Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  When he returned to Australia in 1919, it was with an urgency to make up for lost time and reunite with his family. Waiting were his wife and three sons, John, David and Frank. John was the only one of the three boys who had any memories of their father. Now seven, the youngster had changed a great deal over the previous four years, but so had his father. War badly scarred David Cade’s mind; he was not the same man who set forth from Australia, Gallipoli-bound, in 1915. David Cade is not remembered as a warm or affectionate man, but rather as austere and fusty, any softer attributes having been stripped away by war. If any one of his children were to have noticed the change, it would have been his eldest, John.

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  While David Cade was away at war, Ellen and the three boys moved from Murtoa to a succession of boarding houses in the cool-climate country on the outskirts of northeast Melbourne, counting out pennies to each new landlady. When David returned from war, he was keen to see his eldest son, but from the start theirs would be a formal relationship. Although there was deep affection between them, John only ever called his father ‘sir’. This, no doubt, was expected of boys of his generation, but it was also a social grace that allowed any complicating emotions between father and son never to interfere.

  After returning from the First World War, David Cade appraised his own life as a ‘failure’. On more than one occasion he wrote of lost opportunities. Yet to read his letters and the memoir he penned in 1945(about his observations on life and art), and to ponder his courageous exploits during war, we can be in no doubt that here was a highly intelligent and brave man, with perceptive and well-informed views; however, he despaired over his life and continually berated himself for his self-described failings. Ambition called him but he felt unable to respond. This preoccupation with perceived failure in all likelihood points to David Cade’s psychological wounds from the war. His visions of dead and dying men didn’t dissolve, no matter how hard friends and family might have wished those visions away or just, mistakenly, assumed their disappearance over time. David Cade diagnosed himself as having ‘war-weariness’; others called it ‘shellshock’ but today we would call it post-traumatic stress disorder. Titles change; the symptoms don’t. Whatever fashionable label we use, David Cade was as much a victim of war as the boys he saw cut down around him. When he returned to country Victoria he felt unable to cope with the trials of daily house calls and the relentless demands of general practice.

  Instead, he sought refuge from the mental anguish of incessant general practice and applied for a position as a doctor in an asylum for the insane—hoping for a regular government salary and less stress. So, like the refugee from war he was, David Cade took a medical post with the Lunacy Department in the small, pretty town of Beechworth in northeastern Victoria’s alpine country.

  In 1920, David, accompanied by Ellen and the three boys, moved to the Beechworth Hospital for the Insane. The Cade family settled into a doctor’s cottage in the grounds of the hospital, and for the next two years, the asylum—with its towering walls, farm and garden, set high above the township—was home. As late as the 1990s, an ex-nursing staff member of Beechworth could recall stories of the doctor and young John walking the asylum grounds together.

  The period from eight to ten years of age is an impressionable one for a boy—a time when ideas and dreams take root in his mind; an uncomplicated time he will look upon for the remainder of his life. In 1920, a typical eight-year-old boy played cricket with his mates on the streets of suburban Melbourne; John played games in a lunatic asylum with disturbed men who thought they were Jesus. There can be little doubt that in these germinal years John’s affection for the mentally ill stirred and took root.

  In 1922 Dr David Cade and his family transferred from Beechworth to the northern outskirts of Melbourne, to the Sunbury Asylum for the Insane. The Cades remained there only a short time. A government archive—a school register—in one thin, erratic scribble, places John and his brothers at the local Sunbury State School for a handful of months. There is a paucity of personal reflections at this part of the story and few official records to enlighten us. But we do know from family lore that, as a boy, John was a collector—of stones, of insects and of words. And he was a classifier, carefully placing everything into columns and rows in the same way that a nineteenth-century naturalist might, and labelling everything neatly and precisely. John displayed an innate and joyous curiosity, and early on exhibited a love of the natural world. There was a compulsiveness to it all—picking up a stone to investigate its geology, fully prepared for some secretive creature lurking beneath in its shadow; it was a thoroughness he brought to everything he did.

  In 1922, after their short stint at the Sunbury Asylum, the family moved again, this time to the more modern and spacious Mont Park Hospital for the Insane located at the intersection of suburban Heidelberg, Macleod and Bundoora.

  Although the dates are unclear we know that John attended the local Heidelberg State School along with a new mate, Bennie Rank. John and Bennie became part of a small select group of pupils offered tuition by the headmaster, Mr Frank Clough, for scholarships aiming (we imagine) at more prestigious schools. As it turned out, neither John nor Bennie won scholarships, but this was the first time others marked John out for exceptional treatment and possible higher honours in life.

  After school each day John practised tennis, hitting balls for hours against a high brick wall of one of the Mont Park Asylum wards; or he carted a set of clubs across Plenty Road for a game of golf with his mother, or brother David, both golf fanatics; John, whatever the sport, was blessed with adroit hand–eye coordination. While tennis in particular was a passion, boxing was a necessity for self-defence. Boxing for a boy in the mid-1920s was as much a manly rite of passage as was a clumsy first shave. John was a keen student of pugilism and anointed himself as the guardian of his two younger brothers. Bullying, far from a modern curse, lurked nearby and threatened the younger pair, so John became their protector. Like so much in his early life he learned the craft of boxing from an asylum patient, a ‘dear old man’ who pranced about Mont Park Hospital sparring—imitating the 1920s world heavyweight champ, Jack Dempsey—with invisible foes. We don’t know any more about this insane instructor of John Cade, though we wish we did. Perhaps it was a psychotic patient, or an old soak—one of the many brain-damaged drunkards who’d dissolved their brains with booze—or a boxer with a scarred brain from the relentless accumulation of hits in a boxing tent. Who knows? But in the 1920s there was no shortage of such candidates to offer the young pugilist tuition. And John, apparently, was not shy in taking it up.

  In 1925, John entered the exclusive Scotch College in leafy Hawthorn, Melbourne, a school favoured by some of the wealthiest families in Australia to educate their sons. An article published by the Age newspaper in 2010 noted that Scotch College, the second-oldest extant school in Victoria, boasted more honoured Australians among its alumni than any other school in the nation. In 1925 it had just enrolled one more future star.

  The choice of Scotch College tells us something else about John: that he was a boy who thought for himself. When John’s father—an Anglican—brokered an agreement with his Irish Catholic wife, allowing the children to be raised as Catholics, he insisted as a compromise that the boys be given the choice of their secondary school. John’s father had gone to a prestigious Anglican School, Melbourne Grammar. And we would expect most sons would simply follow in their father’s footsteps. But despite having an Anglican father and Catholic mother, John, in the finest ecumenical spirit, plumped for the Presbyterian school his grandfather Joseph had attended. To cap it off, John’s enrolment form described his religion as Roman Catholic. Years later, John told his family that he felt somewhat ‘on the outer’ at Scotch, that in this Presbyterian School he had to prove to himself that his Catholic faith was soundly based.

  Knowledge about John’s time at Scotch College is sparse, gleaned largely from the memories of a few fellow students and the occasional
line left to us in the school’s yearbooks. He played Australian Rules football for his House, but not that well, and he was studious and meticulous about everything he did in the world of academia. Although clearly bright, there is no suggestion that he was a precocious student or marked out for future achievements any more than his fellow classmates. In his final year he excelled in biology, taking first-class honours and he also did well in chemistry, physics and English, snaring third-class honours in all three.

  It remains a long-held family belief that John’s interest in and aptitude for chemistry goes back to Frederick Cade, who migrated to Australia in the 1840s and set up his pharmacy nearly a decade before the Victorian gold rush. The Cade family archives include a mottled photograph of Frederick—a stern, bearded figure with grizzled hair, a creased face and arms folded like a disapproving maths teacher. The first Cade to set foot in Melbourne looks like a man you’d rather not meet. But he is treasured among the family’s amateur historians and his photograph is pulled reverentially from the family folder. John himself was proud of this connection with Frederick Cade the ‘druggist’ and of his own deep bloodlines that led directly to the birth of Melbourne and the start of colonial chemistry.

  John remained at Scotch College, matriculating at the end of 1928. Turning over the pages of the various yearbooks there is a veritable acreage of names to plough through looking for the one name you really want to find—to uncover what John did or didn’t do during those youthful years. And always looking for clues as to what might make this individual exceptional. Perhaps, in truth, we also scour these lines for ordinariness; to confirm our nascent belief that we all can achieve greatness regardless of the mediocrity of performance at school.

  His name appears in these yearbooks among some other notables, and in the sea of students who drifted into and out of school, unrecognised and unrecognisable. Scotch nurtured a talented bunch in his year: Sir Archibald Glenn, industrialist and Managing Director of ICI (now Orica); Justice C.I. Menhennit of abortion law fame; C.D. Kemp, co-founder of the Institute of Public Affairs; E.R. Love, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Melbourne; as well as E.A.H. Laurie, writer and communist advocate. And then there was Bennie Rank, John’s tennis partner and co-catcher of trains to Flinders Street and on to Scotch College, who rose to head Plastic Surgery at Royal Melbourne Hospital, tucking a knighthood into his kit along the way.

  In the archive folder the school keeps on John Cade, we found an unexpected black and white photograph. It shows John, in his Scotch regalia, with his father and younger brothers. This photo catches him between childhood and adulthood: the date is 1928, so John is sixteen. He lounges, languidly, with a semi-tropical palm behind him, as if stretched out on a deck chair beside a pool in a dreamy, decadent scene from The Great Gatsby; it is the sweet period before the world fell apart after the Great Stock Market Crash. On closer scrutiny John looks like he might be wearing his cricket creams beneath his school blazer; and, although not, should be sipping iced tea and consuming cucumber sandwiches. The school has labelled this 1928 photo with the less-than-illuminating title: ‘Activity—Famous’.

  John’s father, on the other hand, looks uptight and fully buttoned-up in a three-piece suit. With a face as severe as Frederick Cade’s, it is, perhaps, no wonder John only ever addressed his father as ‘sir’.

  At the end of school and with over 150 years of dynastic tradition and expectation, it hardly raised an eyebrow when—driven to succeed and talented to boot—John chose to study medicine at the University of Melbourne.

  In 1929, John commenced the first of six years of his medical course. When his father returned to Beechworth that year as the asylum’s medical superintendent, John remained in Melbourne and boarded with his aunt Rene in Orrong Road, Toorak, at five guineas rent per week. When it came to money, John had a scrupulous moral code. When his uncle, a general practitioner in the town of Narrabri, NSW, died in 1931 he left some money to John, who immediately used it to repay his own father for his medical education.

  His fellow students remember John as an organised and careful student and were not surprised when he was awarded the forensic medicine prize in his final year. Benjamin Rank remembered that John was ‘up in the top marks’ and ‘was research minded, keeping details and classifications’ during their resident and postgraduate years. John’s bosom pal at university and fellow Catholic, Frank Prendergast, concurred and also recalled John’s fascination with all things ‘biochemical’, adding that John ‘was always meticulous in everything he did’. Prendergast, who was to later study and practise psychiatry, saw John as a highly distinctive individual, a man who was ‘rarely ruffled’, and commented that beneath John’s calm exterior he was never frightened of physical confrontation. Prendergast cited an incident when John was betrayed by an acquaintance; in a righteous rage, John exploded and summarily kicked the offending person ‘in the backside’. It made an impression on Prendergast precisely because it was one of the few times he saw John’s anger erupt.

  It is part of Cade family lore how, at university, John boxed against Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, no slouch with the gloves himself and later one of Australia’s most recognised Second World War heroes. And how John sparred with Bennie Rank, whose nose he flattened (very apt, considering Sir Benjamin rose to be one of Australia’s most prominent plastic surgeons).

  In the final year of his medical course, John attended twelve lectures on mental diseases. We have John’s psychiatry textbook from that time, a slender maroon volume titled Aids to Psychiatry by William Siegfried Dawson, one of the first psychiatric professors appointed in Australia. It is the first time we come across John’s signature style of scrupulously underlining sentences with the steadiest of hands, a clue to his character. If assiduous attention to detail is any indication of his approach to psychiatry then he, unlike so many of his fellow students, saw psychiatry as a subject worthy of serious study.

  John’s first year as a doctor was spent at St Vincent’s Hospital, the flagship Catholic hospital in Melbourne. The following year, having decided to study paediatrics, he worked at the Children’s Hospital. By now his father had returned from Beechworth and was back at Sunbury Asylum. John returned to live with his parents and scooted back and forth between Sunbury and the Children’s Hospital on his very stylish, newly purchased, English-made Francis-Barnett motorcycle. It was on one of these trips to the Children’s Hospital that he became ill.

  In 1936, antibiotics were unheard of and ‘catching a chill’ was the ominous phrase that parents uttered when one of their children fell ill. Without antibiotics this could be a death sentence. So it was with some anxiety that David Cade recalled John catching ‘a chill in foul weather’. Within days John fell desperately ill with pneumococcal pneumonia and was confined to bed at the Children’s Hospital. He was nursed around the clock; his parents—fearing the worst—expected him to die. John’s father recalled the outlook when the infection spread from one to both lungs: ‘His condition . . . appeared very grave and one Sunday morning . . . we had become certain that he would not survive the day.’

  But survive the day he did; and at night a young, beautiful brunette nurse sat by his bedside and cared for him. Her name was Estana Evelyn Jean Charles, but everyone just called her Jean. A highly intelligent and warm woman who had gained certificates in three areas of nursing, she sponged John’s body, switched on the oxygen cylinders that brought him life-giving gas, and, by the bedside, prayed for her patient.

  Jean remembered: ‘He came down with a very bad pneumonia . . . I wasn’t to turn him or move him unless I had permission . . . he was very, very ill . . . the priest was called.’

  When, against expectations, John’s fever broke and his laboured breathing eased, his father praised a ‘merciful’ god for his son’s salvation. John lifted his weakened frame from the hospital bed and spent time talking to his nurse, Jean; apparently, even in such sickness, he liked what he saw. On the day he was discharged he came back and
asked her out to dinner.

  Somewhere along the way, in a moment of epiphany, John abandoned the idea of becoming a paediatrician and decided to take up his father’s profession, psychiatry. In November 1936, John Cade, now 24 years old, was duly appointed as a Medical Officer in the Victorian Department of Mental Hygiene and headed off to Beechworth Mental Hospital, with his dog Bonzo the Fourth tagging along for company.

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  Beechworth Hospital for the Insane opened in 1867. Even today the three-storey main building is gloomily impressive, and its parallel lines of deep-set windows, like empty eye sockets, brood over the acres of picturesque grounds below. Modelled on the grand English asylum plan devised by Dr John Conolly, its Italianate corridor-style buildings stand like a silent stone penitentiary. For nearly 130 years this site was a sink of insanity; one of a handful of places where much of the madness in the state of Victoria was corralled and condensed. Originally built for 400 patients, it often crammed closer to a thousand men and women behind its bluestone walls. It was constructed on the beautiful hills that overlook the township of Beechworth; everyone knew if you were heading ‘up the hill’ you were off to the asylum.

  The hospital site, after 128 years, was decommissioned in 1995 as a psychiatric hospital. To stroll around the many acres now with its dozens of empty buildings is quite something. If you venture there in the first hour after sunrise, the air is sweet and clear; the dawn frost lies thick on the acres of grass that recede into the distance. It is one of the prettiest spots in the state of Victoria.