For more than a century the collection of buildings now known as Glenside were Adelaide's home for the abandoned, sick and insane. Within the walls of the 130 acre hospital were countless tales of sorrow, magnificent market gardens and ground breaking advancements for their time in the treatment of the mentally ill.

Founded in 1836, it wasn't long before the city of Adelaide established what would now be considered as primitive means to house residents deemed mentally ill.

As with the progression of treatment, the definition of mental illness also evolved.

By 1845, a reported 12 inmates were segregated from the main population in the Adelaide Gaol due to described mental illnesses.

In 1846 the first purpose-run asylum was established on the current Glenside site.

The Public Colonial Lunatic Asylum operated from 1846 till 1852.

Local historian and Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Flinders Medical Centre, David Buob, said the property was more of a farm than a hospital.

It was located far enough away from the then town borders to keep the occupants out of sight, and out of mind.

The six-room cottage housed inmates from the Adelaide Gaol that were deemed to be mentally ill.

"It quickly became inadequate," Dr Buob said.

The overflows of patients were soon returned to the gaol.

To help deal with the influx, in 1852 the Adelaide Lunatic Asylum opened at the eastern end of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

The Asylum remained in operation from 1852 till 1902, with the majority of the buildings since demolished.

Parkside/Glenside

The Parkside Lunatic Asylum opened in 1870 and soon became the home for Adelaide's chronic mental health patients.

Those nearing the end of their lives, suffering from undiagnosed diseases, unmarried women with children and prostitutes were also toppled into the establishment.

Conditions and treatments were a long way from what patients experience in modern times, with the Register Newspaper in 1910 reporting that approximately one third of those admitted to the Asylum would die on the premises.

A large number were said to have died of old age.

It was renamed the Parkside Mental Hospital in 1913 and the Glenside Hospital in 1967.

Patients who were thought not to recover, or would need much longer than others to recover, were transferred to Parkside.

Separation by location

With changes to the Mental Health Act in 1913, a dual treatment process was introduced with a receiving and mental hospital classification.

Parkside utilised its Administration building as the primary receiving hospital, with outlying buildings for the secondary stages.

Parkside was divided by female and male geographical separation to the north and south.

The east to west plane defined the patients expected stay.

Those closest to the eastern edge, in the Admin wing, were short-term and long stay wards.

Behind those streamed wards for difficult men and women, hospital wards, wards for the intellectually disabled, tuberculosis wards, and finally 'Z Ward' for the criminally and mentally insane.

Originally 'L Ward', the name was soon changed due to the fashionable pronunciation at the time of silencing an 'h'.

When the operators realised the ward sounded like 'Hell Ward', it quickly became Z.

Z Ward was also surrounded by an aptly named 'ha-ha wall'.

Appearing to be a standard wall from the outside, the inner wall had several metres of soil excavated from boundary, changing the height considerably.

The wall name was thought to be derived from the story that prisoners would always boast they could quickly escape the short wall.

Once they stepped inside, with fallen smiles, the guards would reply 'ha-ha'.

The name though originated from times well before the asylum and are thought to have been in existence since the early 1700s when the lower part of the walls were a fashion of the UK pastoral fields where owners wished to have uninterrupted views of meadows.

With the barrier hidden below ground level view from one side, it was said that a sudden discovery on foot or horseback of the fence would often raise a chuckle from the traveller.

Progression from west to east, to the furthest Z Ward, held as much value to the staff as it did the patients, with unruly staff believed to be demoted further east into the more difficult wards.

The Bin

Parkside long carried the nickname The Bin.

A home for the discarded.



Since its creation in 1870, the hospital had become the dumping point for souls that did not fit into society.

By the end of its first decade it housed 274.

Luckily the era of mental health when Parkside opened was described as a period of 'enlightenment'.

"We were no longer chaining people up [or] putting them in water baths, because that concept of being possessed by the devil and needing to be spiritually cleansed had passed."

In the early 1900s, syphilis related dementia provided a large number of occupants.

"They probably made up 20 percent of admissions in the early days," David said.

It's a condition that is now treated with a simple injection of penicillin.

By 1914, a Registrar-General report detailed up to 8 percent of admissions were still syphilis related causes, with up to 2 percent of deaths related to the disease.

On 24 October 1915 a report was issued to a committee investigating conditions at the property quoting the population to be at 1,157.

"You invariably ended up with overcrowding in wards."

Single beds were replaced with bunk beds, and in some cases even four-person bunks.

Hallways became additional wards, and generally overcrowding became the norm.

By 1958, records held by H.T.Kay showed residency had peaked at 1,769.

From the inside

Many patients became automated to the routine of the hospital, and began to fear life outside.

The hospital itself was also largely self-reliant on its residents, utilising the manpower of those within to tend gardens, pick fruit, mend clothes and tailor shoes.

They also tended sheep, cattle and pigs that were farmed to provide meat for the hospital.

"For two or three hours a day, all the able-bodied patients who were in the asylum were expected to do meaningful work," Dr Buob said.

Such were the quality of stocks from the asylum's gardens, the now heritage listed stone wall, was constructed in 1900 to keep looting neighbours out, rather than the patients in.

With inmates finishing their daily work at around 4:00pm each afternoon, by nightfall the gardens had become infested with local residents harvesting the rewards of the patients' hard work.

Effective for many years, when the Great Depression fell on the city, residents simply climbed over the wall and helped themselves.

Dogs were introduced to guard the supplies.

They were quickly killed or poisoned.

By the beginning of World War 2 the hospital had given up hope of protecting the gardens.

The cost of protecting the produce became more than the purchasing of the goods.

The gardens were reduced to olive and mulberry trees, used to produce local olive oil and silks that were exported to Japan.

Decades of differing treatments

Initially preferring bed rest and isolation as a means of treatment, trends soon changed.

Through the late 1800s agents such as chloral hydrat, bromides, paraldehyde and barbiturates were administered to patients.

In 1871, reproduced in a presentation by Professor Bob Goldney for the South Australian Medical Heritage Society, a report by Dr A S Paterson said the new agent Chloral Hydrate had been used extensively during the year and was found to be helpful controlling 'the restlessness of general paralysis and senile dementia'.

"It procures sleep in acute mania better than any other drug which I have tried," Dr Paterson wrote.

As the over-crowding of wards became a large problem for the establishment, new methods were trialled in attempts to cure those inflicted.

In 1929 malaria treatment was introduced, infecting patients with a controlled form of the disease.

1930 saw the introduction of arsenical treatment to try to curb the influx of syphilis derived dementia.

By 1938 the hospital was trialling insulin shock treatment, which placed the person in a diabetic coma.

Cardiazol injections were also administered, with high doses causing convulsions.

This practice was known as 'convulsive therapy'.

In 1941 Electro-convulsive shock treatment (ECT) began, with Parkside the first to introduce the procedure to Australia.

As Australia became gripped in the early stages of World War 2, the style of timing devices required for ECT machines were reserved for bombing mechanisms.

The Physics Department of the University of Adelaide struck on the idea of substituting timers with the dial mechanism from a rotary telephone.

Machines were initially tested on rabbits, before being used on patients with schizophrenia or those suffering from manic-depression.

Patients were also put under the knife, with the first psychosurgery procedure completed at Parkside in 1945.

By the late 1950s, breakthroughs in modern drug treatments began to show promising results, and patient numbers in the asylum slowly began to fall.

In 1962 the separation of sexes was removed and males and females were allowed to mix freely.

By the mid 1970s, with progressions in treatment and falling patient numbers, the original site was subdivided and parcels of land were sold off.

What once was an outskirt disposal point for the city's unwanted citizens had now been enveloped in Adelaide's urban sprawl and had become much sought after property.

With the remaining areas of the once large campus now divided between SA Health, Arts SA and PIRSA, many of the buildings are earmarked for restoration and redevelopment.

A new film and screen centre and health facilities are currently under construction, with plans to restore and reuse many of Glenside's buildings as office and accommodation centres.

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