Underfoot

Early colonists considered Australia not only a perfect prison, but also a tranquil sanctuary for their insane, unwanted, or inconvenient kin. But Melbourne’s supposedly sky-high rates of mental illness sparked a moral panic that would ripple through the centuries, even as different policies and technologies of border control have come and gone. We want healthy, hardy workers, not neurotic, inscrutable immigrants!In this episode, Jinghua and Liz talk about eugenics, ableism, and how the colony has drawn and redrawn the border.

What does it mean to be good, to be respectable, to be legitimate? These concepts have long been used to police women’s sexuality. The Fairhaven clinic at Yarra Bend Park – ostensibly a treatment centre for sexually-transmitted infections – was one of many institutions that incarcerated women and put their children up for forced adoption, under the guise of charity and care.In this episode, Liz and Jinghua talk about 200 years of whorephobia and slutshaming in the colony, and how in every era, bad girls found ways and means of their own.

Yarra Bend Park is both beautiful and haunted.The site has been home to an insane asylum, a women’s prison, a Native School, a police barracks, an AIDS hospital, and more.In this episode, Liz and Jinghua walk you through this lovely bit of Wurundjeri country where the Yarra River meets Merri Creek – and where thousands of people met grisly regimes of containment and control.