Although she was desperate for John to share his experiences of the previous five years, he was steadfast in resisting. ‘He said he didn’t want to talk about his experiences, he just wanted to come home.’ All she extracted from John, at least initially, was that it was ‘a terrible time . . . anything you’d want to know . . . the men wouldn’t talk about it . . . but he was the same lovely personality . . . gentle . . . there was no anger’.
In the decades afterwards, John referred to his time in Changi as the ‘interminable’ years, that seemingly eternal time of suffering. John was about to turn 34. He was angry that war had stolen from him the finest years of his professional life, and fearful that it had robbed him of his finest years with his two young children.
Although weakened, John resolved to resume his psychiatric work as quickly as possible. As Jean recollected:
he was . . . longing to get back to work . . . he was wanting to get going, to get started . . . When he came home from Changi one of the first things he said to me: ‘I must get busy, I’ve spent five years away; three and a half years as a prisoner of war and I had to look after people with no equipment . . . I must find something to stop the melancholy.’
John knew the awful sight of the melancholic patient, severely depressed, sitting mute and immobile, tormented by black thoughts of death; he also knew of other patients who roared and spun into a kind of celestial mania. It was to these extremes of mood that John turned his mind as he prepared to return to asylum life.
PART 3
Salt of
the Earth
A TREATMENT FOR MANIA:
The prolonged bath
[The bath] is given at a temperature of about 98° to 100° F. It has a marked effect on maniacal patients. It is given daily, and . . . prolonged from day to day until a patient may remain in the bath for four or five hours . . . Some authorities use a lid to the bath with a hole in it, through which the head of the patient projects.
Handbook for Mental Nurses, 7th edition, 1941
JOHN CADE: On experimentation
For goodness sake don’t waste your time elaborating untestable hypotheses. Guessing becomes merely a game unless it is a plan for action.
10
Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital, nearly twenty kilometres to the north of Melbourne, was set on a rise on the landscape, visible to all, yet cut off from the currents of normal life. It was a hospital in character and rhythm, more rural than urban, and by the late 1940s it spread over 160 acres, with over 50 scattered buildings and just on 200 ex-diggers filling its wards and roaming its expansive grounds.
This elevated plot of land was at once the highest point in metropolitan Melbourne and a world in itself, amputated from normal society. But it had not always been so. And the clue to its once-splendid past lay at the very heart of the asylum.
At that heart stood Ward A, which housed the more manageable convalescing men: men who, while not ready to rip the place apart, were still troubled by fantasies of the mind. Some slept on the ground floor; others made their way up the broad sweeping staircase and slept on the first floor, out on the spacious verandah with a view of the Melbourne skyline.
In the 1940s, even with a cursory look, one would have sensed that this imposing building—defaced by tacky renovations—had once been a magnificent homestead. But when John returned to Bundoora in 1946, Ward A was a shabby, blemished parody of itself: its wide first-floor verandah enclosed by canvas; cheap timbers nailed on the outside; ornaments cracked, broken or stolen; the divine, oval stained-glass skylight, under which nurses could recall dancing with ex-servicemen, blackened with grime and panels cracked.
Forty years earlier, Ward A had been the famed ‘Bundoora Homestead’, an architectural masterpiece in Queen Anne revivalist style, designed and constructed in 1899 for the very wealthy Mr John Matthew Vincent Smith, known in horse-racing circles simply as J.V.
Smith made his mansion and its surrounds into one of the finest horse studs in the Commonwealth. An equine empire, the Bundoora stud was a name famous throughout the nation. It was here that the virile stallion Wallace, the first son of Carbine, grazed and sired. Of course, all Australians knew of Carbine, the legendary winner of the 1890 Melbourne Cup in record time, and with the heaviest weight ever recorded: a superstar not rivalled in human form. The chestnut Wallace was not far behind. His wins included the Caulfield Guineas, Victoria Derby and Sydney Cup. But he is best remembered as a sire. His progeny galloped the grounds of Bundoora and went on to win two Melbourne Cups and six Victoria Derbys. In its pomp, Bundoora was a horse-lover’s paradise and a place to be seen for the fashionable folk of Edwardian Melbourne.
In 1920, Smith sold his home and the estate to the Commonwealth Government and the fate of the homestead turned. It would be converted into a convalescent farm to accommodate and restore those soldiers who returned, mentally damaged, from the First World War. The Bundoora estate, once a masculine empire of the finest bloodlines, would now, ironically, accept discarded men, seeking to reinvigorate them.
In the years after the First World War, thousands of men returned to Melbourne with minds broken, unable to resume their previous lives. Bundoora would change all that, or so it was hoped. The Argus newspaper reported that these ‘war derelicts’ could be regenerated. In gushing tones, suggestive of an advertisement for a modern-day health retreat, The Argus enthused that Bundoora was ‘charmingly situated a few miles beyond Preston, and adjacent to the Macleod sanatorium for TB soldiers . . . The sight of these wrecked soldiers, patiently graduating from simple jobs, such as tending flower gardens, to the more arduous duties of the farm labourer, is gratifying and inspiring.’
One might just imagine an old-fashioned Movietone newsreel in black and white, flickering with romantic images of beaming returned diggers pruning azalea bushes for the cameras, and the sound blaring gratuitous homilies in a nasal Aussie twang: ‘And here we have our returned heroes; once damaged, now clipping their way back into society.’ Some even managed to do so.
Some men at the Mental Hospital recuperated for relatively short stints, others for life. Visitors came—sometimes bringing afternoon teas—to see husbands, brothers and fathers; but they did not visit in the profusion one might expect. Visiting hours in the late 1940s were limited and reflected the regimentation of hospital life. And, regardless of these bureaucratic matters, the mentally ill were regarded, at large, with ambivalence. Some families—embarrassed or just wanting to forget—simply faded from view. It was to this place—once a haven for the wealthy in their bright silk frockcoats and now a refuge for forgotten men—that John returned, living quietly with his family without too much to disturb them.
John, Jean and the boys moved into the squat single-storey red-brick bungalow reserved for the resident doctor. The front of the house looked away from the hospital wards in roughly a westerly direction, towards sprawling paddocks that trailed downwards several kilometres to a narrow gully with a creek.
The back of the house faced the hospital wards, and it was through a gate in the back fence and along a gently coiling gravel path that John walked each day to see his patients. He returned in the late afternoon by the same gate, rarely bothering to enter the house via the front door. The doctor’s house was as much a part of the asylum as any of the wards in which the patients lived.
Perhaps the most famous photograph we have of John Cade, and certainly the most endearing, is from these early post-war years at Bundoora. In the photo he stands next to the wrought-iron front gate of his house. We get no glimpse of the house in the photo but the surrounds—a thicket of trees and a timber post supporting a chicken wire fence—suggest a rustic setting. As for John himself, his methodical mien is reflected in the sharply folded creases that run midline down each of his trouser legs, his tightly buttoned tweed jacket that compresses and conceals his war-time-wasted chest, and his hair, gently receding, greased to the point of glistening and combed back hard. A naturally lean man, he bends slightly, aw
kwardly, to one side and has a hand in his coat pocket. He seems a trifle embarrassed. Nonetheless, he does his best with a self-conscious smile. The more relaxed figure in the photograph is Peter, the cocker spaniel, who presents a classic pose and eyes the camera without flinching.
The timeless photograph of John taken outside his Bundoora house betrays his attention to hairstyle—not a wayward strand of hair is visible. To maintain this standard, he left the grounds of the asylum every 3–4 weeks for his favourite barber—Milburn’s, in the suburb of Ivanhoe. And for shaving, long gone was his wartime moustache, but he’d kept a small ablutionary memento from his three and a half years of Japanese incarceration in Changi: his enamel shaving mug. In this mug he lathered to full bloom his camel hair brush for the finest of shaves.
As for his sons’ hair, now that was another matter altogether. Haircuts for the boys were considered an extravagance in these years of austerity after the war. John Cade therefore decided that he would learn the art of cutting hair. So he sat and watched as the boys went for their regular haircuts, and diligently observed in that Cade way—deeply, finely, taking note of every implement and their application. With insatiable curiosity, he deluged the barber with questions. David recalled the event: ‘He took us to the barber and, I remember, he learned how to do it from the barber. Afterwards he went and bought a pair of clippers.’ The barber, apparently, was more than happy to assist, perhaps delighted that his adroitness with comb and scissor had an admirer. From that moment on John cut the boys’ hair.
Expensive tastes—not only hair grooming—were clipped wherever and whenever possible in the Bundoora years, and in no area was this clearer than in his care for his sons’ shoes. John kept a ‘last’, something that we might regard as anachronistic in the modern household garage, but a common appliance in the 1940s. A last is a solid model of a human foot around which a shoe is placed in readiness to be repaired. With this, he resoled and repaired the boys’ shoes. His toolkit, lovingly kept from boyhood, contained everything he needed, including a shoemaker’s hammer. It was just the type of detailed mechanical task he loved to perform. The boys remember their father, the psychiatrist, bent over a pair of school shoes gently and systematically tapping each tack into place.
John Cade lived as he’d always done: routines were strictly followed. Not that he was a martinet; far from it. But there was a disciplined manner in which he conducted his life. Something he’d undoubtedly had before the war, but infinitely sharpened by it. Before each meal John said grace, and ‘went to mass every Sunday if it was at all possible if he wasn’t sick or the car hadn’t broken down’. And at bedtime he’d kneel beside the boys and say prayers with them. And his good night statement was one that did not change: ‘Good night, dear. Jesus, Mary and Joseph watch over you.’
Two further rituals, already embedded in his life, marked him out.
Cigarettes were smoked with reverence; they were the timepiece by which he carved up his day. At Bundoora, he smoked exactly seven cigarettes daily, but they were strategic: one at breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and two in the evening. Bought from his local barber, his favourites were cork-tipped Ardath cigarettes; he regarded the more common Turf cigarettes as just that.
Another ritual by which he set his day’s chronometer was tea drinking. John drank Rover tea, ‘routinely having two cups of scalding tea with sugar after breakfast’. And in parallel with his cigarettes, he had another two cups for morning tea, two for lunch, two with afternoon tea and another two at night after his evening meal. Each day he returned from the wards with military precision for morning and afternoon tea, and lunch.
John did a final round of his patients each evening. He’d leave via the back door, pass through his backyard and out the gate that stepped directly on to the asylum grounds, stopping along the way to take in the different pines and eucalypts on the grounds and the birds that rested in them, and keeping a sharp watch for the brown and tiger snakes that lurked in the tussocks on warm evenings. His inquisitive eye saw the world about him as sharply as he did his patients: what made a shrub flourish in certain locations, which ones prospered, and which ones faltered. He delighted in tracking the droppings of wildlife and was a self-confessed scatological specialist. He was known by everyone—his wife, his children, patients, nurses and other staff—to halt at various points as he wandered the grounds and bend over something that had arrested his attention, and study it with an absorbed fixation, returning home with a wry observation about his find. It would not be long before patients came to the house to take a closer look at their nature-loving doctor.
11
When a shiny new doctor arrived at the hospital, the patients were always curious. So it was not long before an elderly digger nosed through the back fence gate—a porous filter at best—and offered to assist Jean: ‘“Hello missus, you got a lot of dishes there, would you like me to come and wash the dishes?” And so I let him come and wash my dishes.’
Next a weather-beaten old man came visiting. He moved about the paddocks in perpetual motion, gathering cow manure in bags to sprinkle on the Cade garden. One day, when the rain thumped down with biblical might upon the earth, the Cades saw him fossicking about, filling his bag. When he knocked at the front door, dripping and sodden and clutching his cow dung bag, he offered his smelly fertiliser but resisted all enticement to come in and dry himself.
Other patients filed past the house with sacks in their hands, like motley work gangs. They came to the front door offering mushrooms from their filthy sacks: ‘Look what I’ve got for you, missus.’ They went out of their way to offer their modest harvest. Why they did this may have been out of generosity, or gratitude, or, perhaps, because life offered so little social interaction that they took what they could.
As well as dish-washers, and cow dung and mushroom collectors, there was a haphazard trickle of curious and well-meaning men—old and young—in and out of the Cade bungalow, offering their services and food and whatever they thought the young doctor and his family might like.
The Bundoora asylum was a world within a world and, like all mental hospitals of the period, an infectious lassitude stretched out across its wards and grounds—a plodding attachment to doing things as they had been done in asylums for over a century.
Inside the wards, where the patients slept at night, beds were crammed against one another, thin rectangles wedged compactly. At night, some patients were compelled to clamber over one another if they needed assistance. It was a feat of endurance for so many psychotic and melancholic and war-damaged men to abide one another’s company in such a fashion.
If you took the time to watch these men, you might observe that one thing unified them. They lived life in their own worlds and shuffled about like pilgrims awaiting a destination. From afar the asylum gave the illusion of a social community. But, in reality, each man was alone. Withdrawing into themselves and imprisoned by illness—whose disfigurement was unseen—they barely communicated with one another. Each man, in his own way, was a wreck. This was not a community of men; it was 200 communities.
Some men scowled at the torments that tugged at their minds; others waved their hands about, arguing with tree stumps. A few saw the outside world as a threat and stood alone, with eyes half-averted, whenever a stranger entered the grounds. The occasional catatonic man assumed an erect, rigid stance, a remnant of a military past. Some stalked about with arms akimbo, faces worn and surly; others sat on their haunches in a row, perched on a step.
Patients dressed themselves in a manner that hinted at a life beyond the asylum, and the longer the admission, the more dilapidated the clothing. For the most part, nothing fitted; and, colour, so absent in their lives, was also missing from their apparel. Their clothing was a nod to the times—formal and heavy—and mirrored a suffocating post-war Melbourne. The men wore street clothes of the day: often this was a jacket made of tweed, usually a waistcoat, a dress shirt and no tie. Boots were mandatory, socks were optiona
l: the spit and polish of military boots were long gone. Leather belts, stripped of their buckles, were wrapped around the men’s waists and tied into a knot to hold up sagging trousers. Those without belts found twine and used this instead. Patients wore grey felt hats any time of the day or year. In summer, corks dangled from strings attached to the brim to keep the flies away. For those patients unable to find a hat, grimy handkerchiefs with small knots tied in each corner mantled their heads.
The Cades embraced the patients, with all their oddities, as an extended family rather than as strangers. That warm relationship is our great stroke of good fortune. For the best and most intimate portrayal of these patients can only be found by living with them. And of all the Cades it was the two boys—Jack and David—who played and mingled with these men and who saw them with uncensored eyes. It is through the boys’ memories that we have a rare window into asylum life. ‘Certainly we knew they were loopy. But that was perfectly within the acceptable range for us.’
‘Our friends called Bundoora the loony bin. But to us it was home, the patients our friends.’
Their schoolmates came over on weekends, riding around the hospital grounds on bikes; Jack and David got around on horseback: ‘Jack rode a pony called Betty,’ explains David. ‘McCurdy got us the horses; he was just a grateful patient. McCurdy was allowed out, went to the pound and brought us back these horses. My horse was Kate, a fat draught horse. She was so broad I couldn’t fit on a normal saddle. I’d plonk about with my legs splayed on the top.
‘We learned a lot about the patients, these lovely people whose brains had gone. Lovely old guys, some a bit strange, some a lot strange, most completely lost. The hospital was their home; it was also ours.’
Finding Sanity Page 9