'Madness stripped away the niceties': Tara Calaby imagines herself into a 19th-century asylum
- Written by Catharine Coleborne, Professor of History, School Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle
claudia soraya m w sirVs unsplashKew Asylum, when it opened in 1872, was the larger of two public institutions in wider Melbourne that housed people with mental illness. Grand and imposing, it opened a few years after the overcrowded Yarra Bend Asylum.
A new historical novel, set at Kew Asylum in 1890s Melbourne, prises open this world –...





