Creative work that is freeing the spirits
RECENTLY
I attended an event at the old St Johns Park orphanage in New Town organised by Kickstart Arts to celebrate the community refurbishing the old site for a variety of community uses. I was struck by the passion and energy of all those involved focusing in on how to understand the past and shape a more humane future. Here are my reflections towards that future.
Whilst a beautiful example of sandstone convict craftsmanship it’s also a weird place — a building now out of place and out of time, something strange that no longer fits its landscape. A monument to ideas of another time. Ideas that now seem very muddled. An orphanage for children who were not always orphans, a place framed as a home which was for many a harsh prison and an asylum.
The orphanage is also an eerie place to ramble through; there is a sense of past spirits and unknown, unresolved agency at work, a presence that shaped people’s lives. This eeriness is imbued in the sandstone and in the artefacts of a bygone era and all the missing people. The strange impact of the inanimate and impersonal materiality of a place that acted upon people.
Firstly, there is the presence of the agency of the colonial guardians of the mad, the bad and the sad. A deep sense of the moral imperative to redeem lost souls through austerity, through order and through mission. Boys had their hair cut two inches above the ear and girls two inches below. Your life was organised for you. This was a presence, however well meaning, much of which should have been absent. But hearing the stories of the residents/inmates/ patients — the children — there is another underlying agency of spirit that was largely absent but should have been present. The struggle of the meek to retain identity and being, the struggle to survive the harsh conditions, the struggle for happiness, family and community, for creativity and hope. It is this largely absent spirit of St Johns that now needs to be present.
Buildings after all are just the physical expression of important ideas and relations in our society. Enlightened churches in western society were often at the forefront of improving the lot of the poor based on the Christian spirit of love and care. Of course it did not always play out that way. At the time the Kings Orphanage Asylum was built at St Johns Park in 1833 it was the best model of care in western society. Children at risk needed to be permanently separated from their parents who were labelled as indolent, destitute, slothful and impecunious. Those with mental illness, labelled as defectives, or lunatics, also became residents at St Johns, as did young people in trouble with the law labelled dangerous and delinquent.
This muddling of different groups allowed for the sorts of controls normally applied to prisons (such as punishment) to be applied to places called asylums, orphanages and homes. Most in the early days were children of convicts and Aboriginal children. For the Aboriginal children, in particular, the orphanage must have seemed weird and eerie in the worst possible way.
The meek have now inherited St Johns Park and have the opportunity to show what a place of healing can be. Handing St Johns Park to creative community-minded people is the best way to redeem the past and create a place of mingling and mutuality and fun and vibrancy and learning.
A place to mend the broken hearts of spirits past — but also to check that in our current enlightened world we are not recreating new forms of exclusion, of weirdness and eeriness, that in another 150 years we may be sitting around trying to make sense of how this could have happened. Professor David Adams is Pro Vice-Chancellor Community Partnerships and Regional Development at the University of Tasmania and former Social Inclusion Commissioner.