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It is sometimes easier to understand the chimeric experience of mental disorder by accessing individual episodes and incidents. This paper will review the lives of three strong-willed, charismatic individuals who all had influential and very public brushes with mental disorder in the small outpost city of Perth, Western Australia, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This opens up questions of retrospective diagnosis, the challenges of being mad in a small town, how print media has preserved these precarious individual narratives, and how individual histories of mental disorders can help to cast light on other aspects of mainstream Australian histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Library of Australia (NLA) Australian Newspapers project went public in July 2008, but many historians and researchers are as yet unaware of its existence, or of its great potential for their research. This article will demonstrate the revolutionary potential of this project for the history of medicine in Australia. Using the case of a largely-forgotten Western Australian chemist, dentist, and optician, Harcourt Whipple Ellis, a search of the NLA Australian Newspapers project produces a substantial amount of information on his at times scandalous career, a general physical description, a verbatim quotation, and many other witnesses' statements attributed to him. These newspaper articles 'flesh out' Ellis, and also provide valuable insights into early-twentieth-century life in Perth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition titled The Lost Generation Project 4: Found in Melville, held between August 20, 2009 and September 27, 2009 at the Heathcote Museum and Gallery, Heathcote Cultural Centre in Applecross, Perth, Western Australia.