Was good at sewing. She did repairs and made clothes on a Singer.
Stefan played the mouth-organ and spoke five languages. On good days, well directed, he could clip a hedge. Henry was better. He was a man of fewer words, but he had a sense about gardening and usually didn’t need direction.
George sat at the bus shelter and did the Melbourne Herald crossword. It was one of those crosswords where each clue gave three obvious answers, making half a million combinations. The prize kept jackpotting. It hit 3000 pounds once, which was a lot of money in 1965. George posted his entry every day at Beechworth Post Office before going back Up Top.
“”Up Top” was the Beechworth Mental Hospital, set in a large garden site atop a high hill at the edge of the small country town. That was in the days before euphemisms, when nuts were nuts and a mental hospital was a mental hospital. Stefan, Henry and Alice lived Up Top, too. They came into the town and did odd jobs for those who would pay.
Stefan had a son in Melbourne who never visited. Beechworth was the repository of those who had no visitors. Two hundred kilometres from Melbourne, the embarrassment could be put away. The schizophrenics and manic depressives were out of harm’s way, controlled by a combination of the then nascent lithium treatment and “”I’ll lock you up in the yard unless you quieten down”.
In the mid-1960s the mental hospital provided more than half the jobs in the town and the other half were in turn to support them. So the Mental Hospital sustained the town. And the town sustained the Mental Hospital.
Most patients had good days and then some bad days. Alice had for a long time all good days. Was it possible, then, that she could leave the mental hospital and live in the town, sustaining herself by doing sewing jobs?
In those days, attitudes were different. People were “”certified” insane. “”Henry suffers from mental illness”. Rather you said: “”Henry is mad, or is certified insane”. His mental illness defined him. Because of this, the crossing back from insanity to sanity was an acknowledged impossibility.
None the less, Alice was allowed to leave the Mental Hospital in 1965 and she rented a tiny weatherboard house in Loch Street and took in sewing.
Of the several hundred patients she was the best prospect. There were at best one or two others who might make the transition, though none to my knowledge did in the 18 years my father was chaplain at Beechworth Mental Hospital, from 1959 to 1977.
Henry and Stefan and the others continued to live Up Top. They walked to town in the day, had a beer or two, bet at the TAB and sat on the park benches for hours. On good days they worked in the gardens of those townspeople who did not allow fear to rule compassion.
I recall one day Henry misunderstanding my father’s instruction about pruning. He virtually destroyed an apple tree. When my father saw it he cried: “”Henry, you idiot; you bloody idiot. You’ve killed that tree.”
And then he roared with laughter. “”Of course, you’re an idiot. Come and have some lunch.”
Henry had as passable a life as his circumstances would permit. Up Top was home, bed and security. The town was community.
Not so Alice. She committed suicide in 1966. How could she have possibly coped? Even for smart people, it is difficult setting up a home and a small business, let alone someone straight from a mental hospital.
And yet throughout the 1980s in an immoral liaison of the trendy everyone-is-equal movement and the sharp edge of public-sector rationalism, people were turned out of mental hospitals throughout Australia to fend for themselves in the name of “”integrating with the community”, “”better use of resources”, “”giving human dignity” and “”economic rationalisation”.
Far from integrating with the community (as they did when patients), they were turned into an alien world that shunned them, a world of which they could never be a part. They continue to suicide, suffer without treatment, get hounded by police and courts and lead lives of lonely, desperate despair while around them is comparative affluence.
Last week, Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin exposed this shameful, discompassionate mistreatment of the mentally ill.
Yes, Henry was mad. But he was human and mad. And that’s a damn sight more than you can say for those responsible for emptying Australia’s mental hospitals in the past decade.