Hidden artefacts have been found in the floors of the old Willow Court asylum
Archaeologists and academics have been enthralled by the findings of hundreds of artefacts hidden in the floorboards of the old Willow Court asylum by a mysterious woman with a knack for planning and a mischievous nature
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t’s a Tasmanian mystery that has an archaeological team bewildered — more than 1000 paper and cloth artefacts that appear to have been “posted” through the cracks in the floorboards at the old Willow Court asylum. And the most remarkable twist to this mystery is they appear to have been the work of a single female patient who hid the artefacts over several decades. Who she might be is still unknown. But the archaeological team call her ‘The Lady’.
What we do know of The Lady is that her family paid for her to stay in the more up-market part of the asylum. We also know she was a detailed planner. Despite her being in a very controlled and heavily watched environment, she somehow managed to not only procure the treasures, but then carefully conceal them in underfloor hidey holes she was forced to repeatedly change, for at least 20 years. The multiple stacks of treasure piled up so high they completely filled in the surface between the soil and the floorboards.
What The Lady left behind is an historical gold mine. Flinders University of Associate Professor of Archaeology Heather Burke — who is leading the team trying to crack the mystery — says the find is a global one-off. “It’s incredible,” she says. “It’s such an astonishing, one-of-a-kind find. I do tend to use the word unique when I talk about that collection and that’s not a word you can use very easily.
“The thing about the Ladies’ Cottage is I don’t know of any other comparable collection of ephemeral objects — things that don’t survive well like paper and cloth — from a mental health asylum. As far as I know, there is nothing like it that exists anywhere else. Every time we look at a different part of this collection it sort of smacks us in the face with something unexpected.”
The collection includes small, carefully folded and wrapped packages and parcels of vintage newspapers tied up with string; bits and pieces of letters and greeting cards and envelopes; vials and tins; pages from books, magazines and newspapers; chocolate, toffee and sweet wrappers; tags and labels. It also includes intact pieces of clothing, many of these items branded with the names of different residents.
Burke and her colleagues including — Canberra University Associate Professor Tracy Ireland and her honour’s student Danica Auld — spent three days crawling around in the dark under the veranda floorboards of the Ladies’ Cottage building at Willow Court in February last year. They have since collected, bagged and tagged more than 400 items pushed down by The Lady through gaps in the floorboards or warps in the fascia between, they believe, 1920 and 1940. Some of the discovered treasures date back to 1880.
Auld is a specialist in the conservation of materials. She says it was amazing given the age of the items that they were so remarkably well preserved. Tasmania’s weather helped, she says — as did the compartmentalised footings of the veranda, which created an almost perfectly sealed time capsule. Auld has spent months analysing the cloth artefacts they found. They’re made up of bonnets, blouses and bodices, bloomers and institutional, plain white aprons with interesting embroidery which she be- lieves was stitched by The Lady. Auld studied, in great detail, three of the heavily embroidered yet otherwise plain aprons for her thesis. “Textiles are not usually the objects that survive because they degrade quite quickly,” she says. “But these hadn’t decayed or turned to dust or gone mouldy. They were protected from the elements and kept quite stable.” Nevertheless, Auld meticulously froze the aprons, then gently vacuumed the fabric and used a special sponge to wet-clean them and bring them back to life. She believes the needlework sheds some light into what life may have been like for the woman who stitched them.
Auld says The Lady’s neat stitches were in fact art. “You’ve got this very plain, white apron that was transformed into a canvas of self expression,” she says. “She was making a really colourful artwork that really contrasted to the austerity of her environment. It’s like she had her own little individual brightness that she created to lift herself up out of those bland colours. It seems quite symbolic that she was able to make it so colourful, almost cheerful, in comparison to what was most likely a quite sad environment. She brought out her thoughts and her designs onto this piece of clothing and it’s almost like she stamped a bit of her identity onto it.”
Ireland says she’s confident The Lady was attempting to tell her story through the embroidery. The odd stitching repeatedly featured not only religious phrases and historical words but a series of colourful motifs — including teapots and tea brand names. “I think of her growing old embroidering those aprons and that makes me quite sad,” she says.
“I see a shadowy figure, wearing an apron herself and surrounded by brightly coloured threads. She wanted to tell her story to someone. She wanted to tell people about her life, even if it was very mundane. Her life was sitting around having cups of tea and reading the newspaper and going to church. She wanted her life to be worth telling.”
The man who first discovered this treasure under the veranda is Hadyn Pearce. He and his wife Penny bought the Ladies’ Cottage that sits inside what is now generally referred to as Willow Court, at New Norfolk in 2012. The institution opened in 1826, and by the time it was closed in 2000-01 it had been divided into the Royal Derwent Hospital and Willow Court Centre, incorporating the oldest continuously operating mental hospital in Australia.
The Ladies’ Cottage (also called Ward J when the hospital’s naming conventions changed) stopped being used to house women in 1965. Pearce was rebuilding its veranda in 2013 when he found the first pile of posted artefacts. “We found these things underneath the veranda and they were going to be destroyed if we didn’t pull them out so we did that as carefully as possible and put them into bags,” he says. This first find has been separately catalogued by archaeology students.
“It’s an ongoing discovery,” Pearce says. “We’ll move along the veranda as we continue the restorations and we will just keep finding stuff. This kind of discovery is as good at it gets.”
Pearce says it was simple for wealthy families to have a female locked away in the Ladies’ Cottage. “All they needed was a doctor to say they were mentally ill and then they were incarcerated here — and for many women that meant they spent the rest of their lives here.”
They were very much institutionalised, but the mothers and aunts, daughters and sisters of the Ladies’ Cottage had a very different experience to the women in the general part of the asylum. “The women who lived in the Ladies’ Cottage spent a lot of time sitting around having cups of tea,” Pearce says. “They ate better meals together in a dining room and family members could visit them in the sitting room. They had a lot of time to knit and play cards and sew. It was quite a grand place, similar to what they would have been accustomed to.” In fact, Pearce says some of the women who were sent to the Ladies’ Cottage probably did not have a serious mental health illness.
“They may have been illegitimate or had some kind of depression or even simply been a young pregnant woman,” he says. “If rich families wanted to get rid of someone, they would send them here.” He says he believes, there were no bars on the windows at The Ladies’ Cottage because the women knew if they escaped and caught, they would be sent to the “squalor of the main asylum with the poor people and the convicts.”
Associate Professor Burke believes the items they have collected could take decades to fully analyse. She says finding out who The Lady was may take even longer. “We don’t know who that person was. We don’t have a name or a history or a family or any kind of context to identify her. She’s just an anonymous woman who lived in that building for a very long time. She was also very, very careful. There’s such a level of detail in what she’s done and how she’d done it. So she’s mischievous but she’s also a really good planner. Somehow she has a system that is so complex we can’t really describe it. And she’s managed to put it into action for decades. It just makes her a great strategic thinker as well as mischievous and naughty.”
Ireland says touching the stitches evokes a strong connection to The Lady. “When you see the embroidery and you run your fingers over the handiwork it makes you feel like you are touching The Lady’s hand. It’s rare as an archaeologist that you find something that tugs at your heartstrings and makes you feel for a moment that you are in their place and in their shoes. I think hiding those items away under the floorboards was a kind of posting action The Lady did as a form of communication to someone. She bundled the stuff up and posted it through the slot sort of like posting a letter. Maybe she was all alone and she was communicating with an imaginary family. It’s a mystery.”