Hillcrest-Oakden

Christine Hillingdon was a Psychiatric Enrolled Nurse for twenty-seven years, employed under the South Australian Mental Health system. During that time, she kept diaries which reveal all aspects of working in that position, such as her period of training and dealing with people who suffered various degrees of mental illness, ranging from frightening to downright bizarre and hilarious … and then there were the patients!


​Being a part of South Australia’s mental health history, coping with the changes within it, and experiencing its evolution in a steady—but not always comprehensible—way wasn’t easy. Despite her trials and tribulations, Christine has seamlessly explored the eccentricity of characters that both lived and worked in the psychiatric field of nursing, with guts, honesty, and a unique wit, in this rare and bravely told epistolary account of her life.