Old Black Cloud: A Cultural History of Mental Depression in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Abstract

A few pages into Old Black Cloud I was struck by the static, black and white photographs of past psychiatric institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand: Auckland Lunatic Asylum in the 1870s, Seacliff, north of Dunedin, around 1917; and the institutions of Seaview, Sunnyside, Porirua, variously in the early years of the twentieth century.