Snow

Chapter Eight

Some people seem to think that journalists have unlimited budgets to just travel around but, let me tell you, with all the problems newspapers are facing these days, it’s difficult to get the editor to fork out even for a trip to Melbourne.

That said, there was a time when I was that keen to find out what had happened to Agnes Moore, I would have put my own hand in my pocket to fund a trip down there.

Luckily I’ve got the kind of editor who will back me when I’m on a story, and when I told him that I wanted to go to Melbourne to do research into Snow’s background – this was after she’d gone to jail, obviously – he somehow got the expense claim through.

I got a morning flight into Tullamarine and I asked the driver of the taxi if he knew where Sunbury was. He said, ‘I’m from Sunbury,’ which is the kind of thing that always seems to happen to me. So then I asked him, ‘Do you know Caloola?’

‘Do you mean the old mental hospital?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘Of course I know where it is.’

He drove me right up to the gates, telling me all these gruesome stories, most of them probably false, about patients who used to live at Caloola: murderers and rapists and people who ate their own faeces, and I don’t know what else.

I paid the fare and stood at the iron gates, looking up at the building. It is pretty grand. It’s made of bluestone, and it’s got big windows and stone archways and lawns with fig trees, and climbing roses.

The history of the place doesn’t make for such pretty reading. I downloaded a copy of the official one, the one that Sunbury Library keeps on file, and it goes into all the gory detail: when Caloola was first opened back in 1864 it was just one big building called the Home for Neglected and Criminal Children, and it was for orphans but also for little kids whose parents basically didn’t want them – kids who used to get called ‘waifs’ and ‘strays’ and ‘delinquents’.

It would never happen now but the cops used to take them to Caloola. It was just like Dickens: they slept on the stone floors and there was no heating but plenty of rats and disease. The place soon got itself the nickname of ‘The Sunbury Slaughterhouse’, because so many of the kids who ended up there died of malnutrition or smallpox or from eye infections that nobody treated.

Caloola even had its own undertaker to deal with all the bodies.

As I understand it, the sign for the children’s home came down in 1879, but it was soon replaced by one that was worse: The Sunbury Lunatic Asylum. The first patients came from the goldfields at Ballarat, but before long they were taking patients from all around Victoria, and new buildings were going up to accommodate them.