Tragic family secret echoes down the years

Linley, a retired reconciliation project worker at Rumbalara, said she grew up knowing about three of her grandparents, who came from England, Scotland and Wales, but she knew nothing about her mother’s father.

“So I thought I’d start with him,” she said. “I had no thought of writing anything at that stage. I just gathered everything together and I ended up with a bookcase full of documents and bits and pieces of family history.”

She discovered the name Merritt was a running thread throughout her family history. Linley eventually tracked down Elwin Merritt, who knew the story of her missing great-great-grandmother.

“We met at the grave and that’s where I discovered the story of Lizzie,” Linley said. “It made me very sad ― the fact that her story had been hidden for so long. I was standing at the grave thinking more than a hundred years have passed and nobody’s been here.”

Lizzie Merritt was the first to be buried in the family grave at Boroondara Cemetery when she died in 1900. She was followed the next year by her daughter and later by her daughter’s husband. Their names are still visible on the fading gravestone.

“The grave did show me they hadn’t forgotten her throughout life,” Linley said. “A lot of people went into asylums and were forgotten and buried at the asylum when they died.”

Research took her to the historic market town of Hitchin in England where Lizzie was born and where her parents were head teachers at the local school.

“We were treated like royalty ― we stayed in the village for about 10 days,” Linley said.

An email she sent to the local historic society was passed on to the British Schools Museum, which published it in a book on the history of headmasters.

“So all that got me really interested ― and I sort of felt compelled to write her story,” Linley said.

Using family histories, interviews with descendants, archival documents and extensive records on Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Linley crafted her great-great-grandmother’s life into a first-person narrative told by Lizzie herself.

“The story is set in a time when ‘lunacy’ was a crime,” Linley said.

“Little medical knowledge about mental illness existed, and stigma and discrimination surrounded the mentally ill.”

Linley believes her great-great-grandmother suffered from bipolar disorder. She said within a year of arriving in Melbourne in 1856 Lizzie was placed in Western Gaol at the western end of Collins St.

“Mental illness was a crime then,” Linley said. “She came before a magistrate and was judged to be ‘dangerously lunatic’.”

Linley believed her book may be the first to chronicle the events of a person incarcerated at Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum and at Western Gaol.

Linley has had to use her creative writing powers to fictionalise the behaviour that resulted in Lizzie’s incarceration.

She said even though treatments for mental illness had progressed over the years, stigma and high rates of incarceration for the mentally ill remained today.

“I came across recent research that said out of 150 people locked up in two busy metropolitan police cells, three out of four met the criteria for a mental disorder,” she said.

Linley said she attended a webinar last week on mental health issues, which revealed a disturbing trend.

“During the 1970s and 80s we had de-institutionalisation of the mentally ill,” she said. “Now we have re-institutionalisation by putting people in jail who really have a mental health issue.”

She said funds raised from the sale of her book would be donated to Sisters Inside ― a community organisation that advocates for women and girls in Australian prisons.

Lizzie’s Journey to Yarra Bend, published by Ginninderra Press, was launched on Thursday, November 25, at Mooroopna Library.