Mrs Sheila Parkinson was born in Wagga in 1916 and came to Beechworth as a young woman around 1938. Sheila trained as a psychiatric nurse at Mayday Hills hospital prior to the second World War. At that time, unmarried women were accommodated and received nursing training on-site. Shiela was obliged to cease professional training and employment when she married in 1941, which disrupted completion of her final nursing examinations. Following post-war changes to the law that allowed married women to work, Sheila returned to Mayday Hills. Sheila's husband, Don, returned to Beechworth after four years abroad as a serviceman in the Australian Air Force. Beechworth's institutions were a major source of local employment throughout the twentieth century. As well as providing limited employment opportunities to young women like Shiela, post-war European migrants from Bonegilla Migrant camp found at Mayday Hills, encouraging European migrant settlement in the district. Mayday Hills was renamed several times since its establishment in 1867. At the peak of operations, it comprised sixty-seven buildings housing over twelve hundred patients patients and five hundred staff. The hospital officially closed in 1998. Today, the decommissioned two-storey Italianate style main building stands on eleven hectares of botanical gardens under National Trust protection. The site remains a popular cultural heritage destination for visitors. This oral history recording was part of a project conducted by Jennifer Williams in the year 2000 to capture the everyday life and struggles in Beechworth during the twentieth century. This project involved recording seventy oral histories on cassette tapes of local Beechworth residents which were then published in a book titled: Listen to what they say: voices of twentieth century Beechworth. The cassette tapes were digitised in July 2021 with funds made available by the Friends of the Burke.Employed as a psychiatric nurse at one of Beechworth's large welfare institutions, Mayday Hills, Mrs Sheila Parkinson recalls the conditions faced by staff and patients at the hospital, which cared for chronically ill people from the Ovens region and patients from the Yarra Bend Asylum, Melbourne, which closed in 1925. When Sheila first began her nurse training, Mayday Hills suffered from a lack of resources and rudimentary facilities and patients frequently suffered from the cold due to poor heating and inadequate clothing and bedding. However, as the twentieth century progressed, Sheila recalls how conditions and treatments improved as a result of increased government funding of services and advances in psychiatry and pharmaceutical medicine. Mrs Sheila Parkinson's oral history recording is historically and socially significant for its witness to life in Beechworth in the pre- and post-WWII period. Sheila's story enriches our understanding of processes of modernisation with regard to psychiatric and welfare services, while the course of Sheila's professional training and employment brings attention to systemic and socio-economic barriers faced by women, as well as the valuable contribution women and migrants make in the delivery of care and ancillary services. This oral history account is socially and historically significant as it is a part of a broader collection of interviews conducted by Jennifer Williams which were published in the book 'Listen to what they say: voices of twentieth-century Beechworth.' While the township of Beechworth is known for its history as a gold rush town, these accounts provide a unique insight into the day-to-day life of the town's residents during the twentieth century, many of which would have been lost if they had not been preserved.This is a digital copy of a recording that was originally captured on a cassette tape. The cassette tape is black with a horizontal white strip and is currently stored in a clear flat plastic rectangular container. It holds up 40 minutes of recordings on each side.Mrs Sheila Parkinson /twentieth century beechworth, mayday hills, psychiatric care, benevolent asylums, nursing, wwii, psychiatric treatment, country women, psychiatric hostpital, beechworth's institutions, local employment, government institutions, listen to what they say, oral history, burke museum, sheila parkinson, beechworth lunatic asylum, beechworth mental hospital, beechworth hospital for the insane, the kerferd clinic, bonegilla migrant camp, working women, white australia policy

This glass slide captures a scene from a male hospital ward at Mayday Hills Mental Asylum. Also known as the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, Mayday Hills was officially opened on the twenty-fourth of October 1867 and was commissioned following lobbying from Beechworth Municipal Council concerning a need for better living conditions for individuals confined to the town's gaol. These individuals, as well as many others who were brought from surrounding institutions, exhibited behaviours that were deemed to be unfit for mainstream society. At its peak, the asylum consisted of sixty-seven buildings and housed over twelve-hundred patients and five-hundred staff. At the time of Australian Federation in 1901 - just a year after this photograph was taken - the patient population numbered six-hundred and seventy-four. The asylum was officially closed in 1996. It is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register as being architecturally significant. The extensive complex of buildings are examples of Italianate-style, which is strongly associated with asylums of the 1860s - the period in which construction of this particular asylum began. Today the asylum offers tours to visitors, including daytime history tours and night-time ghost tours. Lantern slides, sometimes called 'magic lantern' slides, are glass plates on which an image has been secured for the purpose of projection. Glass slides were etched or hand-painted for this purpose from the Eighteenth Century but the process became more popular and accessible to the public with the development of photographic-emulsion slides used with a 'Magic Lantern' device in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Photographic lantern slides comprise a double-negative emulsion layer (forming a positive image) between thin glass plates that are bound together. A number of processes existed to form and bind the emulsion layer to the base plate, including the albumen, wet plate collodion, gelatine dry plate and woodburytype techniques. Lantern slides and magic lantern technologies are seen as foundational precursors to the development of modern photography and film-making techniques.This glass slide is socially and historically significant as it is representative of the lives of the nurses and patients at Beechworth Mayday Hills Asylum in the early twentieth century. It is also historically significant as it is representative of the changing style of treatments and attitudes towards mental illness. Thin translucent sheet of glass with a circular image printed on the front and framed in a black backing. It is held together by metal strips to secure the edges of the slide.Obverse: h /lantern slide, slide, glass slide, plate, burke museum collection, photograph, monochrome, mayday hills, mayday hills hospital, mayday hills asylum, beechworth lunatic asylum, beechworth mental asylum, psychiatric hostpital, beechworth, burke museum, beechworth municipal council, beechworth patients, psychiatric patients, victorian heritage register, 1900, 1900 mayday hills, italianate style, 19th century asylums, asylums victoria, male ward mayday hills