James Dunk
historian and writer living and working on unceded Wangal country, in Sydney
I write about mental illness and mental health, planetary illness and planetary health.
Winner, Australian History prize, NSW Premier's Awards 2020
Shortlisted, University of Queensland Non-Fiction Award, QLD Literary Awards 2020
Shortlisted, Ernest Scott Prize 2020
Shortlisted, Kay Daniels Award 2020
"Bedlam at Botany Bay offers readers a strikingly original re-reading of early colonial Australia. Beautifully crafted and deeply empathetic, this is a book with genuine literary and scholarly merit. It makes a significant and invigorating impact on the field of Australian history, and deserves to be read and discussed for many years to come." – Judge's Comments, New South Wales Premier's Awards 2020
"A brilliant and compassionate study. Vivid true stories spill out of these pages, illuminating colonial society with the myriad flares of private suffering." – Tom Griffiths AO
"by insisting that we should examine trauma and madness in their wider social contexts, by voyaging into emotional history and the predicaments of both the insane and the people who cared for them, James Dunk has opened promising new ways to understand the histories of empires and colonies." – Grace Karskens
Current projects
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered
As evidence of planetary-scale ecological disruptions began to mount in the late twentieth century, some argued that these were symptoms of a deep psychological problem.
Image: Wikimedia Commons: Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima_(from Matsuyama) 509th Operations Group
Mapping the conceptual history of planetary health
A collaborative project between the University of Sydney, Monash University, Harvard University, and KTH Stockholm
Image: NASA/USGS Landsat; Geoscience Australia. Source: Landsat gallery.
Psychology as if the whole earth mattered: towards a planetary mental health
IN THE FACE OF DEVELOPING ECOLOGICAL CRISES, argued Anthony McMichael in 1990, the real driver of action would be human health, and those who wished to protect it would need to learn to ‘anticipate the future’. That perspective has given way to planetary health, a complex, globally framed epidemiology – or a human ecology pressed by crisis conditions into urgent focus on health outcomes. The new field looks to build a sufficient evidence basis for the radical reconfiguration of agriculture, energy, transportation, housing, and other systems in a deteriorating planetary environment – to protect human health by preserving the health of natural planetary systems. While advocates emphasise the significance of mental health within their framework, early projects and outcomes under its rubric have concentrated on physical health. One reason for this may be that the systems thinking which underpins the field has led to profound challenges when applied to psychological problems.
This historical project traces the emergence of ‘planetary mental health’ formulations from the 1980s, when psychiatrists and psychologists active in the medical antinuclear advocacy movement formed their own organisations. They studied not only the potential psychological effects of nuclear war (as their peers did with bodily effects), but the psychology of living under its threat, especially as it presented in children. Some, inspired by developments in systems thinking, went further, investigating the psychological factors which had produced and continued to sustain weapons of such unruly power, diagnosing forms of psychopathology, or ‘nuclear madness’. As the Cold War drew to a close, these researchers applied the frameworks they had developed to the ecological crisis revealed by the landmark UN World Commission on Environment and Development, and begun to map the health effects of deteriorating planetary systems. Drawing on the interdisciplinary insights of human ecology, psychological researchers presented a challenging hypothesis under the banner of ‘ecopsychology’ which prefigured later discussions of the ‘anthropocene’. Humans, they argued, by imagining themselves separate from other species, had developed a fundamental psychopathology, of which the destruction of their ‘life-support systems’ was a deadly symptom and testament. So too the anxiety, despair and ‘solastalgia’ which appear increasingly endemic in the anthropocene are symptoms not only of environmental deterioration but of that fundamental dislocation.
This project will compare the planetary health and global mental health frameworks with these insights from human ecology and ecopsychology to explore the vectors and boundaries of the systems thinking which has become increasingly dominant in biomedical thinking since the mid-twentieth century, and the disciplinary resistance to overarching questions – about human selves and the species – which have emerged both from the study of deep evolutionary time and from the modelling of deteriorating futures.
Past projects
Memories of the Future
a planet burning hot, breathing ragged
To heal our planet we must know it more deeply.
Seven Sydney historians, and local musician Asher Graieg-Morrison, shared stories of places that have formed us, to re-enchant the world and lay down memories for the future.
The politics of madness in a penal colony
Madness emerges in strange places, and upsets everything.
My doctoral thesis uses madness to reveal the workings of colonialism in New South Wales from 1788-1856
A curious combination of leisure and work
A history of beach mission in Australia, 1888-1988
In my honours thesis, I explore the ways in which summertime Christian missions to holidaying families took the form of leisure but also undermined it
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://user-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/295271_402010.png "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
![By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://user-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/946235/529231_727841.jpeg "By Joseph Martin Kronheim and Company (National Library of New Zealand) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
