By 1900 the settler population of the Swan River colony were aware that their Government’s long established policy towards the indigenous inhabitants was in need of change. British policy gave the Aboriginal inhabitants full legal and civil liberties as British subjects. In addition they were to be embraced by British civilisation through the agency of Christianity. They were also to receive protection which included safeguards of their well-being. These ideals underlay the views on Aboriginal administration formulated by the Colonial Office. The policy was eventually enshrined in the Aborigines Act 1886. This legislation conferred wide powers on the Perth-based Aborigines Protection Board to oversee both Aboriginal labour and the land owners employing them.

By the 1890s relations between settlers and indigenous groups had deteriorated, however, and change was demanded. Settlers wanted self-government and less control by the Colonial Office in Britain. Those settlers interested in protecting the Aborigines wanted a new and stronger legislative protection structure. At this time the policy embodied in the 1886 legislation had become unworkable. This left those Aborigines still coming into first contact with settlers without the protection they needed. The pastoral settlements continued to expand into environments occupied by Aborigines, and although there was hardship for the settlers the Aborigines suffered in the ensuing economic and political exchanges.

On top of the changes in the old social relationships came the catastrophic impact on Aboriginal customs and manners of new diseases. Indigenous women and older males were affected most. One reason was that although many people of full descent lived in the bush, many also lived in the areas newly settled by colonists. Another reason was that people of mixed descent were protected as a result of being located on missions or on government stations in the south. In the north, most Aborigines had only recently begun to move from bush life onto newly established missions. In the transition from the 1890s to 1900, the care of indigenous people and their descendants now relied on the newly created Aborigines Department which was established by the colonial government under the Aborigines Protection Act 1897.

The Christian churches, scholars and journalists were interested along with government protectors and some sympathetic land owners in protecting indigenous groups, and in learning as much about their customs, habits and practices as the Aborigines were able to impart. Early in the twentieth century Daisy Bates, the writer and ethnographer, travelled widely around the south of Western Australia and into the Kimberley region as the wife of a property manager, and also as a researcher with the anthropologist, Radcliffe-Brown. Bates worked among and wrote about Aborigines, contributing to the development of ethnographic methodology. She recorded Aboriginal customs, manners and languages, witnessed and recorded Aboriginal ceremonial practices and wrote about the attitudes of Aborigines toward diseases and the way they treated their maladies.

Notions of what indigenous people understood as disease and sickness were intrinsically bound up in other complex ideas about the relationships that Aborigines had with each other, and in belief systems about the animal world and the locations of their birth. Magic played an important role in Aboriginal thinking about disease because magic was understood to be at the root, causing people to become sick, die or be cured. Bates wrote variously on the magic of the Murchison peoples as well as some groups in the Kimberley. Bates accepted that what she observed were forms of superstition which she regarded as part of a general Aboriginal religion. Isobel White points out that Bates concluded in her ethnography that Aborigines thought there was no such thing as death from disease of any kind. People she interviewed had no notion of death from disease because disease could not be translated as a unified concept. She added that if an Aboriginal person died because they ate rancid meat from either whale, or fish, they believed that it was magic that killed the victim rather than the bad food. Further, if a person choked with a bone from an animal or fish, it was because they were bewitched. If they died from gluttony, the food consumed must have been tampered with by sorcerers, or the food preparation custom was in some way broken. If an animal was caught, cooked and eaten and stomach pains occurred, the victim would become suspicious of magical intervention, and look for the nearest sorcerer.

Ideas of the causes of disease and their cures appeared to Bates to be part of the sorcerer’s retinue. Normally, sorcerers had names that reflected natural phenomena such as thunder or sparks from a fire. Sorcerers and their practices appeared to be ubiquitous, and Bates noticed that the ‘magic stick’ was in common use – mainly in concert with other things sorcerers carried such as plants with which magic was worked – by the southern, central and northern groups. Bates indicated that she believed that ‘their greatest power...came from their metaphysical strength, and magic...[which] was secreted...from within themselves, and their apparent control ...over the elements.’ Other signs of impending doom or illness such as unusual and strange animal actions or sounds which mimicked the call of a crow or the screech of a cockatoo after dusk, or at night, might serve to explain something that would come to injure the sick or diseased person.

Bates noticed how fearful of sorcerers many people were and how that fear gripped people to whom she spoke. People believed that sorcerers could do them harm even from great distances. If storms occurred the sorcerer would be blamed, and sick or dying people believed this meant that sorcerers were trying to communicate with them. Other natural phenomena such as eclipses of the sun or moon could frighten people into believing that a sorcerer was attempting to communicate with them personally. Unknown events also played on people’s fears, giving the sorcerer actual physical power. The ‘mulgarguttuk’ as she wrote, might tell of a distant illness, or death, or suggest that a person had suddenly developed powers of sorcery or that a sorcerer was about to die. Sorcerers also were thought to afflict the healthy and strong by their magical powers, an additional factor that made them powerful in the minds of those who held such beliefs. The gradation of any sorcerer’s powers appeared endless and one sorcerer could easily die or be affected by another more powerful. Males tended to dominate the skills and practices of sorcery, but, in some groups, women could be found practising magic.

Of particular importance to Bates were the traditional cures for sickness, pains and injuries. Some ideas recorded by Bates appeared to contradict notions of cures of sicknesses. She recorded ideas which were considered by her informants not to be illnesses but natural events, especially if the illness was unfamiliar to the sorcerer. Indigenous sorcerers used herbal potions for some complaints offered by victims along with the use of ‘topical bleeding’ – bleeding in a common place such as the arms – as well as body hair from their own armpits, or pubic area, to rub or leave on the sick person and, finally, many used urine, either their own or produced as a preparation from older females. Some of the diseases bought by Europeans were not part of the knowledge or experiences of the sorcerers to whom she talked. Bates found that there were many illnesses with which Aborigines were acquainted, and had a customary mode of use. According to Bates, most of the sickness which they contracted related directly to ‘the result of over-indulgence in food, over-excitement in dancing, or...ceremonies.’ As Bates travelled among he informants she did notice the presence of what was popularly called ‘ophthalmia’. Ophthalmia (trachoma) was regularly present, ‘particularly amongst the north west natives, and was due mainly to great plagues of flies which infest the district during two-thirds of the year’. Bates noticed that the action of wind and sun on the dry dust and sand had an effect on the eyes of settlers and Aborigines. Once the eyes became sore infection could follow to become ophthalmia, popularly called ‘sandy blight’.

Other illnesses known by Aborigines, prior to European settlement, included dysentery, diarrhoea, pneumonia, colds, headache, liver troubles, biliousness, sores, rheumatism, inflammation, and various skin complaints such as erysipelas inflammation. Mental illness, or what Bates describes as idiocy and temporary madness, were known to Aborigines up and down the coastline of Western Australia, as were deformities, but most of the deformed babies either died at birth or were killed.

Bates clearly stated that, except for those diseases which were introduced from outside such as gonorrhoea, the native had apparently no infectious diseases among them. Because she had a limited knowledge of bacteriology, she did not elaborate on some of the body wasting and deforming diseases she came across. She most certainly believed that infectious diseases such as some sexually transmitted diseases and diseases caused by poor hygiene such as yaws (a disease I discuss below), leprosy (a chronic bacterial disease of the skin, peripheral nerves and the upper airways, also known as Hanson’s Disease) and tuberculosis (a mycobacterial disease, which also includes phythis, or pulmonary tubeculosis and discussed further below), came with either season visitors or settlers. Later researchers, however, throw a different light on this very complex question. In trying to dispel the earlier harsher viewpoint of a decrepit and blinded race, Daisy Bates put forward her own view that Aborigines were not as diseased as the English navigator Dampier had suggested.

Acceptance of Daisy Bates’ romanticised view failed to erase the doubt that still existed about the possibility that infectious diseases existed in groups of Aborigines before European settlement. Did bacterial and viral infections affect Aborigines prior to European settlement? Is it probable that forms of venereal diseases (to western medicine venereal disease means diseases which are sexually, not all of which are duscussed in this thesis) existed in the populations of the mainland? If such infectious diseases did exist before 1788 who or what brought them, and in particular, was their passage made possible by the Asian and Pacific navigators known to have contacted mainlanders since the commencement of the holocene? Bates contradicts her unpublished material in which she implies that the evidence provided by an informant showed that sexually transmitted diseases did exist and formed part of a system of knowledge used by Aborigines, and their name for it was ‘called koo-ar-oo...common to coastal...[groups]’. They knew also that the disease affected ‘newborns as well, [and] could have been related...to the occurrence of yaws or endemic syphilis in the pre-European era.’

By contrast, Herbert Basedow said he believed that both syphilis and gonorrhoea came with Europeans. Recent research, however, indicates that treponemal diseases such as syphilis and yaws did exist 7,000 years before European settlement. Similarly, missionaries on the Kimberley coast revealed that forms of venereal diseases and skin complaints were already present when they arrived to live with Aboriginal groups just after 1910. They support published evidence gathered directly from Aborigines by Daisy Bates that conditions showing symptoms similar to endemic and congenital syphilis and yaws had existed prior to white settlement, possibly after contact with seasonal Macassan visitors.

At this point it is useful to review what is known now about the likely presence of bacterial and viral infections in hunter gatherer groups similar to Australian Aborigines before and following outside contact. Yaws (which is not sexually transmitted) and syphilis are closely related. Moreover, Treponema pertenue, which causes yaws, provides immunity to syphilis by conferring cross-immunity against Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis. Yaws is found in areas of tropical rain forests and was first named by Castellani in 1905. Mostly a disease of childhood, yaws spreads by direct contact with other human hosts. Also hosts may pass the infection on through direct skin contact by exposing broken skin directly to infectious lesions either on the mouth or sores on limbs, where the infection can expand and contains numerous bacteria. The disease can then spread to the hands and feet, infecting the bones as well. This form of yaws is morphologically identical to sexually-transmitted syphilis. Since the turn of the century these diseases have been particularly difficult for trained and untrained health workers to detect. Syphilis has been described as ‘a democratic disease for it does not discriminate between people of different social classes, races, sexes, religions, ages, or countries.’

As hunters and gathers moved from Africa to other parts of the globe they took parasites with them. McNeill argued that parasites could have been passed from one host to another by direct contact and passing body fluids either by sexual intercourse or between mothers and babies before, during and after birth. Yaws, could survive in temperate climates within small populations of migratory hunters. This process could last for some time ‘as long as the infection acted slowly and did not incapacitate the human host too severely’. These parasites most probably travelled with hunting gatherers ‘from humanity’s tropical cradle lands throughout the earth’. In indigenous Australians research conducted by Cleland (a trained research biologist) and Basedow (a general practitioner) demonstrated the presence of forms of venereal diseases. In 1908, Cleland wrote about his study of granuloma pudenda, which he found among Aborigines in north Queensland, and even more commonly among Aborigines of Western Australia.

The presence of yaws has been a contradictory saga, as recent research indicates. Noel Butlin, for example, believed that yaws existed in Victoria, but Gray doubted this proposition. Gray claimed that these two forms
– Treponema pertenue and Treponema pallidum – occurred on the mainland as a disease mostly affecting childhood. The important point to be made here, as Goldsmid emphasised, is that yaws most probably existed in many Aboriginal communities when Europeans first arrived. Researchers have found that yaws has been endemic for a long time among the Aranda tribe of central Australia, and discovered yaws lesions in Aboriginal skeletal remains from southern and eastern Australia. Others argue that such treponemal infections became endemic in Aboriginal populations long before Asian and white contact.

Gray also wrote about Lymphogranuloma venereum which is caused by strains of trachoma or Chlamydial disease. Trachoma affected Aborigines in Western Australia and Queensland. Although trachoma surveys began in Queensland as early as 1907, as I explain later, there were no research projects in Western Australia until Ida Mann’s in the 1950s. She commented on how white settlers had coped as trachoma had appeared in epidemic proportions in Victoria in the nineteenth century. It disappeared from settler communities after the adoption of hygiene controls which ultimately curbed the infection.

In Western Australia Ida Mann, in contradicting Daisy Bates, doubted that trachoma did affect Aborigines prior to settlement and infection. She argued that it occurred only after close bodily contact with the white population. This raised the question of the origin of trachoma in Australia. According to Mann the disease had become endemic in New Guinea and adjacent islands by the seventeenth century. The islanders had had contact with Aborigines even earlier, making possible its early passage onto the mainland. Some forms of blindness from trachoma are transmitted during birth in both bacterial and viral forms from mother to child, and may also be contracted through sexual intercourse.

The diseases suffered by Aborigines partly explains why the Western Australian Government passed the Aborigines Protection Act 1897. As discussed earlier, this legislation established the Aborigines Department, and following the passage of the Act the Premier John Forrest appointed Henry C. Prinsep as Chief Protector of Aborigines, in 1898. The rush of prosperity caused by the mining boom of the 1890s profoundly impacted on the well being of Aborigines in parts of the State occupied by settlers. It was possibly the impact of disease on sedentary groups that forced the appointment of a travelling inspector with medical training. The first tasks Prinsep gave to the travelling inspector, Dr G.S. Olivey from the London Hospital, focused on the taking of a census of Aborigines. Another immediate task was to assess the physical condition of Aborigines and the conditions under which they lived.

The inspector’s reports told of the widespread effects of venereal diseases among Aborigines. Prinsep wrote immediately to Forrest to tell him that venereal disease among Aborigines was serious and appeared to be spreading. In some places, he reported to the Premier, Government efforts should be backed by ‘legislation with the object of preventing the Aborigines, in their own interest...from affecting...both the black and white population.’ From his own experiences gained during his exploration treks around Western Australia, Forrest had some knowledge of Aborigines, and would consequently have been receptive to Prinsep’s proposal. The public, too, would have been similarly attentive, for not only were there general fears about a disease which whites might contract from Aborigines but there was the added fear about ‘miscegenation’ between the races producing an increasing half-caste population.

During the period 1900 to 1910, the commonest sexually transmitted diseases in Western Australia included gonorrhoea, non-specific urethritis and syphilis. Gonorrhoea, at the time, was a new type of sexually transmitted infection to Aborigines. It is a highly contagious bacterial infection that attacked the mucous membranes of the male and female genitalia, the anus, mouth and eyes. The symptoms were a discharge from the urethra and pain when urinating. The most important long term health problem was sterility in women, but the disease also affected other internal organs, and could cause kidney failure. Aborigines occasionally suffered from symptoms closely resembling gonorrhoea, but sometimes the diagnosis failed to trace the cause to gonococci. This form of disorder became known as non-gonococcal, or non-specific urethritis. By the 1930s most health service people knew something about bacteriological processes, and could apply some forms of preventive treatments and cures. At the turn of the century, however, Aboriginal groups did not know that bacteriological and viral infectious agents were at work, nor were they able to take preventive measures to ensure immunity against disease and general illness. Moreover, the size of the pre- and post-contact Aboriginal groupings affected physiological and biological defences against viral and bacterial diseases.

Isolated for thousands of years as they were, affected the possibilities for developing immunity to forms of bacterial and viral infection. Biological limitations, therefore, were placed on indigenous groups because of the small size of family groups and their mobility. Where syphilis occurred, after some time resistance could have built up in some Aboriginal populations. It is probable that the nature of the contact between seamen from Asia and some Pacific Islands with small groups of Aborigines involved seasonal encounters. This intermittent contact would have made it difficult for local indigenous groups to build up resistance.

Two anthropologists, Ronald Berndt and Peter Worsley, studied groups in the far north of Western Australian and the Northern Territory. They investigated what indigenous groups had to say about their contacts with Asian sailors in their remembered past. Their accounts indicated a less gruesome contact than occurred post-settlement. Macknight, however, has questioned their views on the grounds that the work was flawed by the absence of any satisfactory independent account from the Macassans’ perspective. While it may not be possible to adjudicate these arguments, it is true that the records compiled by government, missionaries, and earlier ethnographic writers revealed a society which was under great stress by 1900.

Fringe-camp living, which tended to pollute the living area, was most probably a post-European contact phenomenon but it could have come earlier. This form of living site became common in southern and eastern areas of the State where some life-style infections became endemic. Aborigines who moved from the bush to sedentary camp life began developing a range of disabilities and health problems. For example, blindness and crippling bone diseases often preceded dementia, especially among the old, frail and infirm. The blind were compelled to become sedentary and this event was a factor in polluting living sites and harbouring infections which camp people were unable to combat. It is entirely possible that, at least in the north of Australia, sedentary lifestyles could have occurred in advance of European settlement through the seasonal visits of Macassan traders. These visitors arrived on a regular seasonal basis for at least 200 years prior to 1829. This seasonal contact continued after white settlement. Although there is no certain cause of why indigenous groups became so afflicted with disabilities such as blindness, debilitating bone diseases and sexually transmitted infections, Table 3.1 gives some idea of the numbers of people who suffered.

It can only be assumed that such afflictions appeared soon after the emergence of the fringe-camp life-style. Once this occurred, illnesses of this nature became endemic. Generations passed and some infections became congenital, associated with permanent pools of infection. The creation of such pools helped indigenous groups to share the patterns of disease and sickness across Western Australia. In every group of people shown as destitute the females fared worse than the males, except for those older full-blood males suffering the long term effects of venereal diseases. Aboriginal females were generally more disadvantaged because they were forced by circumstances to become sole carers for children and young adults. Certainly from the 1890s through to 1904, the level of disability proved worrisome to property owners, police protectors, hospital medical staff and administrators. It was these members of the settler community in particular who bore the brunt of providing even greater amounts of relief and care for diseased, sick, disabled, indigent and dying Aborigines.

The extent of the burden is evident in a host of incidents. For example, on 25 September 1898 the Resident Medical Officer at Derby reported to the Chief Protector that he had provided medical treatment to six Aborigines between 26 August and 25 September at the rate of 9 pence per day. These people had worked or lived on cattle properties near Derby owned by Adcock Brothers and Company. Most were old and infirm and one was totally blind. In the same year, William Padbury of Guildford near Perth applied for a refund in a memorandum to the Chief Protector for the supply of a tent. The tent had cost him £1.17.0. The Chief Protector noted that ‘the tent was for the use of a sick native and was purchased on the 21 April.’ Similarly, at a camp site at Norseman in the same year, Sergeant Lappin authorised a Dr Harvey to supply medical treatment to a native woman named Kitty. Sergeant Lappin indicated that he had given permission for the doctor to give treatment to Kitty in her camp because he considered that she was dangerously ill, suffering from a chest complaint.

It was not always easy for treatment to be sought or demanded, as indicated in an incident reported in the Mount Magnet Miner on 27 October 1898. A number of Aborigines had been camping near a water hole called ‘Yowera’, near Cue, and were suffering from measles. The local doctor had refused to attend despite a request by the police, who reported the circumstances to the Aborigines Department. The doctor had refused to attend because payment could neither be guaranteed by the Police nor by the department.

Medicines were sent from Cue to Mr.W. Watson. Wilson, who had first reported the incident, refused to administer them because he had no idea what the group was suffering from. Further representations were made to the Chief Protector in Perth for the doctor to be offered a moderate fee to treat the group. Watson agreed to provide the vehicle to take the doctor out to the water hole. Chief Protector Prinsep, however, made no response. With heavy sarcasm the report pointed out that the government and pastoralists would act quicker if they found scabby sheep than they had in attending sick Aborigines. The report went on to say that the victims in this case were Aborigines and nothing was done even though a protection board existed to take the public’s interest in Aborigines more seriously.

Another incident involving the department was criticised by the Town Clerk at Northam, who wrote to the Colonial Secretary about the condition of natives in the colony. The letter said, ‘I think I am right in saying that beyond an annual distribution of clothes and food by the Government nothing is done for these poor creatures.’ The Town Clerk continued in another letter asking whether, in the Chief Protector’s view, some action could be taken to establish shelters to act as a school building for Aboriginal children.

Soon after, Prinsep observed in his travels that syphilis in the Wyndham area was ‘prevalent: several deaths had occurred within the last twelve months’. Most of the camps in or near the towns had visits from either the travelling inspectors or from the District Medical Officer. The travelling inspector noted that generally Aborigines in the Kimberley appeared to be in good health, apart from venereal disease, which he claimed abounded throughout the whole district. Malcolm Fraser, a Kimberley land owner, expressed the view that the source of the infection was the ‘unspeakable dirt of the native women’.

In 1899, the year after the Protection Board was abolished in favour of a department and individual protectors, the manager of a property owned by Nairn and Sons wrote to the Protector on 10 April about his concern for an Aborigine seen crossing his leasehold. The man was crippled, and it became impossible for him to walk. That was on the 14 March and he was fed by the station manager. According to the manager the man had walked a considerable distance but could go no further. The man was old and it appeared to the white manager that he would perish if given no food. The property owner was reluctant to feed the man indefinitely and asked the Chief Protector to pay him for the food which he was willing to issue each day. The owner added that as winter was coming he would be needing food and blankets soon. Compassion was a part of Aboriginal ideology, but it was not easy to detect by either government agents or property owners and managers. Destitution was general, and worried many settlers, as did the presence of venereal diseases among groups in camps near towns and on private properties.

Just prior to 1900 Malcolm Fraser wrote to the Chief Protector about his concerns for the health of Aborigines who worked for R.H. Habgood Company, in a coastal region of the Kimberley. Fraser indicated that the most common forms of illnesses in the labour fringe-camps were chest, skin and eye infections. But Fraser was not the only white person able to appreciate what was happening. Similar incidents suggest that many white settlers showed concern for, if not compassion towards, diseased, indigent and sick Aborigines. Some land owners at least were concerned about the condition of those Aborigines who had made permanent camps on their pastoral properties, and the concern seems to have arisen as much from humanitarian motives as from fear that the Aborigines would pass on their diseases to the white community. The Aborigines were not able to adapt as successfully to the changing circumstances as the whites would have wished. Indigenous groups were confronted with dwindling food resources, competition for water from pastoral expansion, and problems associated with their newly adopted sedentary camp life. Even though there were some pastoralists who showed disdain towards the predicament in which Aborigines found themselves, in general the responses of the local magistrates, land owners, contractors, missionaries and protectors to the Aboriginal predicament was more often than not characterised by humanity and compassion.

For all that, however, Aborigines in many locations continued to suffer greatly from a range of medical complaints. Some reports specified bone and joint disorders which observers reported as rheumatics. Other reports indicated the presence of dysentery, asthma, colds and venereal diseases. Some of these sick elderly people sought relief at a telegraph station in the La Grange region where a number of camps had developed. Also, at the remote interior telegraph station at Hall’s Creek camps of sick, starving, blind and crippled people worried officials. For example, the telegraph operator at Hall’s Creek became so distressed that he sent for medicines which had to be brought in by boat from Broome via Wyndham. This crisis developed mostly because the hospitals at Hall’s Creek and Wyndham had both been closed and because a mission was opened in the vicinity. Patients in emergencies were treated by the missionaries.

Various officials recorded their private worries about the poverty and destitution into which the Aborigines were subsiding. On 5 October 1900 a resident magistrate wrote to the Chief Protector about a number of concerns he held for Aborigines on G.I. Brockman’s Nimilya station, saying:

1. I have written to Mr. Brockman explaining his accounts for feeding twelve (12) natives for nine months.

2. I do not see how owners of stations could be compelled to feed the old and infirm natives....unless Parliament legislates on the subject.

3. I am afraid that if old and infirm natives had to …[look after themselves and] their relatives on the various stations for the means of subsistence they would [all] soon die of starvation.

4. I know of several settlers who would feed the old and infirm natives on their stations were they in a position to do so but drought and bad seasons stand in their way.

As the letter suggests, while some settlers went out of their way to give humanitarian assistance, others wanted payment. On top of other complaints, malaria and whooping cough affected people in the camps located near the ration depot at the Fitzroy telegraph station. Many old and crippled people stayed there while the younger members stayed in the bush. White townspeople blamed local illnesses on the contact between ‘Mongolian and Asian pearlers’ and Aboriginal females. C.J. Annear, the telegraph operator at Fitzroy, reported to the Chief Protector in Perth, that these Asian seamen came during ‘the fever months’.

In the La Grange and Beagle Bay areas during 1901-02 the protectors’ reports included accounts of how Aboriginal physical and health conditions were being degraded as a result of the old men living off the earnings from prostitution of their wives and younger women. In turn this meant that venereal disease had a firm footing by 1903, and was causing a great deal of damage. The telephonist at La Grange reported that gonorrhoea was causing internal problems for Aboriginal women and the disease was rife throughout the district. Also he indicated that syphilis and other skin diseases seemed to be something Aborigines caught from Asian sailors. He thought also that half-caste women appeared to be the most affected because they came into towns. Both he, as well as the local protectors, missionaries and police were concerned enough to report the effects to the Chief Protector. Among those affected were 12 to 13 year old girls.

In the same year, pastoral station owners in the Eastern Kimberley region became concerned about the health of their Aboriginal labour. Mr Kearney of Argyle station, for example, wrote of a number of natives who were feeble and crippled, some children who were orphaned and one blind boy, and he called for medicines and a doctor from Wyndham to treat them. They had colds, rheumatics and venereal diseases. The manager indicated that this station was a route to the hinterland and many Aborigines passed through, travelling both east and west. Similarly, at Halls Creek and Fitzroy ration stations, the police officers reported that an influenza epidemic (a disease I discuss in chapters four and eight) had struck camp people. And in May 1903, at nearby Flora Valley, at least 16 deaths occurred after about 200 Aborigines had been camped nearby. A supply of medicines reached them to alleviate the raging epidemic of influenza and to treat a child suffering from syphilis.

A year later, in March and April, Constable Cadlow reported a fresh influenza epidemic, and the presence of other diseases. One of the conditions was ‘ague’ (a form of malaria), that manifested itself with variations of chronic shivering. Four people died from one or other of these diseases. A disease which the police report was unable to specify was similar to swamp fever, or Beri-Beri, seemed to be present among the Asian mariners who cohabited with Aboriginal women when they arrived in 1904. Asian fishermen seemed to arrive with venereal diseases and sometimes with small-pox. Passenger ships also brought small-pox, but only one case came to light among Aborigines. Strict quarantine was generally applied and managed by the local general practitioner, which made some difference. Natives around La Grange, Broome and Beagle Bay were quarantined for six weeks and the Asian sailors prevented from mixing at all with Aboriginal males or females. As many Aborigines as possible were vaccinated by Dr Blick, Dr Thompson and the local policeman at La Grange, Constable Kuhlmann.

Providing medical care to Aborigines remained in the hands of either district hospital staff or private general practitioners in country towns. Not all districts had hospitals, however, and if they did the payment of the amount charged by hospitals and doctors proved the only sure way to get access. Even emergency cases sometimes failed. Aborigines under contract to pastoralists sometimes, but not always, had their bills paid by pastoralists. Destitute Aborigines had their bills sent to the Chief Protector of Aborigines and medical bills of poor white people went to the Medical Department in Perth.

Indigence was no guarantee of access to hospitals or medical care because hospitals decided, one way or another, depending on the general condition of the patient. Most importantly, access depended on the attitudes of hospital staff and general practitioners. Some health workers simply passed the accounts directly on to the Chief Protector’s office, and if funded from Government revenue they sometimes waived the costs. Half-castes were distinguished from what the bureaucracy understood, or accepted, as Aborigines. From the Protector’s records, the average stay per patient was approximately 24 days, which was considerable. Furthermore, the average cost per patient of an annual account sent to the Chief Protector’s Office from the Health Department amounted to £48.16.0 per patient which also made up a considerable amount. Some patients stayed longer but most stayed for short periods. The records reveal that about 236 Aboriginal patients were received into country hospitals all over the State. This figure in no way indicated the numbers who were sick, but it signifies a considerable number of Aborigines entering hospitals for treatment. Although in many cases access was denied to both white paupers and Aborigines living in fringe-camps, it is also true that many hospitals did care for indigent Aboriginal and white patients.

In 1902 the Principal Medical Officer wrote to the Under Secretary concerning the type of payment structure in place and the problems in delivering health care to out-lying ‘lockup-hospitals’ such as Peak Hill. A doctor managing an isolated lock-up hospital (that is, secured hospitals which patients needed a medical permit to leave), at Peak Hill had been placed in an invidious position because he was appointed by a committee whom he claimed was irresponsible for not allowing Aborigines to enter the hospital as patients when they became sick. The doctor said he tried his best to administer medical care to sick Aborigines but he felt betrayed by higher authorities because they made no effort to force hospitals to accept the diseased Aborigines for therapy. As an example, the Principal Medical Officer said that, in the case of Edward Whitworth, the patient might have been saved with treatment had he been allowed access earlier. Edward Whitworth died at Peak Hill hospital and the main cause of his early death may well have been the difficulties in admitting the sick man to hospital. The incident began when the local Police Constable of the Murchison district, John McGinley, reported the circumstances by telegram to the Principal Medical Officer. McGinley said that an Aboriginal man named Whitworth arrived in the town about three weeks earlier. Whitworth was suffering from syphilis, and he was admitted to hospital on an order from Mr Bagot, the Warden of the lock-up hospital at Peak Hill. When the hospital authorities discovered that Whitworth had been diagnosed as having syphilis ‘they turned him out. He has since been wandering Peak Hill in a dying condition.’ That was in December 1902, and three weeks later Warden Bagot gave an order that ‘Whitworth should be locked up as a vagrant. The spread of the syphilis caused the patient to become critically ill.’ Whitworth was so ill that he was ‘unable to face the court for the vagrancy charges.’ The hospital authorities ‘refuse to have anything to do with him as his case [was] very infectious’.

In this southern region the total Aboriginal population stood at approximately 1,216, and of these, 8 out of every hundred were living on the fringes of towns. Of all the Aborigines in the area, only about 15 were permanently on relief. Work for male and female Aborigines presented no difficulty because the population was so small that it insulated them from the pauperising effects of long periods of unemployment and some relief was given by local settlers and missionaries. As one protector stated, ‘they are civilised, and their wants are well attended.’ That year the severe cold produced more deaths among the older people than usual. They died ‘from the inevitable cold which their mode of living brings on – among...them was a native named Billy Kickett, who...gave...assistance to... explorers under Mr (later Sir) John Forrest’. Billy Kickett had received a government pension for his efforts. Another old man at Pinjarra caused some concern because of his blindness. ‘He was very much diseased and had given much trouble and expense.’ The Protector added that the man’s disease made it impossible to move him, and that he had a large shelter built and employed a cottager’s wife ‘to look after his wants and his warmth – a most unpleasant duty’ for which the Protector had to pay at a higher rate than elsewhere. He was happy to report that, at Katanning and Guildford, it was possible to provide special camping places for fringe-campers, and these proved a success.

Along the south coast towards Esperance, kangaroo shooters used Aboriginal hunters, and few travelling inspectors visited the region because it was very lonely country. Even so, the Southern Protector felt that the symbiotic relation enabled the Aborigines to maintain their independence. The Protector highlighted two things – the dwindling numbers of Aborigines and the over-killing of kangaroos. He also wrote that a man called Castilla had been in the area for many months in charge of the water boring party. While Castilla was there he saw Aboriginal males and females with ‘awful mutilations of the generative organs of both men and women...[which] militates against the continuance of race....Should the kangaroo-hunters’ camps cease to exist, the natives would lose many benefits’.

What Castilla observed, and what the Southern Protector described, had already been studied and named Granuloma pudenda. This condition came as no surprise to either the Chief Protector or medical practitioners in the north, who had already expressed their alarm at the presence of venereal disease. Even so, diagnosis presented great difficulty for protectors with no medical training, and concern about the prevalence of this disease ranged wide.

The Protector’s correspondence conveys vividly the kinds of difficulties and occupational stress which the doctors in particular, but also police, local magistrates, hospital personnel and departmental officers, had to cope with in handling infectious diseases at that time. The letters specify that doctors were called upon to travel long distances by horse and buggy to outlying camps to provide medication to sick and dying camp Aborigines. In addition, police officers and magistrates sometimes had to fill in for medical personnel as did local Protectors of Aborigines. At the same time, Aborigines’ difficulties in gaining access to hospitals became complicated by staff attitudes and their social status vis-à-vis other State institutions. The correspondence also provides some insight into the difficulties which doctors and other State functionaries nearly always faced in providing medical care and meeting patients’ welfare needs. Their difficulties became apparent during the course of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives which the Western Australian government appointed in 1905. The Commission’s terms of reference required it to investigate venereal disease, health care costs and general matters relating to treatment of Aborigines by the medical system. Further terms of reference related to the general conditions of life and treatment of Aborigines and half-castes by the settler population.

Walter E. Roth, the Chief Protector of Aborigines of Queensland, was appointed to conduct the Commission, and he commenced its duties early in 1905. His general task was to investigate the employment and treatment of Aborigines and half-castes by white and Asian people in Western Australia. The appointment of Roth, a greatly respected ethnographer and administrator, was a measure of the Government’s concern. Roth’s inquiries revealed a shocking state of affairs. His anger was plain. He bluntly reported that there were no legal protections to stop the ‘greatest scoundrel unhung, European or Asiatic, putting under contract any black he pleases.’ At the coastal pearling port of Broome ‘quite half the children from ten years and upwards are indentured to the pearling industry and taken out in the boats....and the Chief Protector cannot prevent this.’ Also, Roth addressed the issue of medical care for sick Aborigines and its provision by medical officers at local hospitals.

Section C of Roth’s report considered the medical fees paid by the Aborigines Department which, for the past three years, varied between £92 and £96. The practice was for the Medical Department to annually forward government Medical Officer’s accounts for treating contingencies such as Aboriginal maternity cases, epidemics, injuries and long standing ailments, directly to the Aborigines Department. The amounts involved were really paltry: those for 1902-4 were the equivalent of only $11,000 to $11,500, converted into 1996 approximate values. The report also revealed that government Medical Officers had obligations to attend pauper Aboriginals, ‘though the only authority appears to be a circular, dated May 1898, and issued by the Premier’. At that time Forrest had said that attending indigenes in their camps was part of the duties of the resident magistrate, the resident medical officer and local police constable. In addition, the Premier thought that property owners had a duty to care for sick Aborigines in their employ, and that this duty extended to assisting the ‘aged, infirm and sick’. Because of the custom of ‘employers neglecting...natives working in their service, a certain expense had to...be incurred by the Aborigines Department in attending to the medical relief of such cases’. Employers of sick Aboriginal labour were also supposed to ‘cover the costs of service and care’, but it was rare that they ever did.

In reporting to Roth the Chief Protector had contradicted himself when he gave evidence that the general health of the Aborigines was good. In reporting on the operations of his department to Parliament in 1905-6, Prinsep, perhaps chastened by the Royal Commissioner’s findings, wrote more frankly than previously. He indicated that many of the severe illnesses in the area could be attributed to venereal diseases. Medical expenses for treating Aborigines suffering from venereal complaints had almost doubled that of the previous year. Venereal infections among Aborigines became a real concern of Prinsep which he now believed in 1905 had become an epidemic. Prinsep felt extremely uncomfortable about the way Aborigines suffered from the disease. During the proceedings of the Royal Commission, the comments of both Roth and Prinsep had suggested that they held common views on what legislative changes should be made to make Aboriginal health policy more effective. They agreed that health responsibilities should be spread between the two authorities most interested, that is the Aborigines and the Medical Departments. Similarly they both thought that half-castes ought to be covered by the legislative changes.

According to Commissioner Roth the condition of people in the north of the State was more desperate in 1905 than when the Western Australian parliament had passed its 1897 Aboriginal protection legislation. Pastoral expansion and pearling had caused greater health, social and economic hardship to the indigenous people of the north. Roth, therefore, provided the option in his recommendations for people of mixed descent to be identified as Aborigines rather than as European, Chinese, Japanese and Afghan descent. Half-castes had no legal status and their liberties had become highly amibiguous. Biskup noted that ‘most part-Aborigines of the nineteenth century were true half-castes, the off-spring of white men’. As ‘[offspring]... of white men, they demanded the rights of the white men’. The first law passed to reduce the status of part-Aborigines occurred in 1874. A little more than a decade later the Aborigines Protection Act 1886 focused on only half-castes and their offspring ‘who were habitually associating and living with’ other Aborigines. This was one contradiction confronted by Protectors but other hidden ones also existed.

The confusion over the new identity of half-castes also caused problems for people of full descent, and who would pay their health costs. More particularly, health costs became associated with whether a full-blood person, or their relatives, could pay for services provided by doctors or nurses at country hospitals. Some understanding of the difficulties faced by those closely associated with giving medical and health services to Aborigines is necessary, which extended beyond only health workers.

The health services in Western Australia at the turn of the century were by no means easy to understand either for Aborigines or health officials. It was even more difficult for Aborigines when their understanding of the health maintenance system, and that of the State’s flimsy rural health service, on which they came to rely, had begun to crumble. Indeed, the policy adopted under the 1897 legislation collapsed almost over night, mainly due to the confusion over who had to pay for medical treatment and who was exempt from payment. The enquiries initiated by the Western Australian Parliament were supposed to correct the disease, health and healing problem faced by indigenous people in 1904-5 by fixing up the system already in place since 1897.

The 1906 legislation was intended to end the complication over such matters following the 1905 Royal Commission. The Aborigines Act 1906, resulted directly from the recommendations proposed by Roth. Biskup blamed Roth for the identity crisis inflicted on Aborigines, which caused such confusion over health questions at the end of the decade. Biskup wrote that Roth had ‘failed to face [the health and identity questions] squarely – the impression...from contemporary records is one of optimism, of hope that the half-caste, like the man who wasn’t there, would somehow go away’: that is people of mixed racial descent would be absorbed without trace into the white community. Although Roth saw ‘part-aboriginals as a social problem’, with a high degree of rectitude, he did recognise their existence. As such the public was to pay for their health fees but the situation was never made sufficiently clear either to the health and medical system or to the indigenous people if and when they became ill.

If the legislation corrected some anomalies, such as providing material support for half-castes who then became entitled to recognition as being ‘Aborigines’, there remained the question of who had responsibility for the payment of medical fees. This responsibility remained with the Aborigines Department. Public health responsibilities, however, passed to the Medical Department who took on the task of developing facilities for the control of venereal disease, which continued to be one of the most serious health problems. A remedy was soon to come in the building of a segregated lock-up hospital for sufferers of venereal disease. This remedy was mask the more serious problem of leprosy which entered the Western Australian indigenous population late in the nineteenth century.

The manner in which leprosy entered the Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley districts and its impact on indigenous population requires explanation. Because of the leprosy found among Chinese miners brought to the northern Territory in the late nineteenth century, popular wisdom was that these workers brought the disease into the Daly River, a location not previously known to contain the disease. The Chinese had been brought to the Northern Territory from Singapore and shipped as mining labourers by the South Australian government to fill labour shortages during the late-nineteenth century. They soon began cohabiting with Aborigines, who subsequently contracted the disease. Infected Aborigines and Chinese carriers subsequently moved across to northern Western Australia. It is equally possible that the animals used as food sources, such as rodents and mud crabs, carried the disease, or it was transmitted through contact between Macassan seamen and Aborigines. The Macassans came to obtain bêche-de-mer, or sea cucumbers, and to harvest pearls. Leprosy may also have come via the pearlers who came to Roebourne, Broome, Derby and Wyndham. The infection then spread among the Aboriginal groups and across to the Kimberley region where, by 1900 or soon after, the disease began to take hold.

The first reported case of leprosy in Western Australia was in 1880. The victim was a Chinese male who had worked at Roebourne and Onslow as a cook on pastoral stations. In 1902, however, a white male was admitted to Guildford hospital and later moved to Woodman’s Point along the Swan River. There was a dispute over whether the man, who was a pauper from Sydney, was contagious enough to be detained and where he should be kept until he was returned to his home state. In a letter to the District Medical Officer the Principal Medical Officer in Perth indicated that the man was only mildly infectious and that there was little reason to move him to Sydney. The real problem was that no adequate facility existed for the man to be either treated or hospitalised. At the same time, the incidence of leprosy was growing among Aborigines although the system of recognisance introduced by Prinsep proved weaker than expected.

The Chief Protector, in his Annual Report for 1907, announced that lock-up hospitals were to be established on Dorré or Bernier Islands. According to the Chief Protector the islands were ideally ‘separated from one another so that Aborigines could be treated under lock and key’ and detained there until completely cured. In fact no cure existed and sick Aborigines were detained falsely because administrators believed that a temporary halt to the disease was ‘of little use’. The advent of lock hospitals began a long process of isolating people being diagnosed as infected with either venereal infections or suspected of being infectious with leprosy. Mary Anne Jebb in her study of the lock-up hospitals pointed out that Charles Fartier, the travelling inspector of Aborigines, first suggested the idea of an island hospital as a way of treating the venereal disease epidemic. His view was taken up by the Ashburton district shire. An article appeared in the West Australian in December 1907 saying that a systematic treatment program for Aborigines suffering from forms of venereal disease had commenced. The Medical Department emphasised the need to segregate patients under medical supervision. Aboriginal patients diagnosed as being a leper, prior to 1907, had no prospect of receiving medical care and were refused treatment by hospitals. Inspector Fartier, said his concern was that Aborigines were ‘being wiped out’ by infectious disease. In the first medical report from the island the Medical Superintendent Dr Frederick Lovegrove wrote that ‘the condition of some of my patients bears eloquent testimony to the urgent necessity for maintaining these institutions for the segregation and treatment of these unfortunate people’ in the most efficient way possible, not only for their own sakes but for the sake of the community at large. On the completion of hospital buildings and staff quarters native males were despatched by ship across to the hospital on Dorré Island. Venereal disease was the disease that concerned settlers but leprosy was the disease which struck most fear into their hearts.

Leprosy emerged as a serious threat to the indigenous people of northern Western Australia. What caused leprosy and how was it treated in Australia? In the period from 1900 to 1910, 129 patients with active or neutral leprosy notifications were brought in by police from many regions of the State. Leprosy has an enigmatic past in Australia as it has in Europe. Mycobacterium leprae, is the organism which causes leprosy and the disease has assumed emotionally loaded nuances in Australia because its visual symptoms, the stigmata, acquired close associations with xenophobia and racial prejudice against Chinese, Kanakas and Aborigines. Leprosy can affect the skin, the mucous membranes and the nerves. The incubation period ranges from 1 to 30 years and the symptoms develop slowly, characterised by widely distributed lumps on the skin. The lumps result from a pronounced thickening of the skin and nerves and sometimes come with a loss of feeling in the limbs, muscular weakening followed by paralysis and disfigurement. Tuberculosis – which was also confused by some observers with phthisis – sometimes developed alongside sufferers of leprosy, but whereas leprosy is contagious, Tuberculoid leprosy is often benign. In either form diagnosis was always difficult. In the northern areas of Western Australia, the primitive level of technology and health expertise in both the missions and government medical services meant that health workers found it almost impossible to diagnose these diseases. Moreover they experienced difficulty in communicating their own helplessness and the lepers’ plight.

Dr W.J. Durack, the District Medical Officer Marble Bar, wrote to the Principal Medical Officer in Perth on 10 August 1904 saying that leprosy had been diagnosed in the Pilbara region. No record of infection appeared in the Kimberley region, however, until 1908. As the advanced leprosy cases were diagnosed along coastal areas to King Sound near Derby, two cases were diagnosed at Cygnet Bay and another at Point Torment. These three people died a short time after diagnosis, and another patient inland at Mount Anderson station meant that bush people would soon be presenting with the disease. As the disease spread to bush people, segregation of lepers as the favoured form of treatment began to raise the prospects of white settlers being locked away in the same institutions as full-blood Aborigines. While this form of quarantine was initially successful, it terrified white settlers and soon raised the prospect of having leprosariums close to white towns.

In circumstances where the centralisation of the administration favoured the Government, the medical records of the Aboriginal patients were forwarded to the Chief Protector who published only what he felt was necessary to keep Parliament informed. The Medical Department did likewise but combined leprosy figures without reference to race. This complicated the method of reporting the statistics and as a result the data on Aboriginal health generally was unclear. Moodie makes reference to this problem of distortions in Aboriginal data in Western Australia, even after 1960, but it was much worse in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Biskup, in his history of the administration of Aborigines makes the point that Roth’s Royal Commission Report of 1905 had asked for reforms in reporting a wide range of data on Aborigines. Improved reporting of information to the Chief Protector after 1905 represented an important administrative achievement. When Prinsep resigned, however, and C.F. Gale, the new Chief Protector, took over by 1908, and the growing incidence of venereal disease was a real worry. This tension added impetus to the opening of the lock-up hospitals, for which the new Aborigines Protection Act 1905 made provision. When, in 1908, the new lock-up hospitals finally opened, Aborigines from the various ration depots, bush and fringe-camps, pastoral properties and missions were rounded up and taken there to receive treatment for syphilis and other venereal diseases. In the same year, there was a large increase in all categories of Aboriginal destitution and illness. Gale apparently had less interest in alleviating such conditions than his predecessor, Prinsep, however, for while he reported on his many trips to rural ration depots he made rather less mention of Aboriginal social and health conditions.

The changes in the Chief Protectors’ manner of reporting the condition of Aborigines meant that the tabulation of data on blindness and infirmity ceased until 1912. Interest shifted temporarily to the prevalence of leprosy and to the incidence of venereal diseases, and the associated cost of constructing lock-up hospitals. Under Gale health in general had only secondary importance after cattle killing. Roth’s 1905 investigation into Aboriginal and settler relations had a great deal to say about cattle killing by Aborigines. Health for Roth had been a major issue but only in so far as it was a factor in race relations, as when Aboriginal women contracted diseases from pearlers and Asian seamen in the northern areas of the State. Roth largely left the southern region of the State out of his consideration. The southern region took in Perth and stretched south along the western and southern seaboard to Cape Leeuwin and then east to Albany and Esperance. The regional boundary also took in all the inland towns between Norseman and Perth, and included various Aboriginal institutions and missions. This included the Mogumba, Moore River and New Norcia missions northeast of Perth. The complaints affecting the Aboriginal people of the region included blindness, injuries resulting from domestic violence, sexually transmitted diseases, early senility and periodic epidemics as well as general indigence.

In his numerous and extensive travels around Western Australia Gale found little illness or disease among the northern coastal natives. The absence of venereal disease surprised him, considering the reports by local protectors and police of the increased level of intercourse between Aboriginal women and lugger crews. Gale could only account for this phenomenon by his own observation that it was the ‘cleanly habits of the coloured crews’, who were constantly in the salt water. The natives, Gale remarked, also swam a lot during the hot weather. He reported that ‘blindness was the most prevalent disease amongst almost every mob of blacks’. He concluded that there were ‘sure to be one or two blind women or men, and nearly every station has blind people amongst their old natives’. Gale mistakenly thought that because young natives showed no outward effects from the infection that the affliction had something to do with aging. Many of the older natives were suffering from syphilis sores, which in most instances healed up, but were sure to break out again. Young children were subject to the same trouble, but they would grow out of it. What the Protector observed was a cause unrelated to aging but to hygiene and social habits of camp life.

In 1908 a total of 1,200 Aborigines were reported suffering from the following categories: blind aged, decrepit and destitute. In the first category 119 Aborigines (43 males 76 females) were blind and consequently also suffered reduced mobility and independence. Aged and decrepit Aborigines numbered 735 (314 males 421 females). Destitute Aborigines totalled 346 people (144 males and 202 females). The female to male imbalance was heavy in every category. Gale first visited the eastern goldfields centred on Coolgardie and the northwestern central gold fields of the Pilbara as well as pastoral stations of the Kimberley, but his first health report covered conditions across the whole of the state. It focused on the indigent and infirm and the increased number of fringe-camp, station and mission people who had contracted leprosy. He made special mention of the 112 ration stations which were scattered across the State. The figures in the three categories rose to 1,504 in 1909 with the largest increases coming in the female aged decrepit and destitute categories. While an overall fall in the three categories occurred in 1910, the fall was among the males while the female numbers increased. Finally, Gale noted that venereal disease and leprosy were being monitored and that those suspected of having these diseases were being taken to a government property called Mount Wangee, about 140 kilometres from Roebourne. From there they were taken to various lock-up hospitals if they tested positive. The patients were taken from one destination to another by police disease patrols.

Under Gale’s administration the nakedness of the Aboriginal population became an issue of concern for administrators and protectors. Administrators had to justify the expenditure on clothing as bush and fringe people wore their issue of clothing until it fell from the body. The bush and fringe-camp people were constantly entering mining and service towns during their travels and to obtain food at the town stores. Most came into the stores and depots either naked or scantily dressed. Not only did nakedness offend the sensibilities of the settlers in the towns and mining establishments, it exposed the debilitating deformities the Aborigines suffered in fights and from leprosy, tuberculosis and venereal disease. Clothing, therefore, played a particularly important part in the minds of some protectors because it provided Aborigines with some protection against abuse by settlers, who were highly critical and prejudiced about indigenous nakedness, as well as against the natural cold, wind and rain.

Some district inspectors rejected the idea that clothing could provide warmth even when wet. Some claimed that tunics would engender the idea that clothing should be on permanent issue like rations. Such notions, some protectors argued, should not be encouraged because they believed that camp people would become dependent. Nevertheless, the Chief Protector recommended that the supply of cheaply made clothing was an answer to the problem of Aboriginal nudity. By contracting for large quantities of warm tunics with belts, Aborigines would not have to suffer the indignities of nudity when confronting townsfolk. Gale felt that this system was more convenient for natives and far more suitable than expensive trousers, shirts and jackets. The detractors argued that to give natives such good clothing was foolhardy because they would soon turn to rags. In turn, the clothing would soon become too dirty to wear. In addition, when the clothing got wet they would cling to the bodies of people and were more likely to cause colds and chills.

The paradoxical position of protectors was evident. The protectors wanted to protect Aborigines from criticisms levelled at them by white townsfolk. For instance white town residents were critical of the way bush people congregated around mining camps for food and money. This was a different way of life than they lived in their traditional customary ways. According to the rural protectors, bush people were, therefore, forced by circumstances to change their patterns of living and their practices of supporting their eating, shelter and habits within their bush customs. Alternatively, protectors laboured to keep people from embarrassment in the face of settler prudery, and at the same time keeping camp people’s body and soul in one piece, which proved a difficult task for isolated protectors.

Indigenous people’s ideas about health were powerless to treat the diseases prevalent in 1910. Western medicine was used, therefore, to assist in attempting to build good relations between settler and indigenous groups. Whereas in 1900 only the Government’s Aborigines Department was involved in protecting Aborigines by 1910 others were beginning to assist indigenous groups from the ravages of an expanding colony. This was evident by the way the Western Australian government employed protectors who had a knowledge of western medicine. The program of lock-up institutions created in 1907-8 were specifically designed to cope with the ravages of the venereal diseases epidemic identified by the Roth Royal Commission. To pastoralists the policy of protection meant the holding back of the growth of the colony, but to others it was beginning to meant that the State would ensure that a distance was kept between settlers and indigenous people wherever possible, and this is the subject of Chapter four.

 

 

APPENDIX 3

 

 

 

Table 3.1: Disability in Aborigines of WA, 1900-10.

Disability	1900-1	1902-3	1904-5	1907	1908-10	totals
Blindness
male	78	na	70	30	125	303
females	144	na	181	60	145	530
Aged/Crippled
males	353	na	561	270	654	1838
females	681	na	702	366	977	2726
Destitute
males	64	na	175	112	310	661
females	110	na	242	158	533	1043

Sources. na= data not available

Synopsis || Contents || Intro || 1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 || 6 || 7 || 8 || 9 || 10 || Conclusion || Bibliography