Collections from the asylum: Past lives, present tense

Mayday Hills, the former mental hospital in Beechworth, has an iconic presence in the Border region. A cross-University, cross-disciplinary research team has been collecting data for several years, including interviews, photographs and artefacts, and creating artworks and publications in response to the data collection. In 2016 the researchers had an exhibition at the Albury LibraryMuseum entitled UpTop: A Sense of Place for Mayday Hills Hospital.

The current exhibition extends the earlier one by presenting items from different collections, some of which have not been seen in public before. It represents the outcomes of the various aspects of the researchers’ work: social history, archival research and the arts. The research continues because there are many stories to tell and we hope to collect quite a few from people visiting the exhibition. We can never know enough about our past, even if it is an uncomfortable past.