Corporate Body

Charles Brothers Museum (1950s - 1980s)

Mental Health Library, Office of Psychiatric Services

From
1950s
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
To
1980s
Functions
Collection Management and History of Australian Medicine

Summary

The Charles Brothers Museum at the Mental Health Library held a significant collection of psychiatric paraphernalia including artefacts, records, photographs, and interviews with Dr Cunningham-Dax and others. Dr Charles Brothers was the Vice-Chairman of the Victorian Mental Health Authority during the 1950s which is when he began his collection. Dr Cunningham-Dax was chairman during this time.

The Museum closed in the late 1980s and its contents appear to have been dispersed amongst several organisations. It is known that the Public Records Office of Victoria is now custodian of many of the collection's clinical files; Museum Victoria has most of the collection's objects; and the Royal Melbourne Hospital holds most photographs; other items remain unaccounted for.

Details

Museum Victoria took over the Charles Brother's Collection in 1987. At that stage the collection contained over 700 items which had been used in Victorian psychiatric institutions from the 1860s to the 1950s. Many items were collected by Charles Brothers himself on his visits to the institutions, while others were donated by the institutions themselves.

Since 1987 Museum Victoria has expanded the collection and further researched the original contents. Additional artefacts were obtained from institutions including Caloola Training Centre (Sunbury) and Mayday Hills (Beechworth) and oral histories conducted by members of the Kew Cottages Historical Society have been added. A full list of artefacts in the collection can be found in Behind Closed Doors: A catalogue of artefacts from Victorian psychiatric institutions held at the Museum of Victoria.

Related People

Published resources

Books

  • Willis, Elizabeth (with Twigg, Karen), Behind Closed Doors: a catalogue of artefacts from Victorian psychiatric institutions held at the Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 1994). Details

Resources

Annette Alafaci

EOAS ID: biogs/A002358b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/A002358b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260