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This article considers the mid to late nineteenth-century world of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, Western Australia. By examining the built environment of the asylum and the uses of spaces within its walls, it is possible to understand not just the experiences of the inmates, but to highlight attitudes towards the insane. The asylum was built under authority of the British Government, and later transferred to the Western Australian Government's care. Reflecting on this volume's theme of colonial institutions, this article will highlight the effects of center and periphery relationships on life within the asylum.

The slate industry was central to the economy of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century town of Willunga, South Australia and today evidence of the slate industry and the uses of slate abound around the township. As part of the Adelaide Hills Face Zone Cultural Heritage Project the history and archaeology of the slate industry and the uses of slate were recorded. While sites such as the Delabole quarry and village are listed on the South Australian Register of State Heritage Items little attention has been focused on the preservation and interpretation of these sites as a part of a wider cultural landscape rather than as individual sites. As this article will demonstrate the relict landscapes of the quarries need to be seen as part of a wider cultural landscape that encompasses industrial and social landscape, which can in turn be used as the basis for public interpretation. The interest of the general public is essential to the survival of such sites.

In South Australia government authorities in a fledging colony were required to build institutions to care for the poor and the pauper insane, and they drew on designs from England, where workhouses and county asylums were being built in response to new laws. From a simple glance at the plans of the Destitute Asylum, which was built to house the deserving poor, and of the Adelaide and Parkside Lunatic asylums, it would appear that gender divisions dominated life in these institutions. A study of the material culture of the asylums, however, indicates a complex range of factors was, in fact, informing the experience of the asylum for the inmates. Gender, classification, social class, and the organizational purpose of the particular institution were all to play a role in determining the access to and use of the space and rooms of the asylums.

While most of us are familiar with the idea of the lunatic asylum, few people realise that lunatic asylums were intended to be curative places where the insane were return to sanity. In the early nineteenth century a new treatment regime that emphasised the moral management of the insane person in the appropriate environment became popular. This environment was to be provided in the new lunatic asylums being built. This article looks at what this moral environment was and then considers it in the context of the provisions made for the insane in two colonies: South Australia and Tasmania. These colonies had totally different backgrounds, one as a colony of free settlers and the other as a convict colony. The continuing use of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums as modern mental hospitals means that alternative approaches to the traditional approaches of archaeology have to be considered, and this article discusses documentary archaeology as one possibility.

Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings. This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are eminently subject to archaeological investigation.   A few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.