Historical archaeologists have been interested in the archaeology of institutions for a long time. These institutions range from missions and government outposts regulating the lives of indigenous people, to more mainstream entities such as hospitals, orphanages, asylums, workhouses, almshouses, schools, charitable institutions, or places of corrections such as gaols and juvenile homes. In recent years the nature of that interest has begun to change away from a focus on the institution per se to a consideration of the impact of institutions on the lives of their inmates (e.g. Beisaw and Gibb 2009). Thus what was already a highly varied field of investigation, due to the great range of institutions, the organisations responsible for their creation and management, and the diverse purposes of such institutions, has become even more complex. In some contexts institutions are the embodiments of ideologies, in others they are simply places where charity might be given or accepted, or where the sick can be made well or their passing eased. Thus our first point is very simple — the archaeology of institutions is no single pursuit, and the nature of our inquiries can intersect with a wide diversity of issues that in themselves might well demand a diversity of approaches.

Surveys of the field, such as De Cunzo’s (2006, 2009) recent reviews, might be read as tending to argue the opposite. In her view the institutions that archaeologists need to focus on are those of reform, confinement and social change: ‘Places of reform, surveillance, confinement, protection, control, ritual, punishment, resistance, inscription, segregation, labor, purification and discipline’ (2006:167). For her the problematic of institutional archaeology is straightforward and linked with the archaeology of social institutions in the modernising world of the 18th century and afterwards:

and

Similar notions are at play in the idea of institutions as ‘powered cultural landscapes’, where physical spaces, modified by human activity, encode power relations (Spencer-Wood and Baugher 2010). In this model, institutions become sites of class tension and gender dynamics, power inequalities and heterarchy (Baugher 2010). In a similar way, archaeologies of internment focus on control and coercion in a variety of prison and labour camps (Myers and Moshenska 2011). Flowing from this is the notion of such places as ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1961) and the connection of discourse about the design and operation of such places to more abstract notions of social control, discipline and behavioural modification (see Foucault 1973, 1977). Such an approach is strongly evident in Casella’s (2007, 2009, 2011) recent work on the archaeology of institutions, with its emphasis on incarceration and confinement of ‘the other’, while Tarlow’s recent review of the archaeology of workhouses in Britain stressed their role as ‘coercive institutions of containment and reform’ (Tarlow 2007:137). However, the archaeology of institutions also intersects with other discourses and bodies of knowledge, such as archaeologies of the body, and of sexuality, and ‘queer’ archaeology (e.g. Casella 2000a, 2000b, 2001c, 2002; De Cunzo 1995, 2001). Such archaeologies are based around the notion that total institutions act in totalising ways, that all such institutions serve such purposes, and that the primary goal of an archaeology of institutions is to map out the ways in which buildings and other items of material culture, when integrated with other documentary data, contribute to the ideological objectives of institutions.

While this is one legitimate reading of the goals of an archaeology of institutions, we argue that it contains overstatements that open the way for a less mechanistic (or perhaps nuanced) approach. The Panopticon or total-institution model overlooks, for example, many of the subtleties involved in the expression of relationships between authorities and inmates (Driver 1993:13). Goffman himself devotes much of his discussion in Asylums to considering the failures of surveillance and the ways inmates avoid regulation. Even De Cunzo (2009:207) has recently expressed uneasiness about such totalising 94views, where archaeological analysis serves simply to illustrate the workings of a pre-determined ideology.

We fully accept that managing the poor, the deviant, the sick, or the criminal generated technologies and processes of management that allowed for the treatment of individuals to occur at an industrial scale during the 19th century, but we do not see a logical distinction between institutions such as gaols and others such as factories or the military. In our reading one of the critical elements of modernity was the institutionalisation of many aspects of life ‘outside’ such totalising places. Flowing from this is the suspicion that institutions were generally far less successful in achieving their goals of punishment, modification, purification, etc. than they or their historians have claimed. Again we are presented with information that can be read as evidence of ‘resistance’ as distinct from evidence of corruption and ineptitude, or more simply, of a yawning gulf between the rhetoric of institutions and what actually transpired. Finally, in the bulk of cases archaeological analysis is focused more on buildings as items of material culture and on the analysis of written documents describing the purposes of such places, than on the material culture that is found on the sites. While there is no problem in drawing connections between the design of buildings and the totalising goals of the managers of such institutions, a limited recourse to other items of material culture, or in other cases simply a very limited array of material culture to work with, can lead to over interpretation of available evidence.

In the case of the Hyde Park Barracks many of these tenets of the archaeology of institutions are difficult to apply. On the one hand we have a built space that changes its purpose and its internal organisation over time. This is not a building designed in the modern way to discipline or punish, merely to accommodate people who had been punished by transportation, emigrants who were housed temporarily, and sick and destitute women who were in charitable care. After its closure as a convict barracks, the building was no longer associated with punishment or indeed with the modification of behaviour. While it is true that the inmates were offered pastoral as well as physical care, and there were ‘regulations’, we have noted many instances where authority was exercised in less rigid ways. The Hyde Park Barracks has an abundance of material culture that provides evidence that can elucidate aspects of life in this particular institution over some 40 years of its history.

The literature created by the archaeology of charitable care and reform is diverse and encompasses a range of institutions funded by government and church agencies, servicing the needs of diverse groups of disadvantaged and vulnerable members of the community. These include young ‘fallen’ women (De Cunzo 1995, 2001), indigenes (Birmingham 1992; Deetz 1963; Graham 1998; Lydon 2009; Middleton 2008; Sutton 2003), lepers (Prangnell 1999), the mentally ill (Piddock 2001a, 2007, 2009), orphans (Feister 2009; Godden Mackay 1997; Hughes 1992), dispossessed peasants and agricultural labourers (Fewer 2000), convicts and prisoners (Casella 2007; Casella and Fredericksen 2001; Egloff and Morrison 2001; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Gojak 2001; Jackman 2001; Karskens 2003; Kerr 1984; Morrison 2001; Nobles 2000; Oleksy 2008; Prentice and Prentice 2000; Starr 2001) and the poor (Baugher 2001; Baugher and Lenik 1997; Baugher and Spencer-Wood 2002; Divers 2004; Elia and Wesolowsky 1991; Huey 2001; Lucas 1999; Peña 2001; Piddock 2001b; Spencer-Wood 2001, 2009; Spencer-Wood and Baugher 2001).

Many of the studies of refuges for the poor focus on almshouses and poorhouses dating to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and many have emphasised the labour of the workhouse inmates and its perceived redeeming qualities (e.g. Lucas 1999; McCartney 1987; Peña 2001). The only institution directly comparable in Australia to Hyde Park is the Adelaide Destitute Asylum (1849–1917), but the archaeological remains of these two institutions differ greatly (Piddock 2001b). The artefacts of the Adelaide Asylum were heavily culled and those that remain are largely unprovenanced (Megaw 1986; Szekeres 1987), whereas at the Hyde Park Barracks the artefacts can be traced to within a few metres of the point of their original recovery.37 Consequently, Piddock’s study concentrated on spatial analysis of the buildings of the Adelaide Asylum, and while it is of considerable interest in and of itself, it is not a comparable case study.

LIFE AT THE HYDE PARK BARRACKS

The Hyde Park Barracks does not readily conform to our conventional understanding of a 19th-century institution. It was divided between two different arms of the colonial government — one ushering in the workforce and life blood of a growing society; the other caring for the ‘poor friendless old creatures’, some the residue of past cultural structures now in decay. Its Matron of 24 years, Lucy Hicks, had a free hand to shape the daily routines of Asylum life and seemed to do so unaffected by the broader intellectual debates about workhouse control. Due to changes in its use, and in later 19th-century colonial politics, descriptions of the Barracks in the Sydney press plummeted from a well-run facility in the hands of a fair and competent mistress, to an establishment punctured with the neglect and

95physical abuse of inmates, the abuse of property and privilege by the Matron and her family, and general disorder.

The archaeological assemblage from the Barracks offers a different perspective — a glimpse of daily life, not only of the institutional routine, but also of fleeting and probably private moments in the lives of the inmates, visitors and the matron’s family, who shared the space. Trapped beneath the floorboards for over 100 years, the minutiae of beads, buttons, pins, newsprint, fabric and bottle glass offer a different means of interrogating the lives within the Asylum walls. Although the collection is small relative to the thousands of women (and their possessions) that passed through the corridors, it is significant. The collection has shed light on everyday practices such as the lighting of pipes, the dispensing of medicines, or mending of garments, that were occasionally mentioned in the ‘official’ account of daily life recorded by Commissions of Inquiry.

As a result the archaeological record of the Barracks provides an opportunity to create a less mechanistic view of almshouses as being institutions that were run on the same rigid lines and that were inevitably oppressive of their inmates. In this way a detailed archaeological record of the Barracks acts in the same way as the archaeology of ‘slums’ has promoted an understanding that the residential housing of working-class people was not inevitably the ‘slum’ portrayed in popular media (Mayne and Murray 2001).

Individuals used the institution strategically as one response to the related problems of poverty, illness, injury and infirmity. For their part the authorities, including Matron Hicks, members of the Asylums Board and visiting ladies, were not all-powerful and concerned only with reforming the inmates within the walls of the Asylum. Their responses to the women in their charge mixed prejudice and respectability with compassion and humanity. The infirm and destitute entered the institution, and negotiated its customs and boundaries for the days, weeks and even years in which they called the Asylum home.

Daily Labour

Women at the Hyde Park Asylum did nearly all the domestic work of the institution, including cooking, cleaning, sewing and washing. While most of the inmates were elderly and infirm, Matron Hicks retained a number who were strong enough to do the heavy work while earning a small daily gratuity. Sewing and patching were gentler, but still demanding tasks, which served a useful and practical function, as well as reinforcing the imperative of work in return for sustenance and the prevention of idleness. Some women sewed all day, sitting near the windows for light and the fireplaces for warmth, while others sewed in bed. Mary London explained that ‘when I can sew, I sew; I do nothing but sewing’ (Q3135, Government Asylums Inquiry Board 1887:507).

Sewing was, in fact, a common task in institutional settings during the 19th century. In the 1860s, men and women at the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum were employed in sewing, tailoring and cobbling boots, making most of the inmates’ clothing on the premises (Kehoe 1998:32). Men and women at the New Norfolk Hospital for the Insane in Tasmania were also employed in making and repairing clothes and footwear (Piddock 2007:179). At the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum in Victoria, 200 female inmates repaired more than 50,000 clothing and bedding items during the year 1884, in what was clearly a large-scale commercial operation (Inspector of Lunatic Asylums 1885:56).

In one important respect, however, the Asylum differed from many contemporary charitable institutions — it did not have a commercial laundry to recover its costs. Many other refuges exploited their free labour force by selling their services into the marketplace, thereby making up the shortfall between private subscriptions and government contributions. The Sydney Female Refuge Society, for example, advertised ‘Washing and Needlework Done at Reasonable Rates’, which succeeded in defraying the expenses of the Society (Godden 1987:301; Sydney Female Refuge Society 1856:4). A central feature of the Geelong Female Refuge in the 1860s was its laundry, a ‘sanctimonious sweatshop’ and reliable money earner that made up for the scarcity in public donations (Swain 1985:15). The Convent of the Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum in Melbourne operated one of the largest commercial laundries in the colony (Kovesi 2006:144–147), while at the Adelaide Destitute Asylum the laundry work was so strenuous that the women went on strike in 1888 (Geyer 1994:28). In this way the institutions efficiently combined economy of operation with the obligation for inmates to perform productive labour in the pursuit of moral training.

The work of those at the Hyde Park Asylum, on the other hand, was focused inward. Their cleaning and sewing was mutually self-supporting — all the inmates benefited from the work each woman performed. While much of the labour was undoubtedly tedious and tiring, it was also necessary and economical. The tasks were familiar and respectable, and more or less the same as those the women would have performed in private homes as domestic servants or in their own homes as daughters, wives and mothers. This was in stark contrast to the workhouses of England and Ireland, which, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, invoked a ‘severe and repulsive’ discipline (Thompson 1980:295) to ensure that arduous labour was not only a deterrent but even a punishment for the ‘crime’ of destitution. Workhouse labour was focused not only on self-sufficiency but also on profitability (Markus 961993:104). The work of picking oakum and grinding corn was directed outside the walls, with products sent away from the inmates who created them.

There is little evidence at the Hyde Park Barracks, however, of the worst excesses of the industrial workhouses of Britain, in spite of several historians’ claim to the contrary (e.g. Jalland 2002:206; O’Brien 1988:52; Ramsland 1986:160). The architecture of the building, and the many government agencies competing for space in the complex, meant that punitive labour for several hundred mostly frail, sick and elderly inmates was never feasible, irrespective of whether it was ever desirable to parliamentarians of New South Wales. There were no cells for isolation and solitude, such as those at the Magdalen Asylum in Philadelphia (De Cunzo 1995:39), but open dormitories where the women were free to move around as they pleased. The original regulations drawn up for the management of the Asylum were long ignored by Matron Hicks. Instead, she exercised her own discretion, establishing routines that were sufficiently flexible and humane to accommodate the needs of the inmates.

‘Making do’: Institutional Consumption and Private Adaptation

The government outlay on destitute asylums rose from £8995 in 1862 when it took over many of the responsibilities of the Benevolent Society, to £26,885 in 1885, just prior to the second major overhaul of the administration of these institutions. The rate per inmate across the four asylums (Hyde Park, Macquarie Street Parramatta, George Street Parramatta and Liverpool) fluctuated between about £10 and £15 per annum, averaging £13 14s. 8¾d. over the period. Until the mid-1880s the Hyde Park Asylum was usually the most cost effective of the four, having the lowest cost per inmate: £11 2s. 5¼d. in 1871, £14 6s. 11¾d. in 1876, and £15 3s. 2d. in 1885 (Government Asylums Board 1872:406; 1875:928; 1885:720). This was a source of pride for Matron Hicks:

Most of the food consumed at the Barracks was supplied on contract under the direction of the Board, in consultation with the Matron. Bread, meat, vegetables, grains, dairy produce and fuel were supplied to the Asylum on a daily or weekly basis. Fabrics used for Asylum garb were ordered by the bolt from local wholesalers, under approval of the Board but in consultation with the matron (Q2356–2357, Public Charities Commission 1874:76). Kitchen, laundry and mess equipment were probably also ordered from local suppliers on the government books, and the purchase of substantial appliances such as stoves and boilers was arranged directly by the Colonial Secretary’s office. Medical supplies and consumables were arranged by the Visiting Surgeon and Medical Attendant. Gifts, in the form of tea and sugar, flowers and reading matter were also brought on site by kind-hearted visitors.

In spite of this climate of wholesale, mess-hall consumption individuals experienced some degree of control over their material world. It is true that the female inmates were disrobed and bathed on admission to the Asylum and supplied with Asylum clothing, but they retained their own garments for visits away from the place. The archaeological evidence suggests that the clothes they wore inside were standardised but varied subtly according to print design and colour, and the ability of individuals to modify garments for fit and comfort — they were not necessarily restricted to wearing shapeless institutional garb.

It is also likely that the women were able to retain whatever personal possessions had survived the impoverished circumstances that led them to seek government assistance. The possession of too many personal effects, however, probably disqualified potential inmates from entry to the Asylum in the first place. While it is unlikely that they had bags or trunks in the Asylum, small pouches and pockets in aprons allowed the women to keep personal items close to hand, such as a pipe and tobacco, a few coins, or a prayer book or rosary. Taking advantage of loose floorboards to stash objects was another, perhaps riskier, way of hiding private possessions. Keeping objects out of sight may also have limited opportunities for theft, a common source of conflict in 19th-century benevolent asylums (Twomey 2002:68). Those who were able-bodied could earn small wages to purchase additional tea, sugar and tobacco from other inmates, and these funds could also be spent wherever they chose on their days of leave in the bustling markets of Sydney.

Tobacco also served as a means of small-scale institutional exchange. Mary Kennedy and Margaret Heggarty, who were inmates at the Asylum for more than 20 years, bought tobacco rations from those who did not smoke and sold them to those who did. Mary Wright, an elderly blind inmate, traded ‘a box of matches or a bit of tobacco’ for someone to ‘lead her around’ (Q2279, Q3185, Government Asylums Inquiry Board 1887:488, 508).

The Immigrant Depot women, too, had control over their goods and chattels, but within the confines of the Barracks those on short stays probably had limited access to their trunks, and only the Matron could unlock the fancy work they began onboard the ship.

Despite these limitations, the remains of many private possessions were recovered from under the boards. These include not only the items bearing the tags of ownership, such as the handkerchief 97and name stamp, but also those preserved in their state of consumption — the hessian stopper in the liqueur bottle, the silk strap around the bottle, and the sixpence tied in the hanky. Each bears the mark of a crafty, nameless individual making use of the limited resources available to perform tasks or behave in ways not catered for in the Asylum’s operational budgets. Thrift is also apparent in the repair of broken clay pipes, cotton thread wrapped around a wedge of cardboard, and the many patches sewn onto holes in garments.

However, this ‘making-do’ strategy was not limited to the private customs of the inmates. The medical attendant or ward nurses were also ‘making do’ by using general purpose bottles and wooden discs when prescription bottles and labels were hard to come by.

While the practice of ‘making do’ is a phenomenon invariably associated with the poorer classes, or periods of extreme economic hardship (such as during the Great Depression), it is also frequently documented as being practised by pioneer settlers in remote regions, where distance from metropolitan retailers (and wholesalers) made supplies costly or uncertain. Rustic bush furniture, such as meat safes and pantries, buckets made from kerosene tins, bottles cut down into jars, and mattresses sewn from chaff bags, are iconic artefacts in this class (Isaacs 1990). The use of common newsprint cut into scalloped or saw tooth patterns to serve as mantelpiece lambrequins is also well documented (Lane and Serle 1990:248, 325; see also Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2004:162–166).

It is surprising then to discover an assemblage of makeshift material culture in the centre of a commercial hub such as Sydney in the 19th century. It demonstrates how those on the economic and social margins of society can be disengaged from the marketplace in their midst. Assemblages from institutional sites such as the Barracks also afford us an opportunity to study organised consumption on a large scale. While these artefacts represent only a small slice of the assemblage, they provide unique and remarkable insights into the management and utilitarian exploitation of material culture in the 19th century.

Improvement and Spirituality

The Hyde Park Barracks is a special case because it served both destitute and infirm women and arriving immigrants, and was never intended to be a vehicle of reform. It was instead a place of refuge, concerned more with the health of many of its inmates rather than with reforming their characters or exacting punishment for crimes, either of omission or commission. The Hyde Park Asylum was an institution that enclosed and confined a group of women based on their infirmity and destitution. The spartan meals, plain clothes and daily labour, however, were more about economy and convenience than control and discipline. The rapid, virtually overnight, creation of the institution in 1862 was an ad hoc response to a range of social, economic and political imperatives, rather than a carefully orchestrated plan of moral reform. It functioned as a workaday negotiation between its dedicated matron and the needs of several hundred women, circumscribed by the demands of thrift, hygiene and basic humanity. The complex was not hidden away on the edge of town like a prison, cemetery, abattoir or some other ‘dirty’ establishment, but was located right in the heart of a thriving metropolitan centre. In spite of attempts to separate the inmates from other users of the complex, the women moved about their allotted spaces freely, and instead of high walls they enjoyed attractive views over parklands and churches and busy streets outside.

The notion of ‘improvement’ has recently been explored by Tarlow (2007) to examine the processes of social and personal reform that occurred in Britain during the later 18th and early 19th centuries. Authorities established a range of institutions to support paupers, orphans and other marginal social groups, in the expectation that they would help to re-shape society and improve its moral and economic foundations. Asylums established in Australia during the 19th century often had similar ‘improving’ goals, expressed through such regimes as the ‘moral treatment’ of lunatic inmates in South Australia and Tasmania (Piddock 2001a, 2007, 2009). Material from the Hyde Park Asylum, especially in the form of religious tracts, provides evidence of attempts by clergymen, missionaries and other middle-class reformers, to enhance the moral, material and spiritual condition of a particular group of institutional inmates.

Tracts were a product of the evangelical revivals of the 18th and early-19th centuries. Evangelical doctrine promoted salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, a Puritan morality, and commitment to a life of holiness through prayer and Bible-reading. An important manifestation of this movement was the publication of thousands of cheap tracts for distribution to the poor, sick and desperate. Evangelical visitors brought large quantities of religious tracts into the Barracks and distributed them among the women. While it is unclear the extent to which the messages of such literature were read and absorbed by the women, the quantity of material reflects the efforts of outsiders to improve the moral condition of vulnerable inmates.

There are also items, especially from the Catholic tradition, that suggest a more personal spiritual practice. Rosaries and devotional medals were found exclusively on the southern rooms of Level 3, suggesting that this side of the building was for Catholic inmates, while the north side was for Protestants. This segregation reflects the wider sectarian division that characterised Australian society at this time. 98

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The historical archaeology of the Hyde Park Barracks is unique for a number of reasons. The preservation of such a large and diverse assemblage of paper, fabric and other materials in the dry cavity spaces under the floors is simply unparalleled in historical archaeology in Australia, and in the Anglophone world. The well documented history of the building provides a rare opportunity to directly link the artefact assemblages with particular phases of occupational history, specifically the Immigration Depot and Government Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women. These institutions in themselves were unique in their time, and their management under the one Matron, Lucy Hicks, for 24 years makes them an exceptional example in the history of 19th-century institutions.

This remarkable case study gives cause to reflect on the attempts by the New South Wales Government to find a bed for every sick and indigent person in one of their four benevolent asylums, and their success as a bureaucracy in a political landscape of limited surveillance of publicly funded institutions. Within this meta-machinery of the institution lie the public and private histories of the Hyde Park Asylum itself, its inmates and governors. It is the story of private and public lives, and of a remarkable, if fallible woman, Lucy Hicks, whose family history is tightly interwoven with the history of the Asylum.

This Archaeology of Institutional Confinement merely touches upon the many facets of the world inside and outside the institution. The archaeological studies of medical care, religious comfort, clothing, bureaucracy and making-do at the Hyde Park Barracks provide incentives to foster this integration of archaeological and historical information.

Above all the historical archaeology of the Hyde Park Barracks demonstrates that an archaeology of institutions can do more than support or challenge the Dickensian view of Asylum life, or compare and contrast patterns in architectural typology. It can detect the provision of care and comfort within the broad processes of control and governance, it can explore the private and public facets of a diverse range of institutions, and it can elucidate the individual histories of the people who lived and worked inside the institution’s walls.

Of course what we are left with is more than a set of oppositions between the power to dominate and control and the power to resist. Although there is little doubt that the archaeology of institutions can (and indeed does) allow us to explore the power of the state and its capacities to ensure discipline through surveillance and confinement, it is also true that not all institutions during this period existed to achieve such ends. At the Barracks there is abundant evidence of the complexity of such institutions where ambiguities in power relations were played out in the everyday world of lives being led in the expectation of a better life — either in this world or the next.