01 | Shooting the Past | The Ruins of Science

Historian Clare Wright takes a deep dive into Australia's past through six intriguing photographs. In this episode Clare tries to uncover the story behind a baffling photo, and finds herself transported back to the not-so-swinging 1960s.

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  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  A pig gets shot and this nearly starts a war. A pastry shop gets trashed, war. A football match turns ugly, also war? Hey there, I'm Mark Fennell. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are taking on history's most absurd conflicts. Four episodes, four wars, and we called it This Stupid War. Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past, where each week a different photograph helps us dive deep into Australian history.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so the thing is, I'm staring at this photograph and I have absolutely no idea what I'm looking at. Damien, what do you reckon this is a photograph of?

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Some kind of medical device.

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  It looks like some kind of medicine, in a tube. Hospital equipment?

• 1:05Speaker 03

  No, something you stick down, something. I have absolutely no idea.

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  What do you think this is a photograph of?

• 1:11Speaker 05

  I've no idea. It's tablets. I don't know, what is that?

• 1:14Speaker 06

  I think that this is a photograph of a big tin drum of oil. It's got a hose coming out of it, although it says it's 50 mg, so it must be smaller than that. It's got me stoked.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  So Gemma, when you look at this photograph, what do you see?

• 1:31Speaker 04

  It looks like it's something that you don't know can kill you until it does.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Clearly, the people in the ABC office aren't going to be any help identifying the object in the photo. So I'm going to describe it to you, but chances are you'll be just as clueless. The object is made up of what appears to be a plastic medicine bottle. On the bottle, it says 'largactyl', 50 mg, poison. And cascading from the bottom is a long, clear tube. The tube is so long, it's coiled around itself like a pretzel. And at the end of the tube is a tiny metal valve. And that's it. That's why I can't stop staring at this photo. The more I look at it, the more curious it becomes.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Is the object a device for smoking drugs or tobacco? A backyard bong maybe, or a homemade hooker? Or is this a police exhibit? Perhaps the long tube was used to strangle a victim or administer a deadly narcotic? I could reel off possibilities till the cows come home, but I suspect I will never guess. I'm going to need to call in the expert, the woman who showed me the photograph in the first place, historian Kate Davison.

• 2:51Speaker 07

  What it is, is a penile plethysmograph. A penile plethysmograph is a machine that can be used to measure volume changes in the penis. And this is a diagnostic tool. It's basically designed to test responses to erotic stimuli. What you see in the photo, so we can see the bottle, we can see the rubber fitting on the top, and we can see the long, plastic tube. The metal fitting on the other end of that tube would go into a machine which is called a transducer. And a transducer is an electronic machine that measures volume change. And that transducer would be connected to, people might be familiar with the image of a polygraph.

• 3:33Speaker 07

  So you have a sort of a pencil attached to a lever that records changes on a piece of paper. And the piece of paper moves through the machine. So what you get at the end is a nice line, which indicates when volume has increased and when it has decreased. This particular plethysmograph in this photo was made by Australian psychiatrist Neil McConaughey. And this particular photo comes from his personal archive.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  So the object in the photo is a penile plethysmograph, something I've never heard of before, let alone seen. Kate Davison has the photo because she's researching the work of Dr Neil McConaughey as part of her PhD into the history of aversion therapy in Australia. Aversion therapy, Kate explains to me, was a form of treatment for homosexuality. Remember that in the 1960s, when McConaughey was practising, homosexuality was not only classified as a mental disorder, but was in fact illegal. Oh, here comes a dog.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  To find out more of the story behind this bizarre diagnostic device, I've come to the Sydney home of retired archivist Fabian Losguio. In 1971, Fabian was a patient of Dr McConaughey. Fabian is warm and inviting, but I have to admit, his home is one of the most curious places I've ever been. There's a massive wooden church altar next to the bathroom, and every inch of wall and surface space is covered in images of Jesus, various popes and random saints. Some classical, others satirical. Fabian's house is like a gallery of religious iconography.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  So how did his life intersect with Dr McConaughey and the object in this photo? And just a heads up, this story has some strong themes and language.

• 5:29Speaker 06

  There's two Fabians, there's the one that loved that intimacy, and then the other one that hated it and wanted to get rid of my sexuality. And I had been told there was this doctor who would do that. And Professor McConaughey said to me, what we're going to do for you is we're going to be able to inhibit your sexuality. And that will mean you won't be compelled to go and do the things that are upsetting you. It was exciting because I thought I'd be able to get rid of my sexuality altogether and maybe go back to the seminary and lead a life without these troubling desires. It looks innocent enough, doesn't it?

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  Lots of young people hitchhike, but sometimes the homosexual who prey on those least able to defend themselves. Innocent looking, but deadly. Then during lunch, Ralph showed him some pornographic. One never knows when the homosexual is about. He may appear normal, it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill.

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  So it's a very strong message that you're receiving from your family, from society, from the medical establishment, that you have a problem, but you can overcome this problem through treatment.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. But there were contrary voices. My best and longest friend from third class, he was in a relationship in Melbourne, he begged me to come and visit him. And he said, don't go ahead with this, people at another church, at Christchurch. And Lawrence said, it's not necessary to do this. There were contrary voices, but I chose not to hear them. Anyway, they weren't as strong as the ones that were saying to me, I could start a whole new life now without this, the one in my side and that thing that exposes me to sadness and heartache and sickness, disease, being bashed up and everything.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Tell me what you see when you look at this photo.

• 7:31Speaker 06

  Well, I see a container that's got a rubber stretched over it, but it's exactly the thing that I had to put my penis into when I was having aversion therapy. When I look at it, it brings back a certain embarrassment because I had to undo my trousers and pull them down to put that thing on. And I felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed. But most of the time, there was only myself and another person who was operating this thing in the room.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  But on one occasion, a group of medical students came in and I really felt very distressed and embarrassed. So when I look at this photo, I know that that's the thing that they used.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  And can you describe that treatment to me?

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, they put the wires on your fingers and then put your penis in that thing that is in the photograph. Then you sat down and you waited. And sometimes a slide would come up and you'd get a shock, sometimes you wouldn't get a shock. Also, there were strange, very strange, what we call today, videos, I guess, of trains coming in and out of stations and red spots and green spots on the screen. Also, very, even then, to me, antiquey looking film of a naked lady toweling and a naked man toweling. And then the train would come in again and people would be getting on the train and

• 9:14Speaker 06

  off, which looks like Redfern Station, the old rattlers, as we'd call them now. And then you'd wait and then a slide which you'd selected. So before the treatment, I had to look at hundreds and hundreds of slides and make a note of the ones I thought were exciting to look at.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Is that the word they used, exciting?

• 9:36Speaker 06

  I think so. I don't think they said erotic. I was very coy and still am about all the language. But certainly, there were three or four at the most, out of hundreds, that I thought were really lovely and were nice to look at and nice to fantasise, oh, I could be with that boy, see? And so those were the ones that came up. But sometimes you got a shock, sometimes not. And you had to tell the assistant or professor what level of pain it was from naught to 10.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  And the whole time this is happening, you're sitting there with your pants down, hooked up to that thing with the metal end attached to the machine?

• 10:21Speaker 06

  Yes, I only understood that at the end, and only vaguely, when the assistant showed me the graph and it showed that, he said, this is the penile response, you see? See how it's going down like that? Now, you're doing okay. And so I I look, I like looking at the slides, but then I I didn't because I sweated terribly when I thought, when am I going to get the shock?

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  Um.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  And when am I not going to get the shock? Because you didn't get a shock every time they put the slide up.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  And this happened three times.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  Three times a day, just for the week, as I remember it.

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  And you were an inpatient during this time?

• 10:58Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, at the psychiatric ward.

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  And how were you treated in the times at the hospital where you weren't undergoing the treatment itself?

• 11:06Speaker 06

  I was left alone, but one day a nurse came in and when she said, what are you doing in here? What's the problem with you? And I told her what was happening and she got very angry with me and said I was taking up a bed for someone who was genuinely sick. And um I was stupid and silly for doing such a thing.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  So after that week of treatment, did you just go home?

• 11:30Speaker 06

  I went home. I was due to come back for a booster six months later. So when I did turn up again for the booster, I just burst into tears. And um Professor McConaughey then said, we won't do another booster at this stage. I want you to go and see this person. And he wrote a referral to the Smith family in Crown Street. And I went and I s- this councillor psychologist was very nice and he taught me some relaxation.

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  And then he started encouraging me to go out and socialise in bars and meet people.

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  Um, so do you?

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  I didn't go back. I felt at the end of that week, I've done, I've paid the price. I've done everything that I can to do what the church or God wants me to do. And now I'm, there's nothing more to be done. After that, that was it. And as the months wore on, I found that at uni, I had the Gay Society, Gay Sock, it was, as it was called, I started meeting people my own age, going out and finding partners. I found it all very challenging and interesting from then on.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Fabian's treatment under Dr McConaughey didn't change his sexual orientation. As a uni student, he learned to accept and embrace his homosexuality. Dr McConaughey, do you regard homosexuality as a sickness, as a mental disturbance? No, probably homosexuals identified as such are slightly more likely to seek psychiatric help. But is this because of the homosexuality? Or is it because of the social problems that come because they are homosexual? Precisely. I overthink myself for the social problem. Dr Neil McConaughey, speaking in a debate about homosexuality on ABC Radio in nineteen seventy six. So who was Neil McConaughey?

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  The man who made the contraption in this photo? What were his motivations? I meet historian Kate Davison in the Brownlist Medical Museum at the University of Melbourne, surrounded by the little glass bottles and surgical instruments of a bygone era.

• 13:54Speaker 07

  McConaughey did his medical degree at the University of Queensland. Following that, he came to the University of Melbourne, where we're sitting today, and he did his psychological medicine qualification to become a psychiatrist. And his main interest at that time was schizophrenia. Uh, so he was very, very interested in schizophrenia research. Um, he came up with a few new concepts in in that field. After he did his qualification at the University of Melbourne, he went, as many people from Australia did at that time, he went abroad. Uh, and did some time at the Maudsley Institute in London. And this was the world famous psychiatric institute at um the Maudsley Hospital. And he spent some time there.

• 14:37Speaker 07

  Uh, and that, the Maudsley Institute at that time was the, really, it was, it towards the late fifties, it was becoming really the global hub of behaviour therapy. McConaughey spent some time there in in London and then he came back uh to Melbourne, where he worked here in one of the hospitals for a time. And then in nineteen sixty four, he was given a position at the University of New South Wales, specifically to undertake research into behaviour therapy. And so he started his position there at uh the University of New South Wales and he was working at the Prince Henry Hospital as well.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  So as an academic and a clinician?

• 15:15Speaker 07

  Correct. The other important thing to say about McConaughey is that he was politically very clearly identified with the left. He considered himself a communist sympathiser. He would proclaim himself to be a Marxist. And I mention this because we often don't think of the uh the way that politics affects medicine. But for McConaughey, I think that this was really significant because it it certainly shaped his, his particular brand of humanism was very, very much shaped by his ideological views on the world. And he also, I I'd like to point out, he was also a thespian. So he was very interested in theatre plays.

• 15:59Speaker 07

  He actually wrote several articles analyzing books and plays. He was a huge Henrik Ibsen fan. And he would often quote these people in his scientific uh papers, which is something quite unique and unusual. Uh, he was, he was definitely someone who was interested in the arts and had quite a a holistic approach to life and and people's experience of the world. And I think that that really drove him. He was um, I would say that he was a humanist. He had a humanistic outlook and he was interested in really helping people come to terms with the world. People with, you know, great difficulties in a variety of different ways.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Did McConaughey have the idea that he was going to discover a cure to homosexuality in the way that medical researchers today might be hoping to find a cure to cancer?

• 16:45Speaker 07

  He was extremely agnostic, actually, about the idea of a cure. He wasn't interested in curing or changing people's orientation as such. He was interested, this is his words, so we can take it with a grain of salt perhaps, but he felt that what he was doing was assisting patients come to terms with the current social constraints, in whatever way that happened. He thought that he was able to help patients overcome something that they couldn't deal with themselves. I would say he was scientific to a fault. I have spoken to one of his former colleagues, in fact, who told me that he himself, he is gay today, and he himself had homosexual desires at the time that he met McConaughey.

• 17:28Speaker 07

  And he asked McConaughey, oh, this is actually someone who wanted to work with him as a as a postgraduate student in the lab. And he said, oh, I I I would be interested in trying this on myself. And McConaughey said to him, what on earth would you want to do that for? You seem perfectly well adjusted. So he was not interested in trying to change people who were happy with themselves. He really was trying to um,

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  you know, help people come to terms with current social constraints, in whatever way they they felt they could manage. I am personally critical. I have, you know, a very, very critical lens on this as a historian today. I I don't think that it was particularly justified, but we can only take the man at his word.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Social attitudes were one thing, but legal oppression was another. Given that homosexuality was a criminal offence in some states up until the nineteen eighties, how many of Professor McConaughey's patients came under his care as a way to avoid going to jail?

• 18:29Speaker 07

  Out of the forty patients that he saw in his first study, only two of them were at that time facing uh prosecution. There were two of them going through court proceedings and the rest, the other thirty eight, were all there, you know, voluntarily. They had come seeking him.

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  Persecution, discrimination, having the shit beaten out of you, being abused, being spat on, being disowned by your parents. Bound to make you feel a little off.

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  That's Dr Sue Wills. Sue was an academic at Macquarie University, whose doctorate investigated the politics of the women's liberation movement in Australia. She was also a founding member of CAMB.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  CAMB stands for the Campaign Against Moral Persecution. And it was started in nineteen seventy um as an organisation that would be openly homosexual to fight for changes in the law and psychiatry and the churches and everything. Up until that time, um most organisations, well, there was only one, um and they were very closeted. Nobody came out and said, we are homosexual, we are fighting for ourselves.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  In nineteen seventy three, Sue recorded a long interview with Neil McConaughey for CAMB's magazine.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  I wanted him to explain what he did. Um, I had prepared myself. I read all of the articles that he had published about treating male homosexuals. And even in the articles, he seemed to be unaware that he was dealing with humans rather than subjects. Um, and that came through. I used some of the, I used some of the quotes from the interview with him and from his articles, what he was saying about treating homosexuals. Um, so I asked him what it was, how he did it, why he did it. I also asked him whether he felt that he was making it worse for change.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  And he said he didn't think so. I mean, he thought he, he was doing two things, I think. One, he was helping people who wanted. Um, to change their sexual orientation, for whatever reason. He all classified them all as willing, um, which is a bit hard to come to terms with if you're referred by the courts. Um, but also he was very, very curious about the way the brain worked in terms of sexuality.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  So it sounds like he was very generous, not only with his time, but with his ideas.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And did you, were you persuaded by his arguments?

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Absolutely not. I went in with a pretty closed mind. And I, and in a sense, I guess I was trying to convince him of a new approach. I mean, to get him to understand that the biggest problem that homosexuals faced was not because of their homosexuality, but because of the reaction of people to it. In other words, it was the beginning of us talking about homophobia, and it came from developments in psychology and sociology about deviance theory. The creation, society creates deviants. People aren't born deviant.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  So the idea was that you, you needed to educate society to...

• 21:39Speaker 05

  I mean, in general, yes, we needed to educate society, which is why at every opportunity we spoke to groups, school kids, church groups. We were cheap after dinner entertainment for lions and rotaries, and we did it. But I had thought naively, obviously, that we could get McConaughey to stop offering aversion therapy. It didn't work like that. I think he had too much invested in it, and career-wise, he was a associate professor in psychiatry. But what did happen was that we convinced homosexuals to stop going to get treatment from him and others. So he's, he stopped doing it because he couldn't get any more patients.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  So did McConaughey stop practising aversion therapy because gay men like Fabian stopped going to see him? Or did McConaughey himself have a change of heart, realising the folly of the plathesmograph and the science that it was based upon?

• 22:36Speaker 07

  He disputed in the end the idea that aversion therapy acted by a mechanism of conditioning was actually not really getting to the heart of what Pavlov's ideas were. So this was one of the reasons why he, why he abandoned it. Um, another reason was simply that he was affected by the gay liberation movement. Um, he really took that very seriously. It's interesting, uh, at first he was very, very shocked. He was shocked that people might, um, might have problems with what he was doing. Um, he went to the American Psychiatric Association Conference in 1970 and presented a paper there. And that was

• 23:17Speaker 07

  the first time that he was confronted by activists. Surprise. And he came back to Australia, and that's when he began trying to engage gay liberation and women's liberation activists. Um, and there are some very good stories about activists confronting him. He was pelted with eggs at the conference on liberation movements that he tried to organise. Uh, gay liberation had street theatre at University of New South Wales on the library lawn, where they would imitate their version of aversion therapy, um, which was obviously very exaggerated and not very accurate at all. But the early 1970s was really when McConaughey came into, um, I don't want to overstate it and say that he came into conflict with the gay liberation

• 24:02Speaker 07

  activists, because actually there was quite a lot of dialogue between them. And he ended up actually being, becoming a, quite a vocal advocate for change in the Australian-New Zealand, uh, College of Psychiatrists. He supported their own, uh, decision to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in, in conjunction with the changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. He was a great supporter of that change.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  So Kate, we're sitting here today at the University of Melbourne in the medical faculty, among the ruins of science. How is McConaughey remembered among medical circles today?

• 24:39Speaker 07

  I think people have very, very mixed reactions to his story. Uh, he's such an interesting figure because he, he doesn't fit into any of the neat characterisations. The slogan of the gay movement when it arose in the 1970s was psychiatry is the enemy. But he was not, he was not interested in zapping the, the gay away as such. He was, he was really, and it's difficult for us to kind of conceive of this today, but he was really interested in trying to give people the tools that they needed to adapt to whatever society out there regards as normal.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Fabian, if Dr. McConaughey walked through the door right now, what would you like to say to him?

• 25:24Speaker 06

  I'd like to ask him where the slides are, because I'd love to see just those three or four images again, because I think they were aesthetically beautiful as well as exciting. But then I'd, I'd say to him, you, you did promise me that it would inhibit my sexuality. So I got the idea that you were going to cure me completely, and it didn't. Maybe you should have been clearer, or maybe you shouldn't have taken me on. But I, I would say to him, why, why were you doing it? But I don't think I, I, you know, want to throttle him. I think I'd understand that he, for his own reasons, was caught up with this kind of understanding of psychiatry. And, um, I don't want to be

• 26:07Speaker 06

  a victim, except in my own naivety.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  If you want to see the photograph for yourself, head to ABC Listen. My thanks to guests Fabian LaChavio, Kate Davison and Dr. Sue Wells. This episode of Shooting the Past was produced by Michelle Rayner, with production assistance by Sophie Couchman and sound engineering by Angie Grant. And you can catch up on the full series of Shooting the Past on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:45Speaker 07

  The evidence is pretty strong now that we can't alter their sexual orientation as it's biologically determined. What we can do is give the majority of them, treatment doesn't always work, increased control over their homosexual behaviour, or help them to, to make heterosexual behaviour if they want that.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  If someone said to me today, I want to change, I'd say, well, you'll still be human, you'll still love and hate, and you'll still be happy and sad. Hundreds of sessions of electric shock won't, won't stop the desire. Well, it should be exposed for being what it is.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Now, Fabian, I've just got to say thank you. You've been incredibly generous to us today, and I hope that you telling your story also encourages others to share their stories.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  I hope so too. That'd be great for them to, to be able to talk about it, because it's really good to be able to just say, oh, glad that's over.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  And Vale Fabian, who died in 2023. Shooting the Past is an ABC Radio National production, recorded on unceded warungary land.

• 28:57Speaker 00

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