Pastoral Relationship with People with Intellectual ... - Theses

92With tighter regulation of relief the Board of Emigration was dissolvedand Grey introduced a Maintenance Bill in late 1842. 228 This bill imposed upondirect relatives the legal responsibility for the maintenance of dependent pauperfamily members. This regulation, which mirrored a characteristic of the BritishPoor Law, could thus lead to the defining of the ‘deserving poor,’ who were thosewith no natural protectors and who, without responsibility for their owndestitution, were in need of publicly-funded assistance. 2293.1.2 The Institutional Response: The Establishment of the DestituteAsylumA Destitute Board consisting of clergy appointments was established inearly 1849. Their initial task was to assist the Emigration Agent in theadministration of relief to the destitute poor. 230 However, it soon became theBoard’s task to respond to the perceived need of providing the destitute poor withan indoor facility that offered a greater degree of regulation, control, economiesof scale, division of labour and supervision. Thus the notion of the asylumemerged whereby a group of buildings designed according to a factory conceptwere constructed in a manner so as to provide secure, regulated management ofthose deemed to be in need of such residence. The Destitute Asylum was seen bythe Board as an effective means of managing socially dependent people. 231 It wasestablished in 1851 in Adelaide towards the bottom of Kintore Avenue, adjacentto the rear of Government House.Institutional archaeologist Susan Piddock likens the physical, spatialnature and the organising principles of the Destitute Asylum to those of theEnglish workhouse. The design of both buildings was directly related to issues ofsupervision, controlled movement and classes based on criteria such as gender.Both provided work areas, skills training areas and spaces for punishment. Bothbuildings were “fundamentally about the use of the physical environment toreform the inmate, who was either a willing or unwilling participant.” 232The idealised function of Australia’s early asylums through to the mid-1800s was curative and educative in nature. However, with the goal of eventually228 ibid., 12.229 ibid., 12-13.230 ibid., 15-21.231 ibid., 21.232 Piddock, Susan. A Space of Their Own: The Archaeology of Nineteenth Century LunaticAsylums in Britain, South Australia, and Tasmania. (Adelaide: Springer, 2007), 16-17.