'Behaving wildly': Diagnoses of lunacy among indigenous persons in Western Australia, 1870-1914

Abstract

How did the diagnosis and treatment of lunacy in Western Australia intersect with Indigenous control by whites, and attitudes to Indigenous Western Australians in general, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Historical analyses of the pre-1960s period are fragmentary, but there seems to have been about 30 cases of Indigenous persons being charged or diagnosed with lunacy in the period from 1870 to 1914, the overwhelming majority of whom were from remote and sparsely-settled areas of Western Australia. The constant ill-treatment to which most Indigenous people were subjected by whites, combined with often-terrifying internecine warfare between local clans or families, makes these diagnoses problematic. There is little evidence that white professionals made any connection between this ill-treatment and the development of lunacy, nor is any consideration given by local medical practitioners to the idea that acknowledged signs of insanity among white settlers were not necessarily signs of insanity among Indigenous people. © 2011 The Author.