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R.S. Ellery, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon: Private Papers of a Psychiatrist (1956)

One of the keys to Robert Menzies’s success as a politician was his ability to maintain relationships spanning vast distances and periods of time. One interesting example of this is Menzies’s friendship with Dr Gordon Morrissey OBE.

Born in Melbourne in 1894, Morrissey was Menzies’s contemporary at the University of Melbourne, even playing a few VFL games for the team the university boasted at that time. Even back then it was the VFL’s only amateur club, and it would go defunct after the 1914 season following 51 consecutive losses.

After completing his medical degree, in 1921 Morrissey moved to the Queensland town of Ingham, 110kms north of Townsville, with his medical practice and services for the local hospital becoming a cornerstone of the local community. By the 1930s, the town was notable for being home to a large number of Italian migrants, the majority of whom worked as sugar cane cutters. After particularly heavy wet seasons in 1933 and 34, numerous workers were struck by a debilitating fever which caused some to suffer painful deaths. Morrissey identified that this was being cause by Weil’s Disease, or leptospirosis, a bacteria carried by rats which lived under the sugar cane. Against the resistance of local landowners, Morrissey pushed for changes in technique, including the burning of cane stalks, which helped to eradicate the outbreak by 1935. An achievement for which Menzies would award him the Order of the British Empire in 1962.

Despite Morrissey living the rest of his life in North Queensland, he stayed in close contact with Menzies, to whom he would write and catch-up with whenever he toured the Sunshine State. The Menzies Papers in the NLA contain a number of surviving letters from Morrissey. They include Morrissey keeping Menzies informed about local opinion and goings on, an attempt to secure his daughter special advancement with the Department of External Affairs, and repeatedly telling Menzies in a concerned doctorly way that he needed to slow down and get enough rest. A notable message is Morrissey congratulating Menzies on his 1963 election victory, saying that ‘Queensland has made partial reparation for the mid-summer madness of 1961 [in which a bad swing up north almost saw Menzies lose office] which probably frightened them more than it alarmed you’.

Morrissey gifted Menzies a copy of The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, the autobiography of another prominent Australian doctor, Reginald Ellery. Ellery was a pioneering Melbourne psychiatrist, whose innovations included applying the insights of Sigmund Freud and the introduction of shock therapy treatment by injection for the mentally ill. Early in his career Ellery was accused of maladministration and cruelty to patients at the Kew Mental Hospital, allegations which prompted a Royal Commission where Menzies as a young lawyer successfully defended him.

They are unlikely to have gotten on beyond this though. Ellery was a known communist sympathiser who spent an extended sojourn in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and even wrote pamphlets arguing that the implementation of communism would help reduce cases of mental illness. When Ellery established the Melbourne Institute for Psycho-Analysis in October 1940, he faced some resistance from the Menzies Government, as well as the British Medical Association (the forerunner of the AMA).