Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873-1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. xiv, 224, £70.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7190-8724-0.

413 develop better openings and be more patient with those aspects of a text that even in our dualist world can, when not managed helpfully, make the reader feel bodily displeasure or ill-feeling. In her third book on the history of madness in colonial Australasia, Catherine Coleborne portrays a society in motion and one means of bringing order to it. As port cities, Melbourne and Auckland – the book's case studies – were not only gateways for immigration. As economic, political and population centres, they also attracted transient people and those who struggled to make a living. They were characterised by constant spatial and social mobility. While workers could find work and prosperity quickly, both could easily evaporate. Without family connections and savings, many would fall on hard times, some of them permanently. This was difficult to accept for a colonial society that was still unsure of its identity, as the visible poverty seemed to contradict the narrative of a successful, vigorous and muscular settler society. Would colonial Melbourne and Auckland have a prosperous future if so many immigrants could not cope with the hard and uncertain circumstances there? That this sense of insecurity and dislocation felt by many had consequences for the mental health of some inhabitants of Melbourne and Auckland was perceived as an unavoidable reality of colonial life by contemporaries, and public asylums were supposed to take care of the insane. There they would be treated and detained, but also registered and categorised according to disease, gender, social status, ethnicity and race with the aim of bringing order to the minds of those who had been unable to adjust to life in the colonies. These records of the Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne and the Auckland Asylum form the foundation for Coleborne's analysis, as they allow her to probe a society in search of its own identity. In so doing she has two different objectives set out in the introduction: the examination of imperial discourses on insanity and the exploration of institutional knowledge and practices in the colonies. Coleborne pursues these two objectives in six chapters. She sets the scene by portraying the cities of Melbourne and Auckland from the 1850s to the 1880s and then continues in the second chapter by establishing each city's network of social institutions taking care of immigrants in need, including the asylums for the insane. The third chapter focuses on the …