By Kerrie Davies and Willa McDonald in Sydney

In 1886, a year before American journalist Nellie Bly feigned insanity to enter an asylum in New York and became a household name, Catherine Hay Thomson arrived at the entrance of Kew Asylum in Melbourne on “a hot grey morning with a lowering sky”.

Hay Thomson’s two-part article, The Female Side of Kew Asylum for The Argus newspaper revealed the conditions women endured in Melbourne’s public institutions.

Her articles were controversial, engaging, empathetic, and most likely the first known by an Australian female undercover journalist.

READ MORE: 10 days in a madhouse, by Nellie Bly

A ‘female vagabond’
Hay Thomson was accused of being a spy by Kew Asylum’s supervising doctor. The Bulletin called her “the female vagabond”, a reference to Melbourne’s famed undercover reporter of a decade earlier, Julian Thomas.

But she was not after notoriety.

Unlike Bly and her ambitious contemporaries who turned to “stunt journalism” to escape the boredom of the women’s pages – one of the few avenues open to women newspaper writers – Hay Thomson was initially a teacher and ran schools with her mother in Melbourne and Ballarat.

In 1876, she became one of the first female students to sit for the matriculation exam at Melbourne University, though women weren’t allowed to study at the university until 1880.

Going undercover
Hay Thomson’s series for The Argus began in March 1886 with a piece entitled The Inner Life of the Melbourne Hospital. She secured work as an assistant nurse at Melbourne Hospital (now The Royal Melbourne Hospital) which was under scrutiny for high running costs and an abnormally high patient death rate.

Her articles increased the pressure. She observed that the assistant nurses were untrained, worked largely as cleaners for poor pay in unsanitary conditions, slept in overcrowded dormitories and survived on the same food as the patients, which she described in stomach-turning detail.

The hospital linen was dirty, she reported, dinner tins and jugs were washed in the patients’ bathroom where poultices were also made, doctors did not wash their hands between patients.

Writing about a young woman caring for her dying friend, a 21-year-old impoverished single mother, Hay Thomson observed them “clinging together through all fortunes” and added that “no man can say that friendship between women is an impossibility”.

The Argus editorial called for the setting up of a “ladies’ committee” to oversee the cooking and cleaning. Formal nursing training was introduced in Victoria three years later.

Kew Asylum
Hay Thomson’s next series, about women’s treatment in the Kew Asylum, was published in March and April 1886.

Her articles predate Ten Days in a Madhouse written by Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochran) for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

While working in the asylum for a fortnight, Hay Thomson witnessed overcrowding, understaffing, a lack of training, and a need for woman physicians. Most of all, the reporter saw that many in the asylum suffered from institutionalisation rather than illness.

She described “the girl with the lovely hair” who endured chronic ear pain and was believed to be delusional. The writer countered “her pain is most probably real”.

Observing another patient, Hay Thomson wrote:

She requires to be guarded – saved from herself; but at the same time, she requires treatment … I have no hesitation in saying that the kind of treatment she needs is unattainable in Kew Asylum.

The day before the first asylum article was published, Hay Thomson gave evidence to the final sitting of Victoria’s Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate, pre-empting what was to come in The Argus. Among the Commission’s final recommendations was that a new governing board should supervise appointments and training and appoint “lady physicians” for the female wards.

Suffer the little children
In May 1886, An Infant Asylum written “by a Visitor” was published. The institution was a place where mothers – unwed and impoverished – could reside until their babies were weaned and later adopted out.

Hay Thomson reserved her harshest criticism for the absent fathers:

These women … have to bear the burden unaided, all the weight of shame, remorse, and toil, [while] the other partner in the sin goes scot free.

For another article, Among the Blind: Victorian Asylum and School, she worked as an assistant needlewoman and called for talented music students at the school to be allowed to sit exams.

In A Penitent’s Life in the Magdalen Asylum, Hay Thomson supported nuns’ efforts to help women at the Abbotsford Convent, most of whom were not residents because they were “fallen”, she explained, but for reasons including alcoholism, old age and destitution.

Suffrage and leadership
Hay Thomson helped found the Austral Salon of Women, Literature and the Arts in January 1890 and the National Council of Women of Victoria. Both organisations are still celebrating and campaigning for women.

Throughout, she continued writing, becoming Table Talk magazine’s music and social critic.

In 1899 she became editor of The Sun: An Australian Journal for the Home and Society, which she bought with Evelyn Gough. Hay Thomson also gave a series of lectures titled Women in Politics.

A Melbourne hotel maintains that Hay Thomson’s private residence was secretly on the fourth floor of Collins Street’s Rialto building around this time.

Home and back
After selling The Sun, Hay Thomson returned to her birth city, Glasgow, Scotland, and to a precarious freelance career for English magazines such as Cassell’s.

Despite her own declining fortunes, she brought attention to writer and friend Grace Jennings Carmichael’s three young sons, who had been stranded in a Northampton poorhouse for six years following their mother’s death from pneumonia.

After Hay Thomson’s article in The Argus, the Victorian government granted them free passage home.

Hay Thomson eschewed the conformity of marriage but tied the knot back in Melbourne in 1918, aged 72. The wedding at the Women Writer’s Club to Thomas Floyd Legge, culminated “a romance of 40 years ago”. Mrs Legge, as she became, died in Cheltenham in 1928, only nine years later.

Dr Kerrie Davies is a lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, and Dr Willa McDonald is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The University of the South Pacific’s recent 50th anniversary marked 30 years of existence for its regional journalism programme. In an eventful journey, the programme weathered military coups, overcame financial hardships and shrugged off academic snobbery to get this far.

The programme started in Suva in 1988, with Commonwealth funding, and a handful of students to its name. It has produced more than 200 graduates serving the Pacific and beyond in various media and communication roles.

USP journalism graduates have produced award-winning journalism, started their own media companies and localised various positions at regional organisations once reserved for expatriates.

READ MORE: Fiji Report – a day in the life of Wansolwara newspaper

The beginning was hardly auspicious: founding coordinator, the late Australian-based Kiwi academic Murray Masterton, recalled that from the outset, some USP academics felt that journalism was a vocational course with no place in a university.

A University for the Pacific. Image: USP

Such disdain turned out to be the least of Dr Masterton’s problems: plans to offer certificate-level courses in 1987 were almost derailed by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka’s pro-indigenous coups.

Masterton persevered in the face of this political earthquake – the South Pacific’s first military takeover of a nation – and after some delays, he got the programme off the ground. It was a significant development in a region where journalists had little opportunity to attain formal qualifications.

And it was not without irony – the Pacific’s first regional journalism programme, a symbol of media freedom, introduced in a climate of great media repression in Fiji.

Another cloud
Just years after establishing its position, the programme’s future came under another cloud when Commonwealth sponsorship ran out. An injection of French government funds in 1993 provided a new lease of life, with the programme upgraded to a BA double-major degree.

The three-year grant was supervised by Francois Turmel, former BBC World Service editor in London. During those lean years, Turmel often dug into his pockets to fund some activities.
When French funding ended in 1996, USP took over the programme, appointing another Kiwi coordinator in David Robie, a former international journalist, then head of the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) journalism programme.

During his term from 1998–2002, Robie made major curriculum changes by integrating the student training newspaper, Wansolwara, into the assessment and introducing professional work attachments with news media organisations.

He was also the first journalism educator to gain a PhD (from USP) in New Zealand and the Pacific, returning to Suva to graduate in 2003 in history/politics. He tells the story of the early decades of Pacific journalism education in his 2004 book Mekim Nius: South Pacific media, politics and education.

In 2001, I joined the USP journalism programme as the first full-time local assistant lecturer. I was already a Fiji and Pacific news media professional and I went on to become the first local to head the journalism programme.

After graduating with my PhD from the University of Queensland in 2016, I would become the first local PhD to teach journalism at USP. I saw to the expansion of the programme with a boost in enrolments and improved facilities to cater for the new demand, including the recruitment of two local teaching assistants.

Under my watch, Wansolwara continued to win major awards for excellence in journalism.

Recruitment of locals
The recruitment of locals was an important step in building local capacity to carry out teaching and research and provide support for Wansolwara.

The newspaper, founded in 1996 by lecturer Philip Cass, an Aussie, and a number of students, became well-established as the programme’s flagship publication. Wansolwara literally means “one ocean one people.” For founding student editor Stanley Simpson, the paper was a creation of young minds who “wanted to do things their way”.

Student training newspapers are regarded as important strategic assets, and Wansolwara has certainly played crucial roles at crucial times. The paper came to prominence for its coverage of the May 2000 nationalist coup, and the ensuing hostage crisis in Parliament, when the deposed Chaudhry government was held in captivity for 56 days.

Professor Robie has described the 2000 coup coverage as “one of the most challenging” examples of campus-based journalism. The students’ reporting put the overseas parachute journalists to shame, as recounted by Dr Cass: “Much of the outside coverage seemed to be done by people who were just taking the plotters’ statements at face value or else were writing their reports beside the swimming pool at the Travelodge, so the students were giving an alternative view that in many cases was much closer to what was going on.”

Not everyone appreciated the coup coverage. Certain USP academics concerned about security felt that student journalists should practice “simulated journalism”. The smashing-up of the nearby Fiji Television studios by rampaging coup supporters was the last straw for USP, which shut down the Wansolwara news website called Pacific Journalism Online.

However, Dr Robie was able to arrange for a “mirror” site at the Sydney University of Technology to allow the coverage to continue. Wansolwara won the Journalism Education Association of Australia “best publication” in the region award for its efforts.

It was one in a long line of journalism association, as well as regional and Fiji national, awards for excellence in journalism. Such honours, along with a healthy research output, has long since silenced jibes about USP journalism’s fitness as an academic course.

Under the radar
In the post-2006 Voreqe Bainimarama coup years, as media restrictions tightened, Wansolwara, as a student newspaper, was able to remain under the radar and operate more freely than the mainstream media.

Student reporting in the face of risks was exemplary. The April 2009 issue, which included a four-page critique of the coup, was still at press when the punitive Public Emergency Regulations were introduced.

The Solomon Islands student editor at the time, Leni Dalavera, phoned me in the dead of night, concerned that the students risked arrest. Delavera was assured that the authorities were highly unlikely to move against the students, and that the lecturers were responsible for the publication.

The thrills-frills of coup coverage aside, student journalists are also challenged in major ways during the so-called regular beats. A 2016 Pacific Journalism Review journal article by Singh and Eliki Drugunalevu, examined how USP student journalists deal with backlash from peers offended by their coverage.

This article shows how USP’s journalism students changed their initial feelings of fear, hurt and self-doubt to a sense of pride and accomplishment. Students felt they developed resilience, fortitude and a deeper understanding of the watchdog journalism ethos – learning outcomes which would not have been achievable through classroom teaching alone.

This reinforces the idea that students should not be cocooned, or made to practice ‘simulated journalism’, since they learn from dealing with confronting situations, a reality in journalism.

Students like Simpson, who bagged a string of national and regional awards as a professional, cut his teeth as a Wansolwara reporter.

Crucial role
The achievements of staff and students, the unique research undertaken by the programme into regional media issues – which feeds back into teaching – and journalism’s crucial role in the region, have cemented the programme’s position at USP.

In an interview in the November 2016 edition of Wansolwara, USP vice-chancellor and president, Professor Rajesh Chandra, pledged that journalism would remain part of the university’s future.

Chandra, who had strongly supported the establishment of journalism at USP, stated that good journalism was critical for an open and truly democratic society and USP’s role in training good journalists was crucial.

Professor Chandra’s comments underscore not just the journalism programme’s important role at USP, but its contribution to the region as a whole. Such vindication is welcome news for all those who fought for the programme and contributed to its development.

Dr Shailendra Singh is coordinator of USP’s journalism programme. This article was first published as a chapter in the recent book, A University for the Pacific: 50 Years of USP, edited by Jacqueline Leckie. It is republished here with the permission of the author, editor and USP.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz