Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia, 1860–1930
Authors: Kain, Jennifer
Free Preview- Offers a new perspective on the study of migration and mental illness, focusing on policy makers, customs officers and shipping companies
- Draws on a broad range of bureaucratic archival sources from New Zealand and Australia to provide a policy versus practice analysis of border restrictions
- Accounts for the development of the medico-legal system designed to deal with the 'transient insane'
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- About this book
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This book examines the policy and practice of the insanity clauses within the immigration controls of New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia. It reveals those charged with operating the legislation to be non-psychiatric gatekeepers who struggled to match its intent. Regardless of the evolution in language and the location at which a migrant’s mental suitability was assessed, those with ‘inherent mental defects’ and ‘transient insanity’ gained access to these regions. This book accounts for the increased attempts to medicalise border control in response to the widening scope of terminology used for mental illnesses, disabilities and dysfunctions. Such attempts co-existed with the promotion of these regions as ‘invalids’ paradises’ by governments, shipping companies, and non-asylum doctors. Using a bureaucratic lens, this book exposes these paradoxes, and the failings within these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australasian nation-state building exercises.
- About the authors
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Jennifer S. Kain teaches History at the University of Newcastle, UK, and is a Research Associate at the Institute of Historical Research, London where she held a 2016-2017 Junior Research Fellowship. She has published in Studies in the Literary Imagination, the International Journal of Maritime History, the Social History of Medicine, and in 2018 received a New Zealand History Research Trust award.
- Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Introduction: ‘Lunatic Immigrants’
Pages 1-11
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Populating Australasia with Sound Minds
Pages 13-37
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Nation Building, Agent-Generals and Imported Lunatics, New Zealand 1870–1879
Pages 41-68
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Imbecile Passengers and Commercial Paradoxes, New Zealand 1880–1898
Pages 69-96
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Deportation, Domicile and Mental Deficiency, New Zealand 1899–1930
Pages 97-126
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia, 1860–1930
- Authors
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- Jennifer Kain
- Series Title
- Mental Health in Historical Perspective
- Copyright
- 2019
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-030-26330-0
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-26330-0
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-26329-4
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XIII, 244
- Topics
