Abstract
We can infer on the basis of factual data from the nation's records, of for example, number of siblings, one's place among siblings in a family, migration, religious affiliation, etc., the possible influences on a typical individual. We can talk about generic migrants, farmers and psychiatric patients.
This is usually the most which can be known about a person who lived 100 years ago. The extent to which a person can be known is determined by the quality of the data and our ability to infer meanings.
Catherine Currie is exceptional because she lives on through her diary. We can know her through the style in which she wrote the diary, through the content, both from her and others. Furthermore, she is known in a way few people can be known. She suffered two psychotic illnesses which allow her to be known in sickness as well as health. Those episodes, their development and the aftermaths are documented in the diary and in Yarra Bend Asylum records. These historical documents lift Catherine Currie from being an ordinary figure in society in rural Australia to being in the foreground.
Catherine and her diary
The seven volumes of the Currie diaries were brought to public notice when Butler collected data for the history of the Buln Buln Shire in Gippsland in south-east Victoria in 1979. Copies of the diaries are held at the State Library of Victoria [1], and the Yarra Bend Asylum records of 1881 [2] and 1895 [3] at the Public Records Office. Data from the diaries have been used in a number of historical publications and most recently in a book by McLeary and Dingle about Catherine Currie and her diary [4].
McLeary and Dingle have undertaken a great deal of research so that the outlines of Catherine's parents and their lives are known from birth, marriage and death certificates. Shipping records reveal their arrival in Australia from England with their children.
Sarah Ann Catherine Wells was born in England in 1845 and arrived in Victoria in 1853. She was the third born and her mother died from puerperal fever after the twelfth child was born.
Catherine was married when 19 in 1864, 8 months after her mother died. Her husband, John Currie, was then 30. The couple had their first child 8 months later and she gave birth to six other children [4, pp.181–187].
John, Catherine and baby Albert Bryce (Bert) in Melbourne on 12 November 1875. (Reproduced with permission of the Warragul and District Historical Society.)
These are the facts, but without her thoughts about them they stay just that, facts. No life can be breathed into them.
The inner world of beliefs, fantasies, wishes, fears and feelings are often beyond awareness or just faintly known. Yet these are the forces which shape our lives. Later in the diary these elements are openly recorded, allowing inferences to be made about her inner world. A picture of how her mind worked can be suggested from the available data. Why her mind worked that way cannot be approached, as personal data about her pre-diary life is not available.
The first entry, on 8 March 1873 is by John Currie:
At Ballarat in Landers spring cart and bought 4 pigs at 1£ each bought this book, some 2 copies Books and second sequel for Katie all for 9//6d got a new hat took some bacon and sold it for 9/− per Ib spiced got home about 12 oclock PM [1].
This entry set the tone for much of the diary. (All diary quotes are verbatim despite idiosyncratic spelling and grammar).
Early entries provide a picture of farm and family life, external and observable behaviour. Entries are mainly to do with the commerce of the farm: business inventory, farming and mining, dealings with local authorities. This was John's pre-occupation and seemingly the reason for the diary.
He calls Catherine by her diminutive Kate or Katie in the diary. Sometimes he calls her Mother. While these names may say more about how John viewed his wife, they do suggest she was not only motherly but a person for whom a familiar and casual name was appropriate. She was not a forebodingly formal ‘Catherine’.
It is also a record of family events: letters written and received about deaths. This was at a time when letter-writing was still the only form of communication other than direct personal contact.
The first big change in the diary occurs when Catherine took over writing the diary on 28 September 1873:
John Currie has tired of keeping a Diary and has handed it over to me. C. Currie [1].
To begin with, the change was merely in the person recording. The diary continued to be about John's work and farm commerce. However, she soon introduced her perceptions so that the diary had her appearing through the plethora of commercial farm ledger items.
Entries on neighbours, friends and visitors gave an indication of life in rural Australia in the second half of the 19th century. Her observations carry a moralising tone such that her attitudes and beliefs emerge through the diary entries. Work was valued, friendly and playful interactions with neighbours were not [4, p.22].
The next change to the contents of the diary occurred when Catherine started to include her own work as well as John's in the diary [4, p.22]. While she may always have rated her work alongside John's, it is only at this point that the reader can learn that fact.
When Catherine stayed with the Grants, she recorded where she was and the activities at the Grants [4, p.24]. The diary was no longer just recording John's activities and the Curries' farm life, it had become her daily companion. This happened in December 1873 just a few months after the diary became primarily her responsibility.
An odd note was struck by her recording the Grants' farm activities during her stay. It was as though she was not particular who she recorded, more an involuntary reflex action; to a degree a task, a habit, a routine lacking imagination and a loving touch. These contradictory elements in her approach to the diary sit side by side.
Yet some large life-events did not gain a mention. There was no record of her pregnancy, just the fact that she gave birth [4, p.30]. The diary gave no direct statements of why the Curries decided to move to Gippsland [4, p.40]. Like the pregnancy, they must either be part of oral discourse and developed in the family mind, not requiring to be written, or could be thought of as an unthinking censorship.
The changing meanings of the diary and changing level of information allow comment about diagnosis and genesis of her psychiatric illness. However, even when it is a daily record of farming life and seemingly so unrevealing of Catherine, reflection on her later more personal and revealing entries cause the earlier record to take on valuable meaning.
Large tracts of the diary are very boring to read. Perhaps it merely reflects the dull routine of farm life. Even so, the censorship of her existence other than as recorder may indicate how little regard she accorded herself. A psychodynamic approach could postulate that Catherine wrote with a harsh censor's hand.
A portrait of Catherine can be constructed around themes which assert themselves throughout the diary. These were work and relationships and her usual emotional states.
Work and relationships
The theme most prominent in the diary had to do with work. Work was her life and she did not want it interrupted. Their neighbours and friends, the Grants, ‘hinder our work’ [4, p. 18]. She hated ‘idleness’ [4, p.22]. Life was a never-ending series of jobs to be done or demands made. At her level in society, mere subsistence involved a daily struggle.
Work was everywhere but it carried a danger for her. That was indebtedness. The diary shows on most pages that Catherine had been an efficient trader and barterer, but in sharing work with neighbours she felt placed in their debt. ‘When the Brennans came to help, “We would rather they had not come but could not send them away when they did” Jan 75’ [4, p.29]. Such is inevitable in life. There are some forms of help and kindness which can never be repaid. We must accept unpayable debt such as to parents or to a spouse. Catherine hated being in such a position of receiving and dependence. She preferred to be distant and disdainful of people, believing ‘one should not trust too much in others’ [4, p.27].
Throughout her life, she felt slighted by people. Early on, this was by neighbours, ‘they have treated me very shabby’ [4, p.54], but in later life by her children. Why so vulnerable to a slight, real or imagined? She felt put upon and exploited if others asked for help; remember how awful this indebtedness was for her. She strived for her ideal of total self-sufficiency.
Perhaps part of the answer was her outrage with people. They interrupted work. They became ‘impudent’, treated her ‘shabby’ and were an unwanted burden to whom one may be in debt.
She seemed happier with relationships constructed with children and animals. The diary is replete with entries of the death of people and livestock, the latter often given the names of neighbours and relations. When people were not as she desired, they became in her mind flawed and demonised. The other side was the idealisation of John and later on the wealthy neighbour Stoving.
Her perception of impudence and slights were a sore point in the home because John would attempt to explain perceived ‘impudence’ as ignorance without malicious intent [4, p.57]. He attempted to placate her and to help her understand her biases. The deep unconscious roots to her biases and beliefs were never adequately resolved and, with life's events, led to psychotic episodes later in life.
Emotional states
From the core of her being, Catherine was under the sway of a number of emotional states. Most prominent was her belief in her worthlessness. Feelings of being slighted and not respected continued throughout her life. She continually found proofs in life for this fundamental conviction. It was as though others could always see it and she hated them for drawing her attention to this lack of worth she felt about herself.
Sensing slights that others found her unworthy leads back to her sense of herself. In August 1874, she writes poignantly in her husband's absence:
John is not here for me to write what he is at work doing so I must say what I did myself… I am very lonely. Sunday is a lonely day without John. I wish he was here [1].
She pines for him, writes to him and about him in the diary. The sense comes through of her being nothing without him.
This was the downside of living in the shadow of John. Placing little value in oneself may lead to following in another's shadow, but this very act entrenches the belief. It is a recipe for a diminished and depressing view of oneself.
In November 1874, her view of herself in relation to John again appears when building material falls on her head:
…but was not as bad as it might have been—I was so glad that it fell on me instead of John [1].
At this point in life, she is nothing without him, only his activities and interests really matter. One way of understanding why she is ‘nothing’ is via her actively censoring out her worth and existence. She was then left with an unconscious belief about herself which was both powerful and self-destructive.
The next emotional belief was her sense of impending danger. Not only was she nothing without him, but she was in her mind resourceless and unable to continue without him.
Dangers were always threatening, like the bush-fires every summer, wild animals and vermin. There was a desperate need to hold control for fear of what might erupt.
That these dangers were over and above what might be expected, gradually emerged. While Catherine was terrified about bushfires and desperate to find a buyer and leave the farm, the diary would also include entries that John had gone to an Exhibition in Melbourne [4, p.78]. He did not share her sense of danger. For Catherine, he could not simply be late getting home with the horse, he was dead in the dangerous bush [4, p.78].
In her mind, the impending dangers were how close was death and how close she was to being left alone, which ultimately became too much for her to bear. How would she cope if left?
Catherine had two solutions to this danger of abandonment. Difficult to control neighbours and relatives were cut adrift. With her children, she exercised discipline and control which was only part maternal concern. As their lives unfolded, it was clearly a desperate attempt to hold them to her side even when they were adults. Thus, she resisted them socialising and hated them having separate lives.
She used a phrase to end many entries, ‘All's well’. It seemed to express a hope, while revealing a fear that all might not be well. It became like a magical incantation to keep all well, to keep the dangers under control.
The third emotional belief which dominated her life was that of impoverishment. At the external level, she complained of dullness and deprivation and placed it with the house. Everyone had a nicer house, which she coveted but which she also despaired of ever having. Perhaps this could be righted by ‘…nice things…a pretty house…and more singing…’ [4, p.53].
People can construct and view their external world in order to reflect their internal world. Her external world reflected an internal dullness and tedium and need for enrichment and enlivening. The poverty of internal liveliness had been compensated for by living off the life in John, the farm and the children.
Catherine had a sense of herself as valueless and unable to be improved. As her life unfolded, questions developed. Why had she deadened her inner life? Why the impoverished internal world? How long can she bear this and what would tip the balance?
First illness and admission (17 September 1881)
Her baby, Jean Isabel (Ann), just 1 year old, drowned 24 November 1880 [1]. This certainly tipped her into a psychotic illness 10 months later. But why? Such tragedies occur without psychotic illness resulting. Certainly, a prolonged period of mourning would be expected. More so, given the age of the child, the life not lived, the unexpected and sudden death and guilt for not sufficiently protecting the child.
After reporting in detail the loss of the baby in the diary on 14 December including, ‘I cant help blaming myself for letting her out of my mind [1]’, she returned to the usual entries of weather and work. There was no further mention of the lost child or her responses. The impression was of her attempting to continue as though nothing had happened.
The entries ran to a pattern: weather, work done, visitors, trade, livestock movements, John's health if he was not well. Sometimes, there was late news which was put in the date margin, like killing a big snake in the barn on 9 January 1881.
After the tragedy of the loss, danger and death were on Catherine's mind. Life was threatening to run out of control. She felt helpless with disaster forever threatening to overtake her.
Bertie
What does appear in the months after the death of the baby is a psychological decompensation located in Bertie, then only 5 years old. He had been with her when baby Jean wandered back to the water hole and drowned. Catherine had asked Bertie if the front door was open when she first missed the baby.
On 5 January 1881, a neighbour's 5-year-old was killed, but it was reported like the weather as a mere fact with no personal response. Then on 13 January:
Wind. Oats. I had to go to school with Bertie. I tried to make him go through Kinlocks paddock by himself. I whipped him and pelted him with sticks but he would not go. he is very frightened and he says it is for San cke and Bears [1].
The grief of the mother and perhaps some guilt of his own led to Bertie developing a school phobia after the summer holidays. At that time, his complaint and understanding was of being frightened of snakes and bears.
Entries continued to be sprinkled, with Bertie not going to school and snakes and possums being killed. Then a lamb, next a farm pet, then poisoning the wild dogs and killing more farm animals to eat. While it can be said killings and death are normal farm life, it is also a part of life with which this young boy was having great difficulty coming to terms.
Then on 3 June, the family dysfunction resurfaced in the diary with another period of school phobia. On this occasion, Bertie's story taken as fact by his mother was of a bear catching hold of him but ‘he did not let the bear see him crying’ [1].
By 18 July, something had shifted in Catherine's mind. Bertie was frightened again and told a story of a little boy being eaten by wild dogs [1]. This time she didn't believe it, whereas all previous stories seemed to be taken at face value.
While one interpretation of these entries may simply be that the child was fearful of the wild animals he encountered on the journey to and from school, another is possible: that the boy was expressing, in the childish concepts available to him, that forces were close to overwhelming him. He tried to avoid them, but the sadness and guilt over the loss of the baby and a preoccupied, grieving mother was too much. Not just for him, as he believed the climate at home did not permit his sad tears to be spilt, for him to be seen crying.
In July 1881, Catherine's grief had taken a serious turn into psychiatric illness. She felt unwell and lonely, and diagnosed laziness. Her prescription was work to stave off the imminent internal disaster.
Something had taken in Catherine's mind. The ordinary farm life and the focus on Bertie and believing his fantasies ceased working for her, and she stopped writing in the diary. John reported Catherine's decompensation and removal to Melbourne.
An entry from Catherine's diary, beginning 26 November 1995. (Ann Currie Diaries, MS 10886, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria.)
Obvious illness
By September, her symptoms indicated bipolar disease, with manic elements to the fore. She was tied up in a corn sack as a restraint and put on the train. Her sister Elizabeth Wells told the examining doctors Campbell and Williams in Melbourne that Catherine had not slept for 4 days, was violent and could not be controlled. Dr Williams observed on 17 September 1881:
Speaks incoherently, informs me that her husband who is holding her is not her husband at all. She spat at me when I asked her who he was [2].
She was committed to Yarra Bend Asylum.
Why did she disown her husband? John took over writing and searched for answers and understanding about what had happened. He decided that love was the panacea and he simply had not supplied enough; common enough recriminations for the bewildered. His entries show him working toward an understanding, and on 14 October 1881 he wrote: ‘She punished herself to save me trouble’. Later, on 21 October 1881, he wrote:
I find I have been to blame in my treatment of my wife I should have known better…I did not think I was so selfish… It is near the anniversary of the child's death and I am frightened for that time…we made a mistake in not talking it over quietly [1].
The impact of depression and guilt had not previously touched John. Catherine and Bertie were touched by it in their own ways. He sheltered from it and life went on. His unavailability to accept some of the emotional aftermath from the tragedy left the burden on Catherine. Two months after her hospitalisation and around the anniversary of the drowning, responsibility, depression and guilt finally touched him. John wrote on 19 October ‘…we are so helpless without her…’ [1].
She was forgiven and rehabilitated in his mind by asserting her ability to care for the helpless and needy: truly a good mother who did her best for the infant.
Although Catherine did not write about the Yarra Bend experience until 12 years later, the illness and hospitalisation left a deep scar and she never made peace with the experience.
Second illness and admission (9 December 1895)
While there was not a clear trigger as occurred with the death of the baby for this illness, some of the aftermath of that time and her personality structure inexorably led to trouble.
On 16 January 1894, Catherine wrote for the first time of her Yarra Bend admission in which it became clear how that still affected her and how the underlying problems continued on. She wrote:
…They are good boys but they care no more for me than I do for the old pig…I have never had their respect since Father shut me up in a Lunatic Asylum…tied in an old Corn Sack, is it any wonder I raved…I am always thinking of it when they vex me. I always put it all down to that or I could have won their respect [1].
She went away on a holiday on 30 September 1895 and wrote about it on 20 October after her return. It is a long and rambling entry, difficult to follow. However, several emotional strands shine through as she tried to think about the events of those weeks. She railed against not being able to do as she intended, felt like swearing at her companion, this because:
they fairly drove me mad with drumming in to my head that I could not afford it…had a pleasant time till…it seemed as tho it was all
Her subsequent diary entries continued long and rambling, sometimes over a page in length (this contrasted with the common one-line entries on foolscap size pages).
Through November, this trend continued as her capacity to organise her thoughts and hold a focus slipped away. The writing was larger than her norm, and she lost neatness in writing as she lost it in fashioning thoughts.
She wrote on 11 November how her boys made her wild, treated her as though ‘here on Sufference’; how anyone ‘gets more civility than I do’. In her outpourings, she was ‘afraid to be near either of them when their father is not here, and I am jealous of their smiles to others’ [1].
The storm of feelings about her sons, now men, was clear. She had been unable to resolve her feelings towards her sons. She wanted them to be tractable little boys and to maintain that stage of their lives when she was the only woman in their lives. She continued:
It is only that I love them as never Mother loved children I am very sure [1].
But this is not just overprotective love, it is her jealous love, keeping them as baby boys while also feeling them to be sexually desirable boys.
Catherine could record others' concern about her but she fluctuated between her wishful hopes of getting better, the realisation she was ill and feeling forgotten and in the dark about what was happening to her. She was partially aware of her world becoming disorganised.
As her mind became disorganised, so too did her writing in the diary. It was large and ragged as she grappled with the inevitable disaster, as on 26 November:
They say I am ill. I don't feel very bad. Something takes most of the pain [1].
The something that stopped her feeling bad and feeling pain was another alteration of reality, another misperceiving and misunderstanding of the world inside and the world outside.
On 9 December 1895, she was certificated by doctors Smith and Travers in Drouin because of an illness like the first with violence, insomnia and again a manic veneer over depression. The content of the delusions was telling. Dr Travers wrote:
Is under the delusion that her children are better than other people's, and that they will be stolen. Says that ‘mischievous fingers’ are upon her [3].
The omnipotent grandiosity was projected onto the children. In part, this was an attempt to rationalise the theft of her babies: that is, she wasn't to blame and certainly not because she didn't value her children. Her alternative was to believe that they left because they didn't value her. She preferred the delusional belief of them being taken rather than feeling she wasn't good enough or attractive enough to keep them at her side, which she found depressing. The normal developmental step parents take of raising children, and then allowing them to leave, was not possible for Catherine, who tied her worth to her children staying with her.
The idea that her children might be ‘stolen’ carried with it the need for continual vigilance, and not allowing herself rest or distraction from that task. It was also a rationalisation for why she must keep a watchful eye on her children at all times. To an extent, the delusion must be a part realisation of children wanting to steal away from her.
The ‘mischievous fingers’ upon her she apparently saw as the hand of Satan, or fate. She had no insight into the internal conflicts causing the problems.
This second overwhelming crisis in her life seemed to have the same trigger. Both times, it was children leaving. The first time by death, the second by virtue of age. In both instances, she judged herself to be a failure. She was not good enough as a mother to hold them to her. Her adult boys wanted to leave home, to give their smiles and respect to other women. For Catherine Currie, that was unbearable.
On 21 February 1896, Catherine returned to the diary with the statement: ‘I am home again’ [1]. The writing is smaller, neater and more coherent in recording daily activities.
The official discharge was in July 1896, but as with the first illness there was no resolution of underlying conflicts. Yet, to put the management in context, Freud and psychological psychiatry, which sought to understand these illnesses rather than merely remove symptoms, was in its infancy a world away in Vienna. Custodial care and time to permit a scar to form over a psychological wound was all that was possible.
Sequelae to illness in her later life
Sad consequences occurred because of the sort of person Catherine was and the times in which she lived. Catherine never felt at peace with herself after the first illness and hospitalisation. Her lack of respect for herself led her to doubt that John, the children, relatives and neighbours held her in esteem or respect. There was a harshness and cruelty in her when talking of Bert and the neighbours.
The second illness had left her more shaken. Her attempts to run her childrens' lives like a dictator could no longer be justified, but she needed to continue. Right up until the year she died, she was recording arrivals and departures of children as the diary recorded in years gone by the farm produce and tools lent to neighbours [4, p.171]. She was forever attempting to control the world around her, including people. It was as if knowing where they were would confer a circle of protection; she could feel in control of them and ‘all's well’. The consequences on the children were severe as only Bert married, and not before Catherine had died [4, p.128].
The underlying state of mind was now expressed overtly in the diary. Perhaps she needed to use the diary this way to be in contact with herself, or perhaps it represented a failure in her self-containment. She wrote in September 1896, ‘my fault all the time’ [1]. Years of blaming neighbours, fire and vermin for misfortunes could never quite suffice again. There was a sad awareness of the damage she had inflicted on her family.
The entry on 17 February 1897:
…no more consequence than a log of wood…only talk to my heavenly father…all I love think me mad [1].
This and similar thoughts earlier were the depressive core of feelings of uselessness, worthlessness, etc., which when intolerable led to manic swings. This was a harshness and cruelty in her which, when self-directed, led to attacks on her self-worth and her reality testing.
The harshness of the attacks she could launch on herself were also revealed by the kind she launched on Bert. Six months later, she recorded throwing a bucket of cold water over Bert to get him out of bed, while still waiting up at night for the children to come home [4, p.159]. There were just the two florid psychotic episodes in her life, but the failure to resolve the underlying conflicts continued to shape her life and the lives of those around her.
Later, an entry from one of the children:
10.3.08 Mother passed away [1].
There was little mention of her thereafter in the diary, which ceased in 1916.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Ailsa McLeary and Tony Dingle for the opportunity to contribute to their project, and thus to alert me to the existence of these historical documents, and to the journal referees for their guidance.