The building was designed to be seen. It sits above the town on a rise, a long Italianate block with a tower, and when it opened on October 24, 1867 the drive up to it was the last road a great many people in north-east Victoria ever travelled. The colony had decided three years earlier that it needed three asylums. Beechworth was the second, and unlike a prison it made no attempt to hide what it was.
The Horror
It was never one thing. Over 128 years the same buildings were a lunatic asylum, a hospital for the insane, a mental hospital and finally a psychiatric hospital, and the name changed roughly every time the treatment did.
At its peak it held around 1,200 patients — the figure is usually given as six hundred men and six hundred women — with five or six hundred staff, on a site of more than two hundred and sixty acres. A brick wall ran round it, dropped into a ditch on the inner side so that from the gardens it looked like open country and from the wards it was unclimbable. That device has a name, a ha-ha, and it was borrowed from English landscape gardening. Here it was used to make a locked institution look like a park.
A morgue was built in 1868, the year after opening. It was not an afterthought.
What was done to people inside is documented, and it changed with the decade. There was patient labour dressed as therapy — by 1878 the asylum worked sixteen acres of farm and twelve of kitchen garden, and the patients worked them. There was mechanical restraint: straitjackets and shackles. There was seclusion. From the late 1940s into the early 1950s there was electroconvulsive therapy and there were prefrontal lobotomies. Until the 1950s there was no drug that did anything useful for the conditions being treated, which meant that for the institution’s first eighty years the wards were a holding operation.
The individual records are worse than the general ones, because they have names attached.
Marie Stella Hewitt — her name in the civil register was Maria Anne Hewitt, born 1849 — was admitted to Yarra Bend in July 1904 and transferred to Beechworth in July 1907. She died that October. Her case book gives a cause for her condition, and it is not a diagnosis. It reads: The Deeming Case (she being the discoverer of body & chief witness). In 1892 she had found Emily Mather’s body cemented under a hearthstone in a rented house at Windsor, and given evidence at the trial of Frederick Deeming. Fifteen years later a clerk wrote that down as the reason she was in an asylum three hundred kilometres away.
Dudley George Tong was shot in the back at Mouquet Farm on the Somme and spent thirty-five years at Mayday Hills. He was buried without a headstone. Edward Albert Gibbs was committed around the birth of his sixth child; his wife travelled up from Melbourne every six months to see him. Both men lay in unmarked ground until 2020, when five First World War veterans were finally identified and given marked graves.
Thomas Alexander David Fuller had worked there as an attendant since 1940. On the morning of July 14, 1955 he walked to work in rain and fog, and stepped three feet off the path into the sewerage dam. His watch stopped at 6.55. His body was recovered at two o’clock the following afternoon.
At about half past five in the morning on August 17, 1951, a fire started in a ceiling and destroyed the male wing. Eleven patients got out into the mountains in the confusion. Seven were recaptured. Four were not.
What the record does not say
Beechworth is one of Australia’s busiest ghost-tour sites, and the stories told on those tours have grown a long way past the paperwork.
There is no evidence of a tunnel system. It appears in no heritage assessment, no plan and no archival source.
The figure of nine thousand dead in unmarked graves on the asylum grounds is an invention. Patients were buried at Beechworth Public Cemetery, in plots left unmarked until around 1980 — and the Cemetery Trust’s records are good, which means the people in them are identifiable. Unmarked is not the same as unrecorded. No published total of deaths exists at all, and the often-repeated claim that a third of patients admitted to Victorian asylums never left alive carries no citation anywhere we can find.
Matron Sharpe is the site’s most-told ghost: a kind matron who sat with patients before their shock treatment, and whose presence is supposedly felt in the cold rooms of the Grevillea building. A matron of roughly that name did exist — staff lists give an Elizabeth Smart from 1879 to 1893, and a government report names a Mrs Elizabeth Sharp. But electroconvulsive therapy did not arrive at Beechworth until the late 1940s. Whoever she was, she was dead or long retired before there was any shock treatment to comfort anyone through. The legend took a real name off a staff list and moved her forward half a century.
The patient found dead in a tree with a dog is anecdote. The real version is the 1951 fire and the four men who were never recaptured, which needs no help.
Jim Kelly, Ned Kelly’s uncle, is widely said to have died a patient here in 1903 and to lie in an unmarked grave. We have not been able to confirm it in an archival source, and until someone works through the case books at the Public Record Office it should be treated as unproven.
The Modern Relic
The hospital closed in 1995 and the campus was a university until 2011. It sold in 2013 and has been subdivided since: a hotel, a restaurant, function rooms, arts studios, council offices, and a chapel that now does weddings.
You can walk the grounds any day between dawn and dusk, and the gardens are worth the trip on their own — eleven hectares of them, rated among the five most significant planted collections in Victoria, laid out to be looked at by people who could not leave. The ha-ha wall is still there. So is the 1868 morgue.
The part most visitors skip is four kilometres away at Beechworth Public Cemetery, where the asylum’s dead actually are. Five graves there now carry QR-coded signs, because in 2020 a researcher named Eileen Clark went through the records and worked out who was in them.
