The biography of a box

Tales of colonial Tasmania

The museum’s collection contains a medical kit that belonged to Dr John Coverdale and represents the best British medical technology then available. Like all museum objects, it embodies hidden narratives that accumulate across time and place to become part of the item’s history. Registrar Myffanwy Bryant looks at the stories this kit tells of colonial Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania).

DR JOHN COVERDALE was born in 1814 in India, where his father was head of the Bengal Postal Department. After studying medicine in Glasgow, Coverdale cut his teeth as a military ship’s surgeon and after two voyages, decided to pursue a land-based life. Arriving in Hobart in 1837, aged 23, he probably thought he had the fortitude and experience to practise medicine in one of Britain’s most remote and violent colonies. He immediately set up a single-room practice in Elizabeth Street and advertised himself in the local papers as a provider of ‘medicine, surgery, and midwifery, with gratuitous advice to the poor from 9–10 in the morning’.

Coverdale wasted no time in inserting himself into what passed as Hobart’s ‘polite’ society; no doubt looking for business, he even gave lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute. Newly married, skilled and free, a poster boy for the educated and intrepid, he was exactly what the penal colony was trying to attract.

However, private letters reveal that, like many immigrants, he often felt regret and indecision. After a move to nearby Richmond, Coverdale’s private medical practice was struggling to support his growing family and in 1842 he wrote that he felt ‘deceived and almost ruined. Would not England have afforded better prospects?’.1 In the few years since his arrival, the economy of Van Diemen’s Land had experienced a significant setback and residents had little spare money to engage a private doctor. Although he was not a farmer, his livelihood, like that of many immigrants, was affected by fluctuating agricultural markets and exports. To keep afloat, he accepted the government appointments of District Assistant Surgeon, Justice of the Peace, and Magistrate for Richmond. His medical box, the tools of his trade and the foundation on which his family’s future depended, was now in the service of the government, primarily caring for convicts. These government appointments at least provided a regular income for the family, but his dreams of affluence and gentility were hard to realise in this isolated colony.

01 The hopes and dreams of many migrants, be they tradespeople or doctors like John Coverdale, have been embodied in an expensive wooden box. Dr Coverdale’s box accompanied him throughout almost 50 years as a doctor and medical administrator in Tasmania. ANMM Collection 00028793

02

Receipt for surgeon’s instruments bought by John Coverdale from David Stodart in London, dated 2 June 1835. It lists a case each of capital instruments, cupping instruments and midwifery instruments, one dozen lancets, a catheter, a probang (sponge-tipped flexible rod used to remove tracheal obstructions) and elastic gum bougies (tracheal intubation aids). ANMM Collection 00028795

A political match

Dr Coverdale’s medical kit also tells the story of early British administration in Van Diemen’s Land. Parallel to the violence and terror that characterised its early decades, there had been an effort to create a version of British society and government that was utterly at odds with the penal environment. In 1837, Sir John Franklin had replaced George Arthur as governor, indicating a shift in colonial policy and the pressing need to answer questions about the island’s future as it transformed from a penal colony to one determined by free settlers. While many rejoiced at Arthur’s departure, he left behind several influential loyalists such as John Montagu, who was his nephew and the Colonial Secretary. Although a very experienced and adept administrator, Montagu was known to have an ‘imperious manner and dictatorial tone’. 2 He clashed with Franklin and his wife Jane, and disagreed on the future the Franklins were advocating. Agitations about colonial administration between Franklin and Montagu created ongoing tension and, by 1841, their personal and professional relationships were strained. To this tinderbox of a political situation, the unsuspecting Coverdale provided the match by failing to assist an injured convict who subsequently died. An inquest into the death found Coverdale guilty of ‘culpable negligence’ and recommended that he be ‘severely reprimanded’. 3 On reading the recommendation, Montagu advised Franklin that Coverdale be dismissed from his role as District Assistant Surgeon. Initially Franklin agreed and Coverdale found himself out of his prized government job with his professional reputation damaged. What then unfolded became known as the ‘Coverdale Affair’.

Coverdale wasted no time in inserting himself into what passed as Hobart’s ‘polite’ society

Supported by testimonials from Richmond residents, a pleading Coverdale wrote to the press explaining that he had been misled on the seriousness of the accident. As a result, Franklin reversed his decision and requested that Montagu inform the doctor personally that he would be reinstated. Montagu was enraged. He felt Franklin’s about-face had degraded his position as colonial secretary, and from that day on Franklin no longer received the same level of assistance from him. As a parting shot, Montagu also warned that ‘evil consequences’ would ensue from Franklin’s decision to support Coverdale over him.4 Government administration ground to a halt, with newspapers picking sides and digging in. In January 1842, Franklin felt he had no choice but to suspend Montagu from office. Montagu returned to London chagrined and, with time on his side, turned the London Colonial Office in his favour. Just one year later Franklin himself was recalled to London, heavily criticised over his dealings with Montagu. In May 1845, Franklin, determined to make the most of his early recall to Britain, embarked on a search for the famed and elusive Northwest Passage, the sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America. The expedition, in the ships Erebus and Terror, became a national disaster with the eventual loss of both ships and all crew.

The ‘Coverdale Affair’ had exposed the fragility of colonial administrations, where clashing personalities and disputed decisions could prove disastrous for isolated governments under unique local pressures. A visitor at the time compared life in Van Diemen’s Land to living ‘under a bell-jar, cut off from the outside world’. 5 Under these conditions, small agitations, even decisions by local doctors, could be enough to destabilise administrations and upset the fragile society.

Dr Coverdale retained his job in Richmond, the last character remaining from the fallout of the ‘political frenzy’ that he had inadvertently set in motion.6

The inadequacies of the 19th-century public health system were amplified in the environment of early colonial Tasmania

01

When Dr Coverdale started at the Queens Orphan Asylum in 1865, it housed well over 550 children. He oversaw not just their health but also their education, potential apprenticeships and the administration of this large organisation. It was a far cry from his duties in regional Richmond. Image Libraries Tasmania, image 151829

02 Hobart-Town, vue prise d’un ravin au nord, Van Diemen, 1833 by Edouard Jean Marie Hostein. Hobart is shown a few years before Dr Coverdale’s arrival. Despite this picturesque and orderly scene, Hobart was still very much a young town with teething problems, and Coverdale would soon locate himself and his growing family to nearby Richmond. Image National Library of Australia

A history of service

Over the years, Coverdale’s family grew, and while he privately ruminated about the wisdom of his decision to stay in Tasmania, as it was known from 1856, there never seems to have been a sincere effort to leave. He had worked his way up the medical administrative ladder to become First Warden of Richmond, the local coroner and a member of the Board of Medical Examiners. In 1865, Coverdale became further immersed in the public health system when he was appointed Superintendent of the Queen’s Asylum for Orphans in New Town, responsible for 583 children.

The inadequacies of the 19th-century public health system were amplified in the environment of early colonial Tasmania. Focus was primarily on convicts, military and free settlers; but of course, an unseen population existed alongside these (mainly) men –orphaned or neglected children, the mentally ill, ‘fallen’ and abandoned women, the aged and disabled. Their care was seen as a necessary duty for a ‘civil society’, yet these marginalised groups of people were unproductive, a drain on stretched resources and a point of agitation between the local government and the London office. Over the next 49 years, Coverdale would be involved with caring for them all through public health institutions, asylums and prisons in Tasmania. He was the final commandant at the Port Arthur penal institute, was responsible for overseeing its closure after 47 years of operation, and later became Medical Superintendent for the Insane at Cascades, the Hospital for Contagious Diseases, and the women’s Lying-In Hospital.

Coverdale’s approach to his responsibilities reflects European medical attitudes at the time. Increasingly humane ideas towards care and cure were beginning to be adopted in Britain. Focus was not just on housing patients or wards of the state, but preparing them to become productive and moral members of society. Coverdale appears to have endorsed this approach as much as he was able, but the government consistently encouraged him to economise and justify expenditure.

Reports on Coverdale’s performance are conflicting, but he seems to have some awareness for the trauma those in his care had experienced being vulnerable in this unique and harsh society. He recognised the positive effects of kindness shown towards the children in his care, made efforts to address the health of the colony’s sex workers and attempted to provide some comfort to elderly convicts. However, Coverdale’s career in Tasmania’s early public health administration is a reflection of government administration and most public departments of the time. He was not a trailblazer, but rather ‘a man who did his best in often extremely difficult circumstances, with tightly restricted budgets, unsuitable and outdated buildings, untrained and sometimes poor staff’.7

A surgical kit like his can, therefore, have many voices. Uncertain voices of immigrants travelling to the other side of the world. Bickering voices of rival politicians looking for a reason to usurp one another. And the quiet voices of vulnerable people in a fledging society. All can be heard in the biography of Dr John Coverdale’s box.

1 Susan Johnson, ‘Dr John Coverdale: The life of a colonial doctor’. THRA Papers and Proceedings , December 2001, p 326.

2 James Fenton, History of Tasmania, J Walch & Sons, Hobart, 1884, p 158.

3 Sir John Franklin, Some Passages in the History of Van Diemen’s Land During the last Three Years of Sir John Franklin’s Administration of its government, R and JE Taylor, 1884, p 14.

4 Ibid, p 5.

5 Ros Haynes, 2006, The Companion to Tasmanian History, University of Tasmania, utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_ history/V/VDL.htm, accessed 27 April 2023.

6 Craig Joel, A Tale of Ambition and Unrealised Hope, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2011, p 15.

7 Johnson, op cit, p 345.

For more on the search for and fate of Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition, see Signals 112 (September 2015).

The museum has conducted interviews with some of those aboard Voyager at the time