Of course, we’re talking now about a time when people who had disabilities – people with Down syndrome, for example, or people with cerebral palsy – were treated like they were insane and they got put in the same institutions as people who were actually crazy, so Caloola was soon bursting.

There weren’t many drugs designed for mental illness, so pretty much everyone was locked into a straitjacket, and the other major treatment was ‘thump therapy’, where male nurses would go around at night, thumping people to make them go to sleep. There was also a ‘Dark Room’ – a tiny space, blacker than night – for holding particularly unruly patients, often for weeks on end.

This went on for years and years, until finally the screaming got too much for the good citizens of Sunbury, who claimed to be able to hear it coming down the hill. They formed a group – it was called the Sunbury Citizens’ Advocacy Group and a version of it might still exist – to lobby the government to open up Caloola to some kind of scrutiny.

A report in The Age from 1985, which you can find on the Caloola home page, quoted a member of the group saying, ‘I can’t sleep at night, thinking about what might be going on in there. We need to go in and find out! We hear all kinds of rumours about patients being held in straitjackets, and we hear these terrible screams.’

A Victorian minister for community services at that time was a bit of a citizens’ action group hero, because rather than tell the group that he’d get somebody to have a look into it, he empowered the Sunbury Citizens’ Advocacy Group to enter Caloola to conduct its own investigation, and their report caused a sensation when it was leaked to The Age. I can see why. There’s a copy of it still on file in the Victorian parliamentary library, and it basically says that patients at Caloola in the 1980s were living much as they had done in the nineteenth century. They were stripped to their underpants, tied down to chairs, and made to eat with their hands because the staff thought they couldn’t be trusted with cutlery.

None of them had their own clothes – they were given clothes from a communal pile of laundry – and many had been given no explanation for why they were even in Caloola, let alone how long they were supposed to stay there.

I took a few notes from the report. ‘We were disgusted by what we found at Caloola,’ it said. ‘It cannot be right for a person to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and left like a penned ox for sixty years. The waste of human lives is immoral.’

The minister hopped straight on it, promising first of all to bring the number of patients in Caloola down from 1000 to around 500, and he promised to train a ‘new generation’ of nurses to try to ‘change the culture’, and perhaps find out whether any of the patients who were stuck in there could actually live in the community. He called this ‘the program of normalisation’, and Snow was one of the first nurses to sign up for it.