© Chris Bishop, 2025.
Cape Lilac trees that outline and define the location of the historic Greenwood farmhouse. © C Bishop, June 2025.
Upon reading the following from the winter of 1893, one should feel very sorry for Bella.
…A young woman named Bella Hurst, daughter of Mr. Hurst, settler near the Collie Bridge, has been sent by train to the Lunatic Asylum at Fremantle. The poor girl who was brought up in the country, came to Bunbury about the time the staff and band of the Salvation Army from Perth visited Bunbury, some four or five weeks ago. The poor young girl, who witnessed such an impressive scene for the first time, was so taken up with the proceedings that she at once joined them, and became such an ardent supporter that the strain on her mind. which is evidently a weak one was too much, and she developed a religious mania. Her people found it necessary to send her to an asylum. but every hope is entertained that her mental disease is only temporary… [1]
The ‘Lunatic Asylum at Fremantle’ was generally called the Fremantle Asylum.
For important context to the above, the following applies:
- Bella was what family and friends called Mary Isabel Hurst, who was born on 26 January 1873.
- She was born on the family farm called Greenwood, the locality of which was called Collie Bridge or the Lower Collie. Greenwood is now called Clifton Park, for unknown reasons.
- When calling Collie Bridge the ‘country’, it was that relative to Bunbury, and certainly Fremantle. In 1893, the Australind road in the vicinity and to Bunbury, was in very poor condition and the route between the two circuitous. The nearby 1864 Lower Collie Bridge was then falling into a state of dis-repair. Australind was in the doldrums and surviving with a school, post office and store, and a small population of about 30 souls. The 1890s construction of the Perth to Bunbury railway via Pinjarra shifted the focus of development to agricultural and timber towns further inland. Travel from Greenwood to ‘nearby’ population centres laying along the south west rail easement, such as Brunswick Junction, Wokalup, Cookernup, Harvey and Roelands was a long trip. Greenwood was therefore physically isolated and rightly could be called ‘the country’.
- Bella was the youngest of eleven children, most of whom had left Greenwood by 1893.
- The Salvation Army had only commenced activities in Western Australia in 1891, so those running the Bunbury event likely had a lot of religious zeal and seeking new members. This zeal would have appealed to someone who was naive and looking for meaning to their life. The early Salvation Army bands were known for the excitement generated and their public appeal.
Whatever Bella experienced that August day in 1893, it is highly likely it would not be construed as insanity today. It was likely an intense religious awakening, to which she reacted in a socially unacceptable way.
She was not the normal type of female inmate at Fremantle Asylum. Most of the women at the asylum were older, had not complied with the then feminine social norms, been put there by their husbands for not performing their housewife duties, were hardened drinkers or criminals, were homeless vagrants, or actually had some form of insanity. Often persons were incarcerated there on moral not medical grounds. Many did not leave again, except in a coffin. Bella was very young, was in no way hardened by her life, or as far as is known had no male partner or beau, or vices.[2]
Bella’s reputed ‘mental disease’, called in her case ‘mania’, was deemed short lived. On 21 November 1893 she was released from the asylum into the care of her father as ‘cured’.[3]
She married George E Withers at Australind in 1899. George was killed in 1917 in World War 1. Before this, Bella and George had five children. She lived to be 82 years old, passing in 1955. Bella is buried in an Anglican plot at the Karrakatta Cemetery at Perth, Western Australia.[4]
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[1] 1893 ‘Topics of the Week.’, Bunbury Herald (WA : 1892 – 1919), 16 August, p. 2. , viewed 22 June 2025, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87084744
[2] Norman Megahey, ‘More than a minor nuisance- Insanity in Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History, Centre for Western Australian History, University of Western Australia, 1993.
[3] Fremantle Asylum Register of male/female patients, 1857-1906. AV WAS4507-cons1120 25. State Records Office, microfiche, viewed 21 August 2025.
[4] 2025- Family tree research by author on ancestry.com.