Not a drop to drink: New Zealand's inebriate homes, c.1890s-1930s

Abstract

For most of the nineteenth century New Zealand's problem drinkers were treated as criminals or lunatics. They were dealt with in New Zealand's vagrancy and lunacy laws, liquor licensing legislation and Police Offences Act. In 1898 the Inebriates Institutions Act, the first New Zealand statute to deal specifically with the care and treatment of inebriates, was passed by the New Zealand legislature. Over the following years this Act was amended and further legislation relating to the care and control of inebriates enacted; the Habitual Drunkards Act in 1906 and the Reformatory Institutions Act in 1909. Little attention has been given by New Zealand historians to the inebriate institutions established under these Acts or to their inmates. Instead, historians have focused on levels of alcohol consumption and drunkenness in nineteenth-century New Zealand, the colony's liquor licensing laws, the rise and fall of the temperance movement and the battle between temperance and anti-temperance campaigners in studies of the 'demon drink'. This thesis remedies the lack of historical attention given to New Zealand's inebriate homes. It studies the establishment of inebriate institutions in New Zealand in the early twentieth century. Firstly, it explores the circumstances out of which the need for inebriate institutions in New Zealand arose. Secondly, it examines the legislation which provided for the institutionalisation of drink addicts in New Zealand. Lastly, it looks at New Zealand's inebriate homes; their management, operation, treatment regimes and inmates. It argues that the passage of the 1898 Inebriates Institutions Act, 1906 Habitual Drunkards Act and 1909 Reformatory Institutions Act stemmed in general from public concern about alcohol and its effects, dissatisfaction with the efficacy of existing methods of dealing with inebriates and the medicalisation of drunkenness but that the particular impetus behind, and focus of, each statute varied. Consequently, the nature of inebriate homes established under the various acts differed from one another. It discusses also the extent to which notions of the criminality of drunkenness persisted, despite the increasing acceptance of the disease concept of alcoholism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suggests that the 'failure' of New Zealand's inebriate homes was the result of inherent difficulties in the treatment and management of drink addicts, in particular the absence of a specific cure for inebriety.