It’s done! Madness and Marvels, the book I’ve been working on for the last four years, is now available as an ebook. I decided to self-publish it, for two reasons. First, so that those who have been eagerly waiting for it can read it. And second, to make the research that went in to it available. for anyone who might find it useful.
You can download it from all the main ebook distributors (Apple, Kindle, Kobo, Barnes and Noble etc). Or you can borrow it from Overdrive (through the Libby app), Borrow Box or Hoopla, though you might need to request it through your library first. If ebooks aren’t your thing, I plan to produce a paperback version soon.
Though set in the same place, and in much the same era, as The Edward Street Baby Farm, Madness and Marvels is a different sort of book. There are no court-room dramas, no wicked women or dead babies.* It’s essentially a dual biography of two professional men, the engineer C. Y. O’Connor and Dr Henry Barnett, the Superintendent of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum.
The lives of these two Irish men crossed in Fremantle in the 1890s. The West Australian parliament, under John Forrest’s leadership, was just getting to grips with self-government. Fremantle Harbour was being constructed, after much debate. Then the gold rush happened. The book looks at how these events affected O’Connor and Barnett, and the colonial society in which they lived.
* Actualy, there is one death of a child mentioned, that of C. Y. O’Connor’s son in infancy.