From a young child, I grew up with the knowledge that my great-grandfather, William Eason, was a highly respected teacher committed to helping his students excel in examinations and earn scholarships to further education. The William Eason Memorial Gates at the Koo Wee Rup school entrance, erected by an appreciative community following his death in 1936, were a great source of family pride. However, I knew very little of my great-grandmother, Minnie. Dad told me that William and Minnie's young daughter, Norma, had died in a fire, a priest had blamed Minnie for her death because she married a non-Catholic and Minnie ended up in an asylum where she eventually died. Consequently, in 2011 my interest was aroused when reading a newspaper article concerning a patient’s mental health records being available 75 years after their death. I was curious to learn more about my great-grandmother's life and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance.

 

After accessing Minnie's Mental Hospitals' Records, I found them confronting and disturbing as I learned of her unimaginable suffering and torment, which she endured for over eleven years. Added to my anguish, I discovered that William had privately requested her committal. At this stage, despite feeling alarmed at the thought of a husband committing a wife, I remained open-minded regarding his actions. However, after absorbing the harrowing details of her asylum life, I didn't have the resolve or the courage to continue my research into the circumstances surrounding Minnie's committal.

 

It took a chance visit to the Rosedale Cemetery in 2014 to re-ignite my interest in Minnie and William's lives when I discovered that Minnie was buried in an unmarked grave. In stark contrast, William had a headstone in the Pakenham Cemetery and the Koo Wee Rup Memorial Gates as lasting legacies. I felt deeply troubled by such disparity.

 

The journey of researching Minnie and William's lives has been similar to solving a jigsaw puzzle without consulting the image on the box. During the following years, crucial facts emerged through official documents, newspaper articles and more hospital records. I started to piece together a framework of their married lives and the circumstances of Minnie’s committal. As newspaper articles mounted regarding William's community, church and club leadership positions he volunteered for, I wondered how his frequent absences from home would have impacted his young wife and family, raising doubt in my mind as to William's level of commitment to Minnie. Furthermore, after reading the Coroner's Inquest records concerning Norma's tragic death, I wondered how a couple could ever have recovered from such a devastating event, especially with Minnie being responsible for leaving little Norma temporarily unsupervised.

 

It is highly likely that as a result of the circumstances surrounding Norma's death, Minnie suffered from severe shock, profound grief and lasting guilt, which all contributed to her demise. Her chances of ever returning to a fulfilling, settled life were further diminished by many other risk factors in her life, including: her husband's priorities seemed to lie outside of his home, the Catholic Church had condemned mixed marriages and Freemasonry, doctors had little understanding of mental health and the brutal mental health system which existed at that time often incarcerated vulnerable people. I imagine Minnie's potentially fragile mental health eventually became a liability to her husband as he took on more prestigious roles in his community. Yet, just like a missing piece of jigsaw, we will never know with absolute certainty what led William to remove Minnie from her family home and children, leaving her to a life of abject misery and despair until her death.

 

I began to think less favourably of William after learning that his divorce petition omitted significant information and exaggerated Minnie's mental state. When I then discovered in the Receiving House Register of Patients book that William was the attested authority who committed Minnie, based on her supposed jealousy, I felt a strong sense of injustice, particularly given that Minnie's allegations of infidelity against William were quite plausible with his extracurricular activities requiring frequent absences from home. Furthermore, my suspicion that William did not truly care for his wife was validated when I realised that he never visited Minnie once he committed her.

 

As I discovered more critical information about Minnie's committal, the purpose of my investigations shifted to giving Minnie a voice. No one in her family or community would ever have read her Patient Clinical Notes or hospital records to understand how much she ultimately suffered from her husband’s actions. No one in William's family or community would ever have read his divorce petition, let alone reconciled its claims with Minnie's hospital records. I felt a responsibility to reveal the intolerable suffering that she must have endured as a result of the death of her child, an unhappy marriage and significantly, being an involuntary patient of three asylums for eleven years, in degrading, overcrowded conditions, vulnerable to violence and cruelty.

 

In my quest to understand the circumstances of Minnie's committal, I have unwittingly unearthed the chronically unstable childhood that my grandfather, Arnold Eason, experienced. After tragically losing his younger sister when he was six years old, he then witnessed the deterioration of his mother's mental health, his parents' struggling marriage and his mother's permanent removal from his life, all within five years. Eighteen months after his family unit was torn apart, Arnold had another upheaval moving from a rural town to board with a family in Melbourne for three years whilst attending Wesley College. Such severe emotional turmoil and sudden disruptions to his young life gives me a greater appreciation and understanding of his character and the fine and successful man that he became.