Kew Asylum - Documented Histories

Documented Histories

There are few documented or published histories of Kew Asylum. The majority of information available on the asylum comes from the Kew's official records which are now held by the Public Record Office Victoria. Some of the early documents are open (or part open) to the public for viewing such as admission books, case notes, registers, and medical journals. However, the majority of documents dating from 1915 onwards are closed, due to the sensitive nature of the material they contain and the possibility that first degree relatives may still be alive.

A number of photographs of Kew Asylum are kept by the Victorian Mental Health Library at Royal Melbourne Hospital. The State Library of Victoria also holds a number of early photographs of Kew. The University of Melbourne has a small number of theses on Kew – the majority of which are short in length and are architecture-based. The exception to this is Cheryl Day's unpublished PhD thesis which is an ethnographic description of the first fifty years of Kew's existence. While the thesis was unpublished, it is available in PDF form through the University of Melbourne Library website.

Some contemporary accounts of life in Kew are available. Paul Ward Farmer wrote an essay "Three weeks in the Kew Lunatic Asylum", describing his admission to Kew in the 1890s. Julian Thomas, an American reporter, wrote a series of articles for The Argus in 1876–1877 under the pseudonym of "The Vagabond". Thomas was an attendant at Kew at the time. There are also excerpts of affidavits from patients, doctors, and attendants at Kew (as well as other Victorian mental hospitals such as Royal Park, Mont Park and Sunbury) detailing the terrible conditions in the asylums during the 1920s in the book A Plea for Better Treatment of the Mentally Afflicted by Hon. William G. Higgs.