Old Age in Australia

A History

Pat Jalland

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780522867077
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

The Australian population is rapidly getting older, demanding important policy and service decisions. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore a 100-year history of older people in Australia from 1880 to 1980. Over that period the aged suffered as 'forgotten people' until 1945, when there was the promise of a new deal for the elderly.
Major themes examined include family histories of aged care, poverty, social and medical policy, gender, the impact of wars and economic depression, housing, nursing homes and the retirement debates.
Old Age in Australia provides essential historical context for current discussions about the implications of ageing in Australia.

Part One
‘The Forgotten People’,
1880–1945

1

Poverty and Prejudice, 1880–1908: Asylums or Pensions for the Elderly?

Historians have already made a major contribution to our understanding of the debates on aged pensions from 1900–08. But this milestone in the history of older people can only be fully understood by a careful analysis of the pressures for change in the twenty years from 1880. These included the growing sense of crisis over the ever-expanding destitute asylums for the aged poor—a crisis which reached its climax with the severe economic depression of the 1890s. Not only were the asylums overflowing, but even larger numbers of respectable poor were forced onto the streets to beg or seek rations.

There was a bias in young colonies against ‘undeserving’ paupers who had once been convicts, especially if they were elderly, frail and destitute. Thus many poor old people ended their days in bleak, overcrowded asylums under a regime which prioritised strict budgets and monotonous regulation. The nature and extent of such prejudice varied greatly between the colonies. For example, there were conflicting views in the 1890s about how to cope with this impending disaster. Victoria was influenced by the reactionary philosophies of the Charity Organisation Society, as we shall see later, fearing the growing pauperisation of the aged as a charge upon the community. By contrast New South Wales was motivated by the more egalitarian policies of the new Labor party and repelled by revelations about appalling asylum conditions.

In the later nineteenth century many sick and incurable older people in colonial Australia spent their last years in so-called ‘benevolent’ asylums, where conditions varied from inhumane in Queensland and Tasmania, to more tolerable in South Australia and Victoria. The removal of the elderly poor from the home to the asylum was a fundamental social change, reflecting a growing tolerance for large institutions for treating the elderly, destitute and insane. The trend to the institutionalisation of the elderly poor was well under way in colonial Australia, as in Britain, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial governments usually played a greater role than philanthropic bodies in funding the relatively large numbers of destitute older people. Convicts and early migrants left their families behind in Britain, and were obliged to confront illness, destitution and death without the crucial support of family networks or traditional communities, until new family formation took place over generations. Anne O’Brien’s analysis of three hundred inmates of the New South Wales benevolent asylums between 1880 and 1896 shows that 92 per cent were immigrants and 64 per cent had no living relatives.¹

The demographic and economic changes in later nineteenth-century colonial Australia left an ageing immigrant workforce without property or skills. Old age and destitution were often linked as major contributory factors in their deaths. The loss of mature strength with advancing years, reinforced by ill-health, could cause the premature end of full-time paid employment for labouring men. Certain occupations such as metal-mining were especially debilitating. Many tried to remain independent for as long as possible, but the critical years of vulnerability came early, often around the age of fifty, for lonely men who had never married or had abandoned their families. Most were keen to stay outside destitute asylums where possible, but it was hard to create a new independent existence in a colonial city, with limited social support. Alcohol was also a major problem, when the masculine pub culture was often the centre of male social life and alcohol consumption was high.

As the youthful population of convicts, immigrants and gold seekers aged, the demographic age-structure shifted dramatically. After the gold rushes the over-sixties population of Victoria rose from 1.5 per cent in 1861 to 8 per cent by 1901. The proportion of older people was especially high because of the large exodus of young people during the depression of the 1890s. The increase was more gradual but still significant in NSW, where those over sixty rose from 3 per cent in 1861 to 5.6 per cent in 1901. The proportion of the population over sixty years in 1901 in other colonies was closer to that of NSW, with just over 3 per cent in South Australia and Tasmania, though Queensland and Western Australia were still growing at 4.8 per cent and 3.3 per cent respectively.²

The rising numbers of elderly male immigrants created a marked gender imbalance, which was reflected in the high masculinity ratios in destitute asylums. In Victoria and NSW during the 1870s and 1880s there were usually well over twice as many men as women in the asylums, higher than the sex imbalance in the total populations.³ Other forces affected the gender imbalance in asylums, including the effort to preserve family units by assisting widows and deserted wives through outdoor relief in their own homes. Moreover women were more likely to develop supportive networks of friends and neighbours to provide assistance in times of need. Families often found it easier to cope with dependent old women, whose hatred of institutions probably exceeded that of men.

Aged People in ‘Benevolent’ Asylums in Colonial Victoria and South Australia

Victoria created a system of destitute asylums that probably deserved the title of ‘benevolent’ more than most, despite overcrowding, poor diet and regimentation. But Victoria was also the most powerfully influenced by the English Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, with its stress on the stigma of pauperism and its stark distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor; applicants had to prove destitution by willingness to enter workhouses which were made deliberately unattractive. The reformed poor law system in England did have some benefits from the 1870s, with its compulsory poor rates, professional administrators and centralised organisation. But the comfortable classes in Victoria fiercely opposed state intervention to compel taxation for social support, which was thought to encourage rather than deter pauperism. They supported private philanthropy and its network of charities as the appropriate moral alternative. Nonetheless philanthropy proved inadequate in most young colonies, requiring increasing government grants. In Victoria in practice the government had to provide around 70 per cent of the asylums’ operating costs by the 1890s.⁴

The Melbourne Benevolent Asylum for the aged, infirm and destitute was established in Melbourne in 1850, chiefly for single, low-paid male labourers. The primary occupation of women in the Asylum was overwhelmingly domestic service, though women were always in a minority from the 1870s. The Melbourne Benevolent Asylum’s population became increasingly old and infirm, the average age at death for men rising from fifty-seven years in 1870–72 to seventy-five in 1912. The numbers of inmates in the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum increased from 625 in 1880 to a high point of over 680 during the depression of the 1890s. The vast majority of inmates were English and Irish, with smaller numbers of Scots and Welsh. An increasing proportion needed medical care because they were very old and worn down by disease: in 1880 half the 625 were classified as incurable and over a hundred as blind.⁵ In 1896 the Melbourne Herald described the annual muster of Melbourne Asylum inmates: ‘hundreds of poor old creatures hobbled and tottered past … Some were lame, many blind, others partially paralysed … It was a sad spectacle.’⁶

Applicants to the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum had to be recommended by a subscriber, and usually came from the labouring classes. Their claims were investigated, as to character, means and family support: most were admitted if there were vacancies, despite common failures to prove worthiness. They usually remained in the Asylum because extreme age, infirmity or destitution left them no other option. ‘Old age’ was cited as the most common reason for admission, as well as heart disease, blindness, general debility, rheumatism, and paralysis.⁷

From the mid-1870s the Asylum’s general registers contained more information about family circumstances, since there was a strong moral expectation in Victoria that families should support elderly indigent relatives. But few inmates had families in Victoria with resources and many had no family in colonial Australia at all. The registers had to cite reasons for the failure of families to do their duty. Mary Kelly, a widow and former domestic servant aged sixty-six, was admitted in 1882 suffering ‘general decay’ and died only eight days later, but her only son and two nephews were unwilling to support her. William Talbot was a bootmaker, aged seventy on admission, who died after five years in the Asylum: the register noted that his four sons were not in the colony and they ‘left their father helpless’.⁸ Married couples were separated within the Asylum in segregated dormitories and dining rooms. Jane James, a domestic servant aged seventy, entered the Asylum in 1885 with partial paralysis and died three years later. Her husband John became an inmate six months before her death. Their sons’ locations were unknown and their married daughters were unable to support them.⁹

In many cases the bare recorded facts in the bleak Asylum registers are intensely sad. Emma Woodhead, another widowed domestic servant, endured ten years inside while totally blind. Her daughter-in-law was prepared to bury her in 1888, but not to accommodate her in life. Julia Howard, a domestic servant aged eighty-five, with no living children, survived until she was ninety-two, despite infirmities. Her husband offered no support because he was living in Richmond with another woman. Many inmates stand out in the records just because they somehow endured life in the Asylum to extreme old age. Martha Ball and Sarah Quick were former English domestic servants who died in the Asylum in the 1890s at ninety-nine and one hundred years respectively. Neither had relatives or friends to assist and Sarah was brought in by police as destitute at ninety-two years of age. These wretched cases raise questions about where these frail old people lived and how they survived before entering the asylum at such advanced ages.¹⁰

The responses of the eight Victorian benevolent asylums to enquiries from the Royal Commission on Old-age Pensions in 1898 were illuminating. In answer to the question, ‘Are the inmates of the class of deserving poor?’, the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum replied that only about one-quarter of their 685 inmates were deserving. The majority of their inmates allegedly became ‘burdens on charity’ as a consequence of ‘drink, improvidence, indolence’; there was no mention of old age, disease, poverty, blindness, mental disability or unemployment. Though the average age of inmates in all eight Victorian asylums was over seventy years, only the Geelong Asylum mentioned old age as a cause of destitution.¹¹

The Destitute Asylum in Adelaide was perhaps the most humane in colonial Australia, especially as it was the only one so far to conceive its role as primarily medical. From 1852 the government-funded Destitute Board provided indoor care for the infirm aged at a large central asylum in Adelaide, the only one in the colony. In South Australia the government also played an unusually large role in provision of outdoor relief in food and other necessities through the Destitute Board for the infirm aged living outside Adelaide. By the 1880s men in the asylum outnumbered women by three to one, following the impact of the gold rushes and heavy male immigration. The average age of the asylum inmates rose as the population aged and the asylum increasingly focused on an ageing generation of single male immigrants drawn from tough, unskilled jobs such as labourers and station hands. Three-quarters of the 223 admissions in 1887–88 were older migrants with no family in Australia—or none willing to support them.¹²

The managers of the Adelaide Destitute Asylum tried to be humane and to make the best use of extremely limited resources. Adelaide was unusual from the start in seeing the asylum’s role as primarily a hospital for the ‘aged, decrepit or diseased’, rather than a workhouse for the destitute. Many inmates had been moved to the asylum from the hospitals as a consequence of incurable chronic disease and poverty and 75 per cent were expected to die in the asylum.¹³ In 1885 the average age was seventy for men and sixty-four for women, and the average inmate was far more debilitated than in the asylums of Victoria and NSW. The average numbers of inmates under medical treatment rose steadily from 95 in 1889 to 355 in 1896, with great emphasis placed on the need for good, attentive nursing for the utterly helpless.¹⁴

An article in the Adelaide Advertiser in May 1898 commended the humanity and efficiency of the asylum officials: the asylum was well managed, but the system required a ‘complete revolution’. In particular the author condemned the ‘barbarous’ separation of poor, old married couples who had spent their lives together, as ‘a standing blot on our civilisation’. He also criticised the apparently aimless and joyless lives of so many inmates, ‘sitting in rows on benches to all appearances without any occupation’.¹⁵

Inhumane Asylums in Tasmania, Queensland and NSW

The worst asylums were those in colonial Tasmania and Queensland, where treatment of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One ‘The Forgotten People’, 1880–1945
• Part Two Hope for the Future, 1945–1980
• Select Bibliography
• Index