Still Standing

The History of Institutionalisation and Eugenics in Aotearoa

The first NA meeting I ever attended was in a small community hall in St Albans, a relatively affluent suburb of Ōtautahi. The land had once housed a homestead built in the 1860s by one of Aotearoa’s early colonisers. Over 160 years later, the Victorian-style community building, no longer a private residence but now a public park and garden, with its white weatherboard cladding, gabled roof, and ornate trimmings, hosted over fifty drug addicts each Friday evening.

I wore a matching dark denim mini skirt and jacket with black stockings and boots that zipped up to my knee. I sat with my back against the wall next to the woman who would become my sponsor years later. The meeting ran for a hazy hour. I flinched when sections in the readings were chanted in unison with gusto. ‘Jails, institutions and death’ was shouted into the night. These words came at the end of a reading called ‘Who is an Addict?’ Jails, institutions, and death are the fates for addicts who aren’t fortunate enough to get into recovery. I’d never been to prison, but I’d been close to death and well acquainted with different flavours of institution.

I spent ninety days in an institution on a large plot of land in Canterbury, directly across the road from the women’s prison. It functioned both as a rehabilitation centre for addicts and alcoholics and as a working farm. The institution had many faces, purposes, and functions, but the underlying current that ran through its walls and corridors and the nurse’s office, was to change the behaviour of the souls that inhabited it.