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Hidden women of history: Catherine Hay Thomson, the Australian undercover journalist who went inside asylums and hospitals
In 1886, a year before American journalist Nellie Bly feigned insanity to enter an asylum in New York and became a household name, Catherine Hay Thomson arrived at the entrance of Kew Asylum in Melbourne on “a hot grey morning with a lowering sky”.
Hay Thomson’s two-part article, The Female Side of Kew Asylum for The Argus newspaper revealed the conditions women endured in Melbourne’s public institutions.
- Authors
- The Conversation
Her articles were controversial, engaging, empathetic, and most likely the first known by an Australian female undercover journalist.
Hay Thomson was accused of …