Henry Hellyer - Suicide

Suicide

Henry Hellyer's suicide has led to a play and to many theories about the cause, none supported by much more than speculation and phsycobabble. A balanced summary of both rumour and fact concludes that he probably suffered from depression. There is also some evidence that he may have suffered from bipolar disorder.

Thus, in a letter to his sister-in-law in 1830 he wrote that he had been in excellent health ever since arriving in the Colony, "… except for two or three short attacks occasioned by over-exertion and fatigue after some of my long excursions in the bush". There is no hint of what these "attacks" may have been, but there is no doubt that his explorations were marked by extraordinary energy and copious note-taking on everything that took his interest, from cicadas, through "young centipedes white as snow" to land-crab chimneys. He is often described as a visionary. The Chief agent of the VDL Co wrote of him: "He is exceedingly chimerical in all his ideas … He would have mansions where I would have cottages" and elsewhere "... he may he said to look upon everything with a painter's eye and upon his own discoveries in particular with an affection which is blind to all faults".

If Henry Hellyer was prone to "attacks" of depression after periods of over-exertion and fatigue, the winter of 1832 provided an occasion. He wrote: " ... The snow is so deep that we are completely hemmed in by it. It forms such hard lumps on my overalls ... that I was completely fettered by it and in the greatest pain imaginable. One hour of this weather would kill any man if he were stuck fast and remained inactive. The poor dogs were literally plated with coats of mail formed by the ice on their hair, but they travelled better than we could, as the crust would support them ...".