
— teens delivered by parents or police
— those for whom nowhere else existed or whose original reason for admission was no longer known
... at one point, 960, not including staff
successors
Conservators, renovators, crafters, stall holders, bible readers, ghost chasers, belly dancers, coffee sellers, and Masonic, Lions and garden clubbers, and rum distillers, chefs and Sunday drivers, and the Friends of Willow Court and the working bees, and the bored and the curious and the squatters and the artists and the McDonalds-eating pedestrians who mistake gutters for bins.
Liquorice allsorts. How often does ‘something for everyone’ mean you?
‘Lions, tigers and bears. Oh my!’
2020: The council unveils the Derwent Valley Community Brand: ‘It’s a way for our businesses and tourism operators, community members and council to have a consistent look and feel for the valley, and for how the rest of the world sees us.’ The consistent look hangs on brand users selecting from a stylised swan, hop, gum, trout, cherry, river, platypus, thylacine or fagus leaf – each with four logo variants and an interchangeable palette of nine colours. Three hundred and twenty-four possibilities.
The rest of the world tells us they see ‘pooping tigers and children’s hieroglyphics’.
performance
In the 2016 winter Mike Parr came to town and spent three days in his head in the dilapidated 1960s-built Alonnah Ward for females. City folk and New Norfolk turned out in force to see him, queuing under street lights lit Dark Mofo red. The entry fee was a mirror, the offerings recovered from cars, budgies, bedrooms and beyond.
Broken mirrors, broken lives and/or endless reflection? Parr says he was taking his art and depositing it as a residue, as a sort of sacrifice. As we wended our way through the extant abundance, we nodded appreciatively at art in all its manifestations – crouching man wearing PJs, video installation of lip sewing, buckets of urine – or else thought what the, and big mistake, bringing the kids.
The possum-shit carpet stuck to our shoes.
eating place
Of the Agrarian Kitchen Eatery next door in the renovated Bronte Ward, we are told ‘the diner experiences a true sense of place through the food they eat.’ Walk a block to the north and the same fixed-price lunch investment for two buys more than sixty cheeseburgers and a no less authentic experience of (another) place. On ‘ShareTheMeal’ on the internet, it puts food on the table for more than three hundred people. Just saying.
conundrum
When communities want to forget and individuals want to remember, and communities want to remember and individuals want to forget – how do individuals and communities navigate the notion of partial forgetting and partial remembrance?
research | notes
Shortcomings in resources and facilities created an inability, for many years, to provide for patients’ vastly differing needs. Periods of over-crowding and staff shortages. Misunderstood illnesses. Actions well intentioned now recognised as harmful. Views expressed around the absence of few real alternatives prior to the drugs now relied upon to manage epileptic fits, severe psychoses, etc. Devoted staff working under difficult conditions, possibly little recognised/supported; others perfunctory in their attentions – even brutish – and not held to account. Episodes of finger pointing, media attention (sometimes accurate and helpful, at other times sensationalist and/or promoting stereotypes) and politics and opinions minus solutions. Myths, memories – and reading tangents ...
Hysteria (Greek origins, uterus) – the product of ‘wandering wombs’, satanic possession etc. Cartoon fodder. Imagine a moveable feast of organs with wee legs, causing havoc. Brace yourself.
verb (1905)
To camisole. 64 people for 163,222 hours. One year.
tools
Sharing interpretive panel #8 on The Avenue with Jean and her blighted Charles, a picture of shoes with lockable buckles. More tools of the trade, handcrafted on site.
chattels
Tony worked in Admin where some patients’ jewellery and other valuables and belongings were stored in a vault as might be needed for safekeeping purposes. Among items in custody: an axe, firearms and a violin.
In the caverns of the antique centre that has taken over the Olga Ward, a man spots a barber’s chair re-upholstered in cow hide. He can’t, however, find his wife.
trivia
/’trivɪə/ noun – details or pieces of information of little importance or value. Like the number of days the fog doesn’t lift. Like how many dozen car, truck and tanker bodies lie scattered around the Court. Like the colour for the squatting tiger logo: trout yellow or fagus orange?
arrest
A recent article in The Mercury reports the plight of a regular to the area, a 28-year-old agoraphobia and Asperger’s sufferer. In the hours leading up to his arrest he was ensconced in a camping chair in the second storey of one of the empty buildings, keeping a look out, partaking in a midnight beer. Four charges were laid. How effortlessly one’s circumstances can change.
leap
The hospital’s D and E wards, near the Woolworths car park, are enclosed by fences festooned with thirty-two signs advertising TFH Hire. The wards have been spray-painted inside and out, had their tiles and plaster smashed, had their doors, windows and sections of brick and roofing iron removed and been taken to with matches as stealth and time have permitted.
Weedy grounds, a curb-side shipping container and the barbed-wire-trimmed fences protecting the businesses on the opposite side of The Avenue add to the charm.
The council’s prospectus for investors says ‘the mix of established and emerging enterprises gives the Willow Court precinct a feel of excitement and vitality.’
excitement and vitality
AWOL.
A siren sounded across town when patients considered dangerous flew the coop.
Also absent, a visitor to the asylum reported, was real, hearty laughter.
Out and about on The Avenue this week: two supermarket trolleys and a chook.
Bound (and bound) for Bruny Island on a day out for patients, a woman in a ‘camisole’, her plight glimpsed in a film recording the excursion.
assemblage
A report on the council’s website says that between February and June 2020 the New Norfolk Tidy Towns committee removed 93 patches of graffiti, collected 60 dumped tyres, and picked up enough litter to fill 189 bags. In the same period, two other stalwarts collected another 74 bags worth from around the CBD, surrounding streets and town entrances. The effort is typical of other months.
More excitement. More vitality.
historic graffiti
On an outside corner of The Barracks – rhythmic rows and columns of pencilled numbers. 1207 1986 18229861176 896 1916 1064 1705 1508 1116 938 1311 744 320 2592 1390 1328 592 1660 800 2620 2000 1994724 3097 3604 1976 2420 1128 2412 8092 ...
One wonders their significance and the calligrapher’s identity.
A sign requests that we do not touch the surface. It also points to the daily decisions we make about who and what we protect.
archive boxes
Willow Court is a mash of architecture – art deco, Victorian, modernist, villa, etc. The Barracks pre-date Port Arthur and were built in the Palladian style. Their austere grandeur now houses cardboard apartments for silverfish and plans for a centre for the arts.
artefacts
My guide keeps asking me questions. In the medical superintendent’s office – ‘Why do you think there’s a trap door in the floor?’ She eventually shows me laminated pictures of what the archaeology students found during their digs.
anecdote
A former staff member relays how a feral cat – a persistent and unwanted visitor to the hospital – was scruffed and delivered a dose of electro-convulsive ‘therapy’. Only then did it stay away.
Things done to cats and dogs often attract greater outrage than things done to people.
country
Here, Leenowwenne. How to hear their stories, acknowledge their truths?
guide book
‘Black swans rubberneck across the water.’ Lonely Planet’s New Norfolk is a picturesque and peaceful place that has been sculpted and stigmatised by two forces (the second, a mill).
stories
‘All we know for sure is that the Valley really is as big, bright, dark, loud and weird as we let on – and we’re happy to prove it.’ Derwent Valley guidelines – how to get started with our brand.
In 1941 journalist Joe captured a valley ‘oddity of an extreme nature’ in his photograph of four horses felled by lightening while pulling a cultivator. Down like dominoes. The bright then the dark.
note
25/9/20: D I E – spelt out in small rocks on a bench in the sad garden opposite the Willow Court gates at the southern end of The Avenue. Also within a circle, a rain-soaked note folded in half and pinned down with more mudstone shards.
connection (1901)
A patient saves crumbs to feed the birds that he says are the only messengers he can trust to carry his news to distant friends. He shares his bread and tidings thus for fifteen years.
an exchange recalled (1885)
‘How long have you been in the asylum?
Millions of years.
Have you ever been married?
Lots and lots of times.
How many children do you have?
Ever so many; I couldn’t count them: but thousands upon thousands.’
hush
1856 Asylum Regulations. The wardswomen ‘shall allow no communication between the male and female patients’. The wardsman in charge of the cows ‘shall permit no gossiping in the cow-house’. Udder silence.
The compulsion to make puns; a weak attempt to find light/ respite in the dark?
insanities
Micro: Woolworths stands on what was once the hospital’s oval. A COVID-prompted sign attached to the inside of the exit informs customers that the door is not to be used as an entrance.
Macro: Davis station in Antarctica has a Woolies, a storeroom resupplied by sea and the airdrops of Defence Force behemoths that refuel mid-air to make the long flight. Enter plans for a concrete runway | an avenue for tourism | Elm Avenue | Elm Street | a nightmare thereon | 3 kilometres long | slash the landscape | slice the silence | with 90 plus decibels of inbound metal fucking the wildlife | hell yeah, best-practice style.
Paradise paved.
restraint | and marginalisation | hush
places / boundaries
Us and them. Insiders and outsiders. Here and there. Conceptual horizons or imperatives? Patterns emerge.
It takes an aerial view to dissolve boundaries, to provide any hope of that cathartic wash of seamlessness.
A regionally significant enterprise, the hospital’s property once extended to more than 350 hectares.
Now standing on the town’s outskirts is a nursing home built in the style of an oast house, and across the Derwent River, the newsprint mill – Australia’s oldest – now Norway’s.
snip snip
She cuts bumblebees in half with her secateurs. Won’t tolerate them. Introduced; out of place.
the cutting edge | interventions | of trial and error
Thirty-nine nurses resigned in one year. In other years and after their shifts they cooked Christmas goodies for their wards.
nurture | thyme
A sign on an old commode in the community garden near the medical superintendent’s cottage invites passers to take thyme to smell the flowers.
‘Don’t plant them before Show Day!’ Unsolicited advice is the most freely given.
I lie on the grass and watch the formation and disintegration of a contrail.
The broad beans will be ready for Christmas.
passing time
A light week’s washing in the hospital in 1905: 11,000 separate articles. The daily wood chop: 5–6 tons. Reprieves from boredom, the latter also rewarded with tobacco.
Leaks, rot and paint flakes replace labour.
One woman spent 57 years here – a lens through which to review the significance of two weeks of home or hotel quarantine.
Depressions in a sandstone windowsill on The Barracks’ verandah record a century of leaning to catch the sun’s warmth.
As others indoors took to the window frames with their teeth.
While Hobart came and gaped over the walls.
time management
Harlequin bugs mate on the verandah’s flagstones. They will do so for most of the three to four days that make up their lives.
[ ]
Day after day, the elderly man took his dog lead for early morning walks in these parts, the collar dragging on the ground.
plaque
‘Remembering all those who passed through here and those who cared for them.’ ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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