Phenomena: The Lost and Forgotten Children

Travel Guide

Dunedin – “Seacliff Village”

This is the story of the community of Seacliff village during the 1950s, with many of the author’s family members working in the hospital at some time or another. He says they sometimes shared our primary school with young patients from the hospital.

The asylum has to be seen to be believed:

They were deposited, confused and bewildered, into the care of the mental hospitals for the unloved and unlovable, the uneducated and the unwanted – soon forgotten, feeding the insatiable appetite of the institution, placating the guilt of the knowing masses. Deposited there to be described, measured, weighed and quantified, labelled, segregated and finally, cattle-ised..”