James Dunk

Hi there.

I mean, we've heard about the pandemic, the way it reveals all these fractures and fault lines in society.

It's actually the way I feel about mental illness and madness.

We can get close to it and follow exactly how it comes about, how it's expressed, how people respond to it.

We learn all sorts of new things about

or any kind of society.

And so my book does that for the early colonial history of Australia.

Yes, absolutely.

We learn so much about the kind of values that we have in our communities and families, but also about the way that the law operates and kind of the place of medicine in society.

It is a little bit about institutions, but the institutions were fairly late to the picture, the picture that I'm interested in, at least.

The kind of first institution wasn't built for about 20 years.

And even that was a pretty small affair, kind of a barn, actually, where people just slept on the floor sometimes.

And it wasn't a lot of medicine or process there.

And so it's not, you know, the story of the total institution that we have later in later kind of studies of prisons and asylums.

It's...

very ad hoc and creative and interesting kind of solutions people found to the problems caused by mental illness for persons and families and for the society at large.

Well, I have a couple of small children at home and...

I've actually really been enjoying reading with my seven-year-old, my eldest, Aldo Leopold's The Sand County Almanac.

I kind of have known about this book for a while.

I mean, it's got a book of mythic status in the environmental community, published in 1949, the year after Aldo Leopold died.