Leprosarium violin

From the early 20th century in Australia, the 'Big Sick' was a most feared, incurable and darkly mysterious disease. Stigmatised from biblical times, the bacterial infection known as leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, began sweeping through the Kimberley. With strict and forced quarantine the only option, the Derby Leprosarium, ‘Bungarun’, was built in 1936 to isolate leprosy sufferers. The fifty years of its operation witnessed one of the most significant dislocations of Kimberley people with one in every ten Kimberley families affected by the disease. In March 1937, the Sisters, as government employees, took up the nursing at Bungarun and remained at Australia’s longest running leprosarium until its closure in 1986. A classical pianist, Sister Alphonsus Daley, in an early form of physiotherapy in 1944, began teaching patients, many of whom had never been to school, to play the violin. More instruments began arriving at the Leprosarium from all over the country and in its heyday, the near 50-piece, classical, Aboriginal leper orchestra played Beethoven, Mozart and Rock’N’Roll with a joyfulness that reached well beyond the spectre of their isolation and stigmatisation. This violin is testament to the resilience of a community formed by people from all parts of the Kimberley, forced to isolate together with the Sisters, the doctors and the staff who cared for them under the harshest form of isolation and quarantine, for the 50 years of operation. The original violin is currently on display in the WA Museum Boola Bardip, Perth, and this replica will take its place for the six-year term of loan. The original and haunting sounds of the Bungarun Orchestra can be heard outside in the Garden of Healing, adjacent to this 1926 Old Convent.