Voices From the Archive: Lust,Legislation,Lunacy

Abstract

The podcast presents social and situational evidence indicating how the promiscuity of young working-class girls emerged as a mental disorder in Tasmania. The playscript is a creative composite of verbatim data retrieved from postcolonial archival, legislative, welfare, medical, and legal records that provide graphic and disturbing revelations about the consequences of state policies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, on the lives of the young female wards. The podcast acts as testimony from the past that parallels the present where young women are appraised, criticized, and condemned by outdated legislation that has a direct impact on contemporary judicial decisions.

Who developed the piece and for what purpose/s

The 3 Act Podcast ‘Voices from the Archive: Lust, Legislation, Lunacy’ was developed by Dr Elga Skrastins during her PhD research (PhD from University of Tasmania awarded in 2023). The podcast is a recording of a multi–voice play, scripted by Elga to disseminate her analysis of the precursors and consequences of state responses to the deemed social problem of female promiscuity. The playscript is a creative composite of verbatim data retrieved from archival, postcolonial legislative, welfare, medical, and legal records from Tasmania, Australia. The podcast recording provides social and situational evidence documenting the ways that in the late 19th and early 20th century, the promiscuity of young working-class girls was classified as a mental disorder. Pregnant wards of the state judged to be moral imbeciles were consigned to asylums.

How and why, it was developed

The collection and analysis of real-world data from a specific site and from the perspective of a range of participants and sources is, according to Hammersley (2007), the most basic form of social research. Performance for the presentation of data was supported by Becker et al. (1989), 30 years ago, when he noted that the script format solved many of the problems of conventional scholarly papers by reducing the dominance of the ‘analytical’ voice, as longer quotes can clarify the speakers’ meanings. This process acknowledges the constructed character of social scientific data and allows the ‘voices of the people be heard’ with less intervention, as the researcher cannot ‘make the speaker’ say only what the researcher wants the audience to hear. The actual ‘analysis’, of what is said, is embodied in the researcher’s selection of materials and this is presented in the podcast.

More than 20,000 words were sourced and assembled from welfare files, state correspondence and documents, conference proceedings, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and scientific developments to reveal social consensus among stakeholders regarding the immorality, promiscuity, and wantonness of young working-class girls. The attitudes and interventions depicted throughout legal processes, court appearances, welfare correspondence, clinical examinations, and medical procedures provide graphic and disturbing revelations about the consequences of state policies on the lives of the young female wards. The range of statements and assertions when spoken and heard, convey a direct forceful impact. The podcast becomes the conduit of a performative approach where the facts are undeniable and indicate the absence of social change, making the past applicable to contemporary issues.

Creative performance methods for presentation suggested by Denzin (2003), Derbyshire and Hodson (2008), and Wilkenson and Anderson (2007), provide a range of perspectives about truths and characters in a shared reality. The creative piece is then open to interpretation as the voices of real people speaking in the ‘present’, provide dramatic shape to events from the past, without any claim of ‘truth’. The accumulated data presented have considerable potential to shift the authority of research findings beyond academic settings. Felski (2022) suggests that de-mystifying theoretical claims by providing vivid examples and resonant details, can inform and capture the interests and imagination of a wider audience and the possibility of what Grbich (2012), describes as an ‘epiphany or acute realization’ – that the past is a history of the present.

There is something extraordinary about real people, saying real things, about important events. (Derbyshire and Hodson, 2008: 199)

Derbyshire also suggests that to present, interpret, and replay events and testimonies taken from official records about complex, social and political realities, can immerse audiences in a collective act of ‘bearing witness’ to situations; such is the intention of the podcast.

Elga Skrastins, the narrator and sole creator of the podcast sourced from publicly available materials, applied her expertise in performance to create the scripts. The collaborative efforts and voices of 14 volunteer University of Tasmania staff and research students, convey the compelling and at times shocking findings that reveal undisclosed policies and judgements that highlight the misogyny, patriarchy, and discrimination based on class and gender, existing in State legislation.

How does the piece achieve its intended purpose?

The piece acts as testimony from the past that parallels the present where the deemed promiscuity of young women is still appraised, criticized, and condemned using outdated legislative acts, conceived in a different time that still have direct impact on contemporary judicial decisions. The creative piece validated the contention that the management of women as sexual beings was achieved by biased legislation, patriarchal power structures and institutionalized discriminatory practices based on class and gender that established negative social construction of working-class sexuality as amoral and deviant.

An outline of the ethical procedures followed

All procedures were transparent, ethical, and accessible for peer review by the staff and research students who participated in the early readings of drafts and in the final recording process. All the individuals depicted in the podcast have died, and their records are freely available digitally or accessed as hard copy in libraries. The main ethical approach to circumvent any trivialization or embellishment of the lives of wards was achieved by using the ‘ordinary voices’ of the staff and research body of the University of Tasmania, rather that actors. The recording of the podcast was conducted in the digital studio of the University, using a multidirectional microphone and audacity software.

Context

The research for the podcast was based on a case study of Tasmania the small island state of Australia, an ex-penal colony with a long, harsh convict experience well-documented by Damousi (2013 (1997)), Piper (2010) and Snowden (2011). The state’s convict heritage and colonial prison locations have become tourist attractions, and the asylums built to house insane convicts have been repurposed as upmarket cafes and antique shops. Much of the historical background on state welfare, poverty and institutions came from Petrow (1995), Daniels and Murnane (1980), Garton (2014), Rodwell (1998), Swain (2007), Van Krieken (1992), and Brown (1972).

The case study was inspired by historian Evans (2002), whose research on state wards documented ‘what happened’ to some wards and noted that Tasmania was a valuable microcosm, where despite local variations, comparable policies were replicated nationally and internationally. The broader international approaches to adolescent promiscuity were reflected in the ‘travelling ideas’ from science, welfare, legislation, and the judiciary. The podcast format, by providing information accessible to a wider non-academic audiences, enables young wards, deemed ‘problem girls’ in the legal and welfare systems in Tasmania, to be heard for the first time, to reveal their agency, resilience and persistence against the all-encompassing power of the stake holders.