In 1920, and again in 1926, the Western Australian government reformed the way they administered Aboriginal affairs by changing its structure and implementing an austerity approach towards protection policies. Additionally, the Hookworm Campaign continued its final surveys in 1920 and the report was made public in 1924. In the southern and eastern regions of the State, the Government’s austerity measures helped promote greater movement of Aborigines from government reserves which in turn helped to create a new style of missionary, or surrogate protectors in the fringe-camps. In the north, the Commonwealth began taking an interest in leprosy as international critics attacked the treatment regimes of the disease employed in Australia. New forms of ethnographic advice to the Government based on the administration of Aboriginal affairs began to develop. I discuss aspects of disease health and healing of indigenous groups in the contexts of these themes.

The restructuring of Aboriginal protection agencies affected the lives of Aborigines, government administrators, missionaries, health workers and pastoralists employing Aborigines. The government divided the new protection agency into two separate regions, one for the ‘north’ and the other for the ‘south’. In the north the region extended from the 25th parallel and north along the coast to the Northern Territory border. The areas of the north which concern this chapter are the Gascoyne, the Pilbara and the Kimberley districts. The Chief Protector in that region was O.A. Neville, previously the Chief Protector for the whole State. Moreover, he was appointed Secretary in charge of a new Department of the North West. In the south, Aboriginal administration and protecting became the responsibility of Fred Aldrich. Aldrich learned his craft of growing oysters and breeding fish at Botany Bay and Port Hacking near Sydney New South Wales. He was appointed Inspector of Fisheries for Western Australia in 1911. His main skill was the development of oyster-bed fisheries and he focused mainly on that occupation until 1920 when the Western Australian Government restructured a number of rural interest departments. Aldrich was appointed Chief Inspector of Fisheries and Protector of Aborigines for the Southern region. The Fishing Industry had a number of interests in the southern area of the State which included whaling and deep ocean fishing, for which Aldrich was responsible. His region of protecting Aborigines extended south from the Gascoyne, taking in all of the wheat belt, the eastern goldfields and the whole area south of Perth to Albany and on to the South Australian border. His general unfamiliarity with race questions and particularly Aboriginal health prevented Aborigines from getting to know him and enabled him to implement the govenment’s austerity program with some aloofness. As such when the administration was changed again in 1926 Aborigines still looked to Neville to correct the anomalies that they experienced.

At the beginning of this period too, a number of follow-up surveys of the hookworm disease were still under way, and by 1924 the results of a combined international, national and state funded survey on hookworm was made public. Although some survey teams focused on Aborigines it was not specifically an Aboriginal program. The results revealed high levels of the incidence of parasites in Aboriginal groups. A pilot survey commenced in 1911 by the Australian Institute of Tropical Health had resulted in a further survey that began in 1919. Following funding from the Rockefeller Foundation a national program began on October 1, 1919 and continued until 30 June, 1924. The Australian Hookworm Campaign, as the program became known, made a number of surveys of parts of the Australian population to discover the locations of the hookworm infestations. The survey examined human fæces of sample populations in each state. Along with the search for the presence of hookworm other parasites were also recorded. In the Australian campaign the result of the surveys was that of the 248,721 persons examined 48,256 or 19.4 per cent were found to be infected with hookworm.

According to Sweet the highest local infection rates of parasitic infections in Australia were found in Aboriginal camps of the tropics. In these camps the rate of infection by intestinal parasites was similar to that found in Papua and New Guinea. Some parasites depended on both the moist temperatures of the tropics and the insanitary habits of the population. Some parasitic worms were found in drier interior regions as well, and such parasites did not rely on the rainfall of moist tropical regions to spread, as was the case of hookworm. More recent indications show that hookworm was never as serious as some medical administrators suggested. The parasite causes anaemia and can be fatal, but the kinds of parasites found in Aborigines at the time of the survey could be found in many other Australian populations, small or large.
J. Gillespie has recently argued that the hookworm project was a political device presented to the Federal Quarantine Agency as a means of expand itself into a fully fledged ‘Public Health’ department, a goal it achieved by 1920. Gillespie claims also that most of the parasites found among the Aborigines who were screened proved relatively harmless. The real problem related to the complications arising from prolonged hookworm infection. The worms could travel through to the bloodstream and on to the lungs and other organs. Internal bleeding followed and anaemia developed thereby reducing the energy of the infected persons. Throughout the world the social stigma of the disease caused it to be labelled as ‘the germ of laziness’.

The national hookworm project was enthusiastically supported across Australia. It already operated a number of pilot surveys extending back before the First World War. It commenced once more in Western Australia in April of 1921, when Dr Atkinson, the Principal Medical Officer of Western Australia, was notified by the head of the new Commonwealth Health Department, J.H.L. Cumpston, that ‘Hookworm disease existed on the north-west coast of Australia. Several cases were reported from Beagle Bay near Broome.’ Cumpston was not able immediately to say whether these were Aboriginal cases, but Atkinson knew that those surveyed were Aborigines, and hookworm had been located in their mission communities. When the survey report was made public the Western Australian results indicated that 308 people out of a population of 2,846 surveyed had contracted the disease. Western Australia’s hookworm rate of infection stood at 19.8 per cent, a figure marginally above the national total infection rate of 19.4 per cent, as indicated by Sweet. This was sufficient for the Western Australian government to approve payment for their involvement in the National Hookworm Campaign to eradicate the disease.

The District Medical Officer in Broome, Dr Hayes, asked Atkinson whether the Commonwealth wanted the ‘stools’ of Aborigines from Beagle Bay and ‘half-caste’ camps around Broome sent to Perth for testing, a suggestion that was made by the new Director of the National Hookworm Campaign, Dr Sawyer. At the same time he gave verbal assurance that costs would be recouped from the Commonwealth. Notification of approval of the expenditure came on July 1921, regarding cases at Beagle Bay where specimens of faeces could be received for testing from Broome. Two years later Cumpston wrote asking what action the Western Australian Government was taking about the endemic hookworm at Broome and Beagle Bay.

On 24 August 1921 the national coordinator of the Hookworm Campaign, Dr Sawyer, wrote a memo to the Superintendent of Moore River Settlement at Mogumber saying that, following a phone conversation with the Chief Protector of Aborigines, they had arranged for an Aboriginal girl, Ruth Clinch, to return from treatment in Perth by train and that someone from the settlement should meet her at the Mogumber railway station. In a note from the Chief Protector to the Reserve manager at Mogumber, Dr Baldwin was to visit the reserve to investigate hookworm disease on his way to other places in Western Australia. Dr Baldwin was particularly interested in examining the Laverton natives. The note indicates also that treatment was also to occur among Laverton Aborigines but that it would be conducted in a professional way, with concern for patients. The manager in his reply made the point that Aborigines moved across the State when ceremonies were in process and often travelled for long distances. In addition to the itinerant worker population from New Norcia, Aborigines had settled at Moore River from as far east as Laverton. These people used the settlement as a safe haven when looking for work in the south. Moore River was 110 kilometres north of Perth and, on the other hand, Laverton about was 750 kilometres north-east of Perth, and 250 kilometres due north of Kalgoorlie. These distances suggest that Aborigines had acquired considerable geographical mobility. It also suggests how infection could travel so quickly from one group to another, across vast distances.

In September 1921 Dr Sawyer wrote to the manager of Carrolup indicating that 7 per cent of the 300 Aboriginal adults and children had become infected with hookworm. He also said that Dr Baldwin had notified him that Aborigines at the reserve were hosts to a number of parasitic worm infections. The people had travelled from northern areas to work near New Norcia. From there they had moved south to Guildford near Perth, and then to other southern fringe and settlement camp locations. Notes on record show that health inspections took place as far east as Eucla in South Australia in the same period. About fifty people were named in both the infected and itinerant category and among them were about ten young children. Some of these people, the records showed, had been treated and had moved on only to be re-infected at other camp-sites. This phenomenon, in hindsight, reveals problems in the mass treatment of highly mobile individuals.

A newspaper article reported in July 1924 that the Commonwealth’s representations to the State Minister for Health, H.B. Jarvis, indicated that health authorities had won the battle, at least for the time being, against hookworm infestation. The Hookworm Campaign continued the survey to other parts of the State and examined Aborigines living both on government reserves and on government camp-site excisions. These excisions created by the Chief Protector were becoming permanent living places for Aboriginal groups.

Although the government continued to expand the supply of rations to newly established missions, the austerity measures placed stress on protection agencies and problems of access by Aborigines to existing services. In turn, this created greater Aboriginal mobility away from established reserves and missions. From this trend came a new style of missionary who began to act as surrogate protectors. The Chief Protector began to supply rations as well as funds to missionaries to manage those bush people who had recently abandoned their bush life-styles. The two most notable regions were in the southwestern region from Perth, Albany and Esperance and central eastern regions such as Leonora, Wiluna and Mount Margaret. In general, Aborigines of mixed descent in the southwestern area lived either on privately leased sheep, wheat and cattle properties as indentured labour, on missions and government reserves, or on government owned fringe-camp sites. Health conditions were generally poor. In 1920 residents at Moore River government station, for example, suffered from out-breaks of scabies, pneumonia, influenza and tuberculosis. That year an epidemic of flu caused three deaths and the hospitalisation of 106 people.

Nurses delivered primary care while the administration of public health remained with the Fisheries Department. Sixty years later a Moore River resident remembered that Aborigines had to be very sick or nearly dead before a doctor came to see them. The same happened with a dentist. If any person suffered from toothache the Superintendent would take the tooth out. At the same time, small family groups in the south who became dissatisfied with institutional life on mission or government settlements, began moving in ever increasing numbers to fringe-camps. These were reserved land set aside for use by fringe-camp dwellers and deliberately provided by government for that purpose. Such camps were in common use during the mid-1920s. This migration to the fringe-camps was caused primarily by the implementation of Protector Neville’s ‘native settlement scheme’. One effect of Neville’s policy was that in the south unemployment throughout the 1920s increased for people of mixed descent as they chased casual farm work. The Department’s policy of encouraging people to move into white society was rigorously pursued. As people were released from the constraints of reserve or mission life they moved in increasing numbers to the fringe-camps. These reserves were mostly occupied by those Aborigines who had either come west from desert areas for work or were migrants from Carrolup Mission. They had moved to the fringes of rural service towns from the missions and more remote government reserves, and then became casual labourers on the soldier settlement and land development schemes after the First World War.

Once on their camp sites Aboriginal land clearers were left to fend for themselves. It was assumed that they brought with them a natural social order. Also, there was an assumption that hygienic and healthy living practices were a part of the culture brought by camp dwellers to their current fringe dwelling sites. Assumptions such as these proved wrong. Health was affected by peoples’ circumstances and certainly by their pursuit of employment. The camp sites of farm workers, according to a recent assessment, were looked on by local white townsfolk as ‘unsightly’ and a ‘menace to health’. Although there was doubt about where the evidence came from, local opinion was that social chaos emerged from black farm workers and ‘undesirable’ whites who camped with the Aboriginal workers and their families. Further, in the camps there was a lack of authority which led to heavy drinking and fighting. In 1924, the local Council at Kellerberrin together with the local Medical Officer told the Commissioner of Health that Aborigines were making the local camping ground ‘unhealthy’ because they were camping too close to the catchment area of two government dams. The camps were without proper sanitation which, according to the Shire Councils, represented a threat to health.

Despite government resistance to the missionaries they continued to find new ways of proselytising the newly emergent camp-dwellers. One way was to take on the mantle of advocate for fringe-groups problems by directly intervening between the authorities and campers. Another new approach was for these new missionaries to live in the camps. There they held religious gatherings and performed baptisms, weddings and burials as needed. Some became spokespersons for the campers in disputes with townspeople. Providing clothing for the destitute and food for the hungry campers, formed one of the services the new missionaries provided. They also commenced child minding and some camps had their own schools. These missionaries also helped to bridge the communication between indigenous families in need of health care and the staff at country hospitals. Migration from missions and reserves to fringe-camps in the south swelled the numbers of people living in fringe-camps. In turn the spread of some communicable diseases such as tuberculosis began infecting a few Aborigines. Some children were removed to places like Moore River and the Swan River Mission in Perth to be closer to medical treatment. Other infectious diseases, especially influenza, proved more destructive. Although tuberculosis could wipe out whole families, influenza could remove whole fringe-camp population. During the 1918-19 Spanish influenza pandemic, 43 people died in the southern reserve populations of about 1000 people. Neville, nevertheless, maintained, that in the southern region the health of Aborigines remained good.

Such assurances notwithstanding, virulent pathogenic diseases and resistance by the health services to accept Aborigines as patients typified both the Aboriginal epidemiological patterns and the Aboriginal responses to government austerity measures in the south. At Moore River in 1921-22 about 106 residents contracted influenza with three deaths resulting. In the same period, at Katanning, bureaucratic exigency and social custom clashed when some Aborigines died after local doctors refused them treatment. During the 1920s, a number of camp dwellers complained to the Chief Protector about being refused treatment by district hospital medical staff. Such prejudice often forced Aboriginal patients to travel long distances before finding a doctor who would treat them. One complaint in 1927 was about Katanning Aborigines who rushed their sick relatives to Gnowangerup where at least three subsequently died. Policy on the management of local hospitals was made by the local Road Boards, who held responsibility for running local hospitals. The Commissioner for Public Health had powers under the Public Health Act, 1911-12 to compel hospitals to admit Aborigines but local interpretation of the legislation always meant that hospital staff usually had the final say. Court magistrates, local police and protectors similarly failing, thus in their duty to require that Aborigines be admitted.

The austerity measures instigated everywhere by the government in 1922 placed stress on the living accommodation at Moore River. The annual report from the Aborigines Department, in 1923, showed that approximately 400 inmates were living at Moore River. This was nearly double the 1922 figure of 261. A reduction in costs incurred from £7,711 in 1923 to about £5,500 in 1924 was then imposed. The reserve management responded by reducing building maintenance which in turn led to problems with vermin, water supply and a general deterioration in living conditions. The Department’s austerity measures prevented it from tackling the overcrowding of dormitories, in which large numbers of Aborigines were forced to sleep very close together. It was the Department, then, which created the conditions for rapid spread of airborne infections and skin and other diseases that were transferred by close body contact. In adults the diseases most commonly transmitted in this way were venereal diseases, influenza and tuberculosis. In children the diseases were most often scabies and parasitic infections such as hookworm. On top of these cases resulting from overcrowding was the denial of access to hospitals. The reluctance of the hospitals to admit Aborigines was to lead to a twenty-five year struggle between the Aborigines, the State health authorities and the local government bodies before Aborigines gained freedom of access.

Although fringe-camps had their origin round about the turn of the century, their popularity in the twentieth century may be dated from the closure of the government reserve at Carrolup. The closure of Carrolup propelled people in two directions. The strong and healthy gravitated directly to fringe-camps, where the new style of missionary tended them if they became ill. The Chief Protector transferred the sick, elderly and younger residents directly to Moore River, a refuge which lacked proper health facilities. Carrolup had opened as a ration depot and refuge in the 1880s, but in June 1922 the general austerity measures put in place by Deputy Protector Aldrich forced its closure. This action meant that the sick and frail waited for prolonged periods for treatment. At the same time, those Aborigines moving to Moore River believing they would be better off were mistaken.

Many years after his retirement Neville recalled that relations between the Aborigines Department and health authorities had deteriorated throughout the 1920s. The clauses of the Aborigines Act 1905 relating to health could not alone correct insanitary living conditions in the camps in the absence of adequate funding. Payment of medical expenses by the Aborigines Department, still in force in 1920, was the means by which Aborigines anywhere in the State were meant to obtain primary health attention. But that measure did not guarantee access to care, because of the shortage of hospital beds in country hospitals, which remained a continuing problem, and the fact that even when special arrangements for Aborigines were in place, there was no obligation for hospital staff and general practitioners to comply.

Hospitals with special wards for Aborigines often put white patients in them when beds in the general wards became scarce. Almost from the day he commenced Neville struggled unsuccessfully to keep health facilities open for use by Aborigines. The records reveal a long running battle between protectors and hospital administrators to force the latter to admit sick Aborigines. In most cases Aboriginal protection agencies paid for the erection of separate shelters, in some cases tents, at the rear of country hospitals. Neville’s failure was a result of his having to deal directly with each offending rural hospital separately, and sometimes even separate sub-professional personnel in each hospital. At the same time, changing economic circumstances in the 1920s forced him to spend less on what, some argued, was a disappearing Aboriginal ‘problem’.

The Aborigines Department paid for the building of a four bed ‘native ward’ at Narrogin soon after Neville took up duties. The hospital wrote to Neville asking him to fund the repairs to these wards. Neville refused to support funding repairs out of his Department’s vote. In November 1919 the District Medical Officer, James Lewis strongly urged the Chief Protector to build a portable frame tent which could be spiked down due to the large number of natives admitted to the hospital. His reasons were that ‘the natives are uncleanly in their habits they make the white patients have a bad time’..Furthermore, Lewis suggested that if the Protector of Aborigines could supply the material, the orderly could build the structure. Otherwise, Lewis suggested, the Police Department had a tent that would do the job.

It appeared that hospital authorities originally approached the Aborigines Department to erect small wards for use by sick Aborigines. When Aboriginal patients came to be admitted tents were preferred because white patients were placed in the beds before Aborigines. These circumstances lasted until a crisis developed. As demand by whites for beds occurred the hospitals economised by re-assigning the Aboriginal beds rather than forcing white patients to travelling to Perth for a vacant hospital bed. Mostly the crisis resulted from increasing white and Aboriginal populations competing for the same bed space. In addition, as more Aborigines moved away from reserves they went to hospitals for immediate health care. In 1925, for example, the Matron of the Narrogin hospital wrote again indicating that two small wards existed at the rear of the Narrogin hospital for Aboriginal cases. Her understanding was that due to increased demand on hospital beds no room existed for Aboriginal patients. Neville wrote at the bottom of the page that he thought that the Matron of Narrogin hospital said that ‘arguments had arisen about the treatment of Aborigines. She added that she had spoken to Dr Mackie who insisted that people treated by him must have order forms from the Police sergeant’.

In another town the fringe-camp dwellers wanted the same services as other indigent mission and reserve dwellers. Lance Williams, while relating his story of living on Gnowangerup mission during the 1980s, told Anne Haebich that ‘in 1926 a tent was provided for Aboriginal patients at Gnowangerup hospital.’ When the reserve at Carrolup opened a clinic the tent was transferred to the reserve. Williams attended the school run by the missionaries at the time, and he recalled how, ‘in those days, Aborigines were not allowed into the hospital at Gnowangerup’. When other missionaries came into the camps they gave us a big sleep-out, a big canvas tent on a camping ground. ‘My sister had an abscess on the brain then, just behind the ear, and you know they had to have the operation in this tent. The doctor, he was a German bloke, and matron and two nurses done it’.

Further changes to the administration occurred in 1926 when a new Aborigines Department was formed following the abolition of the Departments of North West and of Fisheries. As part of a general increase in interest in Aboriginal issues, health featured prominently in the five years from 1925 to 1930. This did not mean an automatic acceptance by country hospitals of the need to allow Aborigines to have access to hospital and primary medical care, however. This matter remained unresolved. Neville wrote to the Secretary of the Medical Department about ‘the large number of natives at Narrogin...requiring medical attention’. He reminded the Medical Department that Narrogin, a government funded hospital, had an obligation to treat Aborigines who sometimes needed treatment. He indicated further that it should revert ‘to its original purpose, or some other arrangement [should] be made for the treatment at hospital of natives, and thus avoid unnecessary expense.’

Two female protestant missionaries (United Aborigines Mission), Misses Bradshaw and McRidge, became concerned at the poor education Aboriginal children were receiving, and they started a mission at Gnowangerup, in January 1930. In the beginning the mission developed along similar lines to missions in other places. It started with a small bough shed school and within a few years there were up to forty children attending. Classes were later moved to a small hall which served as a church and a small hospital was erected. The Aboriginal families camped in different places. According to Lance Williams, they formed a ‘square but somebody over here and somebody over there. But they got little tin places made out of kerosene tins, used to go to the dump...cut up the tin and make a sort of tin place’. This was a significant change in living patterns and in personal and group hygiene.

A researcher indicated that the mission population grew rapidly and by 1928 there were one hundred Aborigines living at Gnowangerup regularly. At the same time the camp was evolving into a little town with its own store, school, hospital and camp-site. ‘The women worked in Gnowangerup washing clothes for the white ladies at about 5 shillings for a whole days washing, hanging it out, fetching it’. The Aboriginal women from the camps washed white townsfolk’s clothing by hand and did a lot of house work for them besides. These Aboriginal families were distinctly different from mission and government settlement groupings. They were kangaroo shooters, contract fencing workers, farm-work labourers and shearers. Many also earned money by felling trees to supply farmers with fencing posts.

Political organisation by people of Aboriginal descent proved difficult to achieve. Political, economic and social matters surrounding health always presented problems. A group of mainly male Aborigines of mixed descent took a political stand against the state government, when, as a Perth newspaper pointed out, they banded together ‘in order to obtain the protection of the same laws that govern the white man’. The idea was the ‘brainchild of a half-caste farmer from Morawa district, called William Harris, and a delegation led by him met with Premier Collier.’ The delegation said to Collier that they ‘wanted to live up to the standards of the white man but to do so they needed to be exempt from the Aborigines Act, and allowed to live our lives in their own way.’ They owed their confidence to their Christian background. The protestant denominations of the Salvation Army, the Untied Aborigines Mission and the Anglican Churches had worked hard to convert fringe-camp people to their respective denominations. These bodies were responsible for the emergence of a radical group of Aborigines of mixed descent wanting equality with whites. However, as a ‘ginger’ group for change, the Harris group failed to make an impact on either the administration or other Aborigines, who may have hesitated for fear of reprisal. An ethnographer working in the region fifty years later found that this delegation had no impact on white Western Australian or their Aboriginal counterparts. The ‘emergence of any autonomous Aboriginal political activity in the inter-ethnic field was discouraged by issuing exemption certificates to those deemed sufficiently acculturated.’

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s tensions existed between Aborigines Department administrators and the various religious bodies interested in Aborigines. Missionaries tended to institutionalise fringe-camp people by converting them and creating around them new types of religious structures that differed markedly from the type used by earlier missions: the missionaries acted as servants rather than dogmatic tutors. In the southern region, ‘all the old style church institutions had closed by 1921’, and this provided Christians with some opportunities for the evangelical proselytization of camp peoples.

Meanwhile, in the northern regions of Western Australia two notable developments occurred in the Kimberley region. One was criticism of the policy of isolating lepers; the other related to a Commonwealth funded leprosy survey of the Kimberley. In this period the Kimberley region produced 28 leprosy patients out of a total of 35 patients for the whole of Western Australia, and most were Aborigines. The preponderance of Aborigines among these leper populations heightened the fears of white residents in remote northern towns such as Roebourne, Broome, Derby, Wyndham, Fitzroy Crossing and Kununurra. In the 1920s health authorities were forced to abide by the law and provide treatment whereas in earlier decades the white residents, in collusion with the police, health and protection authorities, simply shipped lepers out to isolated islands, as mentioned in the last chapter.

The protection legislation had always imposed an obligation on the protectors to provide medicines, medical attendance and shelter for sick, aged and infirm Aborigines. We have already seen that this legislation created tensions between the department and the health agencies. Antagonism between the Aborigines and the Health Departments arose over treatment of Aboriginal lepers. This centred on the responsibility for providing food, shelter and land to erect hospitals and clinics, and on responsibility for the care of Aboriginal patients. Neville always assumed that once Aborigines fell sick they became the responsibility of the health authorities. Neville’s inertia in relation to lepers underlay arguments about his failure to provide health care in general. The health system operated in such a way that people paid for services either when receiving treatment or when a service was demanded. Payment, therefore, had to come from the ‘natives’ themselves, the Chief Protector, employers, the police or the courts. Aboriginal lepers suffered more than most Aborigines because they lost all their liberties as soon as a positive diagnosis of their condition was made. The Chief Protector who had the responsibility of protecting Aborigines was powerless to do so in the face of more powerful Health Department. The health agencies were able to exercise almost unlimited power to apprehend and segregate Aborigines with an infectious disease. They expected the Chief Protector to pay maintenance costs of Aboriginal lepers while in custody.

Very little change had occurred in screening practices and the collection of suspected leper sufferers for transportation to the nearest hospital or lazaret. Aborigines suspected of harbouring the infection were kept in custody until the pathologist’s diagnosis was known. Those who were suspected of being infected were gathered from their distant bush camps by police disease patrols. Once in custody they travelled long distances (normally chained to each other) and were marched by foot or carried by bullock wagon to a central screening point such as Roebourne, Broome, Derby and Wyndham.

Disputes persisted over the administrative responsibility to feed the lepers while they were travelling. The patients needed food while in custody and this was normally done on route to the lazarets at Wyndham, Broome and Derby. The screening process also took weeks and suspected lepers had to be fed. For instance, the test samples went south by special post from the northern trade centres to Perth. The results were usually sent back by radio directly to the transport dept. All this time patients had to be maintained, and food normally came from either private contractors, who sometimes worked in other government employment, or from hotel kitchens in Roebourne, Broome, Derby and Wyndham. If the tests proved negative, the suspects travelled home by themselves – a highly dangerous exercise. Such arrangements were harsh, and the infectious diseases legislation contained almost no humanitarian provisions.

One of the Aboriginal Department’s employees, F. Luyer, who attended leprosy patients as they came in from the bush in 1927, requested additional salary payments for feeding the members of the contingent. On 17 November 1927 the Chief Protector of Aborigines approved the payment of five shillings for each leprosy patient he fed before their transportation to further destinations. On 27 November Luyer wired the Commissioner for Public Health to request permission to build a shelter at the cost of £10. He also requested urgent action to maintain the security of the quarantine compound because some patients would be sure to escape. His correspondence reveals the practical difficulties of operating a disease patrol in which a number of agencies held an interest.

The relevant legislation was the Public Health Act 1886, which allowed officials to isolate persons suspected of having the disease. As early as 1889 general statutes on leprosy existed, but leprosy was not a notifiable disease until the enactment of the Commonwealth quarantine legislation in 1908. On the question of legislating for notifying infectious diseases, Western Australia followed Victoria, where legislation bestowed wide powers for isolating people suspected of having infections.

Federal reluctance in 1920, and the sudden upsurge of leprosy cases, tended to confuse the politicians and bureaucrats of state and federal governments alike. The confusion intensified because the Western Australian Government took a position that distanced itself from full responsibility for leprosy. The State felt that the Commonwealth held responsibility for controlling exotic diseases. Leprosy, in particular, was a disease that northern townsfolk believed came from mariners and pearlers, who were considered as foreigners. Doctors saw some strains of venereal disease as peculiar to Aborigines, where the body wasting appeared similar to leprosy; so it was that rural townsfolk believed that leprosy was a disease that mainly peoples other than whites contracted. The disease, many believed, would not spread to white settler populations of the north-west.

Segregation, even on humanitarian grounds, was never an easy choice for either publicly or privately employed doctors. The style of segregated hospitals already existed and had been in use to isolate venereally diseased Aboriginal patients since the late nineteenth century. In defence of the Western Australian medical system, they mistakenly applied models used by Europeans, mainly under conditions of epidemic maladies. When the problem of leprosy arose in the far northern areas of Western Australia the solution appeared obvious.

Doctors and administrators did not appreciate it at the time, but leprosy was never very contagious. Instead, rumours or news of an increase in the number of lepers struck fear in the hearts of the medical profession and the public. Race prejudice ruled the placement of lepers in treatment programs. Chinese, Manilamen and Aborigines were put in the same location. White patients were kept apart from the bulk of leper suspects and patients. Cook in his 1922-24 study drew the conclusion that the causes of the leprosy epidemics originated in the social conditions adopted by the few white pastoral workers who cohabited with Aborigines in the many fringe-camps of the northern towns. Throughout the 1920s a number of small outbreaks did occur. These involved all races, but the majority were Aborigines. Even though the numbers of people contracting leprosy were small in the 1920s, the stage was being set for a huge increase in the next decade.

Increasing interest in leprosy arose from two sources. The first were the white settlers, who were terrified of the infection and feared that some of them would soon become infected and join the leper ranks. Indeed, leprosy was spread to white society from Aborigines, and leprosy gained a foothold in the white community by 1920. The upsurge in interest by rural white settlers was partly due to its spread among white townsfolk. The second source of interest was the Commonwealth who expressed their intentions to investigate the causes of diseases, and the method of preventing diseases, by collection of sanitary data, as well as educating the public in matters of public health. To make matters more complex, as early as 1919 the Wyndham Road Board sought and gained approval from the Western Australian Government to act as the local health authority, and the request became law on 7 August 1918. Parallel to this development, as a government document on quarantining disease pointed out, the Western Australia quarantine position was considered by the Federal Cabinet who decided to list the matter of leprosy at the next Federal and State Ministers’ conference. The next meeting was scheduled for January 22, 1919 at which the State and Federal Governments discussed the question of the coordinating Commonwealth and State powers in relation to quarantine and disease.

In a memo written in 1920 to the Western Australian Minister for Health, Everitt Atkinson, the Commissioner for Public Health in Western Australia pointed out that the Commonwealth authorities held the responsibility for the isolation and care of quarantinable diseases arriving in Australian ports on board a ship. The State authorities, Atkinson stated, were responsible for diseases arising in the State, whether as a definite extension of overseas or not. Cumpston, the head of the newly created Commonwealth Public Health authority, wanted to adopt a new system. He proposed that in addition to its Quarantine responsibilities, his agency should research the causes of disease and death, investigate methods of preventing disease, collect sanitation data and, finally, educate the public on issues relating to public health.

Furthermore, Cumpston wanted the Commonwealth to subsidise States with any well-directed effort to eradicate disease and, using a system adopted in the United States of America, inspire and coordinate public health measures without jeopardising State sovereignty. Without exception, by October of 1920 the States saw in such moves an underlying conspiracy to encroach upon their powers. The Commonwealth had been funding Western Australian venereal disease programs with subsidies from as early as 1907. These subsidies went directly to treat mostly Aboriginal sufferers. The Western Australian Government reacted to public fears by pressing the Commonwealth for subsidies to attend to the increasing number of leprosy patients. But these funds were to be spent on old methods of segregating sufferers from the public and transporting them away from Western Australia. While that State’s consciousness about health and safety rose a matter of international controversy took public prominence.

In the early 1920s Sir Leonard Rogers, a researcher into leprosy, and his co-worker Ernest Muir wrote a paper critical of the way Australia treated leprosy patients. Both men were leaders in the treatment of leprosy in India and Africa. At a conference of the Pan Pacific Science Congress in Sydney in 1923, Rogers presented his views, as Davidson pointed out, arguing that a policy of isolating leprosy patients deterred them from coming forward to be treated by trained medical doctors. Once lepers became confined to lazarets the standard of treatment in Australia fell below that available in other countries. Rogers claimed that Australian policy had not been able to reduce the incidence of leprosy and new cases had been recorded each year showing that the disease continued to increase. According to Suzanne Saunders, Rogers agreed that leprosy was reaching epidemic proportions in the Aboriginal populations of north Australia. At the time of Rogers’ presentation there were four leprosariums across Australia. Western Australia had establishments at Roebourne, Broome and Derby, while the Northern Territory had a facility on Mud Island. Queensland catered for leper patients on islands off the coast of Cairns and New South Wales facilities were located in Sydney. In all instances isolation remained the main form of treatment in 1920.

The Commonwealth’s interest in the epidemiology of leprosy manifested itself when Dr Cecil Cook began a research project to study leprosy in Australia. He compiled a major report on the prevalence of leprosy in northern Australia. Cook was born on 23 September 1897 in Bex Hill, Sussex England, at a time when J. Ashburton Thompson was publishing his prize-winning essay on the first Australia epidemiological survey of leprosy. Cook’s father, an English doctor, migrated to Barcaldine in Queensland, where he established a private medical practice. Cecil Cook went south to study medicine at Sydney University. On his graduation in 1922, he claimed the prestigious public health award, the British Wandsworth Research scholarship, taking it up in 1924-25. His research involved an investigation of the prevalence of leprosy in northern Australia, in conjunction with the Commonwealth School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in Queensland.

Cook’s report on leprosy was one of the first epidemiological studies done in Australia since the 1890s. Cumpston later remarked that Cook had painstakingly examined the facts and formed definite views. He observed that Cook had characterised leprosy as an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium. The disease was transmitted from one person to another by direct contact, under certain environmental conditions. Due to the problem of not knowing the medical histories of many who had come in contact with the infection it was impossible to know much about the contagion in many Australian cases, largely the result of imperfect observation and incomplete investigation. The disease appeared to infect persons who had experience of long periods during which they harboured infection and possibly were a danger to their associates. Many carriers harboured the disease but showed no outward sign of disease. Leprosy was found to be successfully diffused, and had become endemic only in humid climates.

The outward signs of the thickening of the skin of the forehead was less noticeable among infected Aborigines than among most Europeans. This folding of the forehead was attributed to the stimulation of resistance by the greater exposure to the ultra-violet rays of the sun. Cook surmised that leprosy was unknown amongst the Aborigines and early European settlers. He thought also that the disease had been introduced from China and islands around the Pacific during the last century through the importation of coloured labour into Australia from those countries. The disease then spread to white males through contact with Aboriginal women. The infection spread from those whites to others. It was through this process, he argued, that the disease had become endemic. White females, Cook claimed, did not contract the disease until 1890, but the incidence among them increased rapidly by 1925 when 23 white female cases were reported. Between 1900 and 1921 the number of white Australian males who contracted leprosy had risen to 22 which tends to support Cook’s conclusion that the disease came from Chinese mine workers and passed to Aborigines thence to white people.

Cook made a preliminary investigation in 1922 and began his major project a year later. He travelled to the northern area of Western Australia where he visited the sheep and cattle properties of the Ashburton, Fortescue and the Pilbara regions. He went on to Broome, Derby, inland along the Fitzroy River and north along the border to Wyndham and Forrest River. He noted that the local leprosarium was housed in the old government buildings. He criticised the use of these dilapidated buildings and the lack of interest shown by the medical profession of the northern regions in improving them as well as the lack of concern shown by the Government. Cook’s report was released in 1924 and published by the Commonwealth in 1925. One of Cook’s proposition was for greater federal and state coordination of funding leprosy treatment. At the same time he criticised the isolation of leprosy patients but could see no immediate alternative.

Only a few researchers in Australia worked on leprosy, and those who did so conducted their enquiries mainly in the Pacific and elsewhere. An article appeared in a Western Australian paper, the North West, stating that following the experiments which lasted six months the surgeons at the hospital where lepers were received claimed they had cured all cases treated with radium. The article went on to quote an unnamed Collins Street specialist who possessed experience in treating lepers in Nauru. The specialist was quoted as saying the use of radium produced results and was a ‘great step forward’. Further, the specialist indicated that the form of treatment adopted up to then consisted mainly of isolation and strict hygienic practices comparable to those used in treating tuberculosis cases. Chaulmoogra oil, with its various compounds, was the drug most used, and was given by injection. Other remedies were tried, but this oil appeared to be the only preparation which brought satisfactory results. The lack of research in the Kimberley, as reported by Dr Cecil Cook, probably heightened local residents’ anxieties. The effect of Cook’s study and recommendations on the Commonwealth Health Department was instantaneous.

In June 1925, Cook reported to the federal government on a specific recommendation arising from his research. This was for the development of a lazaret on the Commonwealth Controlled Channel Island in the Northern Territory. Cook pointed out that there were already eleven leprosy patients on the island, and that a Chinese man Jimmy Ah Cup from Roper River, together with two Aborigines, Alick and Judy from Pine Creek, and Billy from Maranboy were also living on the island. A Greek café proprietor from Darwin was isolated in his suburban home after diagnosis as a leper. The report argued that while they waited for plans to be finalised for his removal elsewhere there would be no special reason to condemn the man to exile in a lazaret like the one at Darwin. In the same report Cook explained that in 1916 a lazaret had been created on waste land on Darwin harbour. This miserable locality had been the home of twelve lepers isolated there for some time. The inmates at this deplorable place included a healthy half-caste girl of four. No effort had been made to treat those Aborigines affected by leprosy with a view to its eradication. The diagnoses of many Aborigines were made by white bushmen or the local policemen, sometimes erroneously. Many notifications were free of the disease, and others actually suffering from it were overlooked altogether. Cook went on to indicate that the island was used exclusively to isolate Aborigines, and he scathingly criticised health authorities in Darwin. He urged action immediately because many Europeans were now becoming infected and accommodation had reached crisis point.

Cumpston wrote to the Secretary of the Department of Home and Territories in Melbourne on September 1925 stating that Cook’s report had revealed that leprosy among the Aborigines was serious. Cumpston went on to argued that something should be done immediately and he believed that it was clear that three things needed to be done. The first need was a properly equipped leper station at Darwin. A second was for the appointment of a medical officer with proper training and reliable personality to be placed in charge of the hospital. And a third was that Channel Island was the most suitable place and with adjustments to the quarantine regulations would the best option for a lazaret. Cumpston tried to move too quickly, however, to get the lazaret going, and, in doing so, distorted Cook’s objections to the Darwin site.

The lazaret at Channel Island had two iron buildings. A doctor from the mainland visited once a week when weather permitted. When Aborigines were diagnosed as lepers the health officials shipped them straight to the island and left them to themselves. The condition of the island was regarded as sufficient for Aboriginal patients. But the Bishop of Carpentaria, Dr Davies, and the Rev. H.E. Warren of the Church Missionary Society had already brought their viewpoints to the notice of the Minister for Home Affairs. The secretary of the Department of Home Affairs wrote to Cumpston and pointed out that temporary improvements were unacceptable. He agreed with Bishop Davies about the unacceptability of forcing Aboriginal and white patients to live under such poor circumstances. Ironically, despite the Bishop’s protest, missions under his control continued to send patients to Darwin and many went straight to Channel Island.

Drs Cook, Jones and Norris of the Commonwealth Department of Health decided on 9 October 1925 that leper patients identified at church missions would be segregated at mission stations as a temporary arrangement. They would then be treated with medicines and medical direction from Darwin supplied by the missionaries on the spot. Mr Urquhart, the Administrator Northern Territory, wrote to Cumpston earlier in the month about Dr Norris’s view, that the lazaret on Channel Island was unfit for any patients not under supervision. Despite the problems experienced in Darwin in 1925, Cumpston was planning to send Dr Elkington to report on the situation.

The Western Australian responded immediately to Cook’s report by writing to the Prime Minister, who replied to the Premier on 8 August, 1927 about establishing a lazaret at the Commonwealth Quarantine Station on Channel Island, near Darwin. He requested information from the Premier on what districts, the numbers of lepers to be accommodated at the outset. Without providing answers to these questions the Premier responded immediately that as soon as the lazaret was finished he would send the Western Australian lepers there for treatment.

Some years after his criticism of Australia’s practice, Sir Leonard Rogers wrote a further critical paper in The Medical Journal of Australia. This time he condemned Australia’s approach to treating venereal diseases and leprosy patients. Writing in 1930 he was even more ‘authoritative and persuasive’. He brought to bear a criticism of Cook’s work which was based on a decade of international research together with experience that indicated just how backward Australia’s treatment of leprosy was compared to world-wide developments. Saunders points out that ‘in essence Rogers argued...that isolation...deterred leprosy patients from coming forward for treatment, and the standard of treatment in Australia was considerably below...other countries’. Further, Rogers doubted Cook’s assumptions that leprosy in Australia was as limited in its incidence as he had concluded in 1924.

Rogers marshalled convincing data. He presented them in these terms:

In 1924 [Dr Cook] pointed out that, in spite of leprosy having been a notifiable and quarantinable disease for three decades, it is still as prevalent as ever in some of the States, and in his 1927 report he showed that the disease in Queensland, after declining between 1910 to 1919 from 83 to 42 steadily increased again from 1919 to 1927 from 42 to 77, especially among Europeans. He thought that leprosy was under control in New South Wales, but this is not altogether borne out by recent data, for in the seven years up to 1920 the total segregated cases varied between 20 and 24 and the yearly admissions averaged three; and from 1920 to 1927 the admissions numbered 26, an average of 3.25 and the decline in the total remaining to 17 at the end of 1927 was due to five repatriations and 15 deaths during that period.

Rogers then attacked the segregation of ‘poor lepers’, who were compulsorily imprisoned for many years and observed that ‘in no other disease was treatment imposed with such penalty’. The true volume of infection in Australia was disguised by patients who became fearful of being diagnosed due to the severity of treatment, which implied that it was criminal incarceration. In short, Rogers elaborated on the social consequences of leprosy patients being labelled, and that the cure for this disease in Australia was worse than the disease. Australian approaches were, moreover, racially prejudiced against Asians and Aborigines.

As for curing the disease, he alluded to his experience in Calcutta and Hawaii. The ‘demonstrated that in early treatment stages of the disease out-patients could be cleared of all clinical signs of active infection. These out-patients were ‘rendered bacteriologically normal and uninfective by weekly injections of soluble preparations of the active parts of chaulmoogra and hydrocarpus oils’. Reverting to statistics, Rogers claimed that he had 486 patients treated over a five year period. Of this number, only 8 per cent of advanced cases had not responded to treatment while 38 per cent of those with moderate infection and 64 per cent of early stage infection had been diagnosed as clinically recovered. Modern methods of treatment, Rogers claimed, consisted of proper surveillance in which the patient’s contacts would also be observed over time for signs of early infection and included in an early treatment program. This method could help to clear up the pool of infection within five years, and before the new cases reached high infectivity, thus eliminating the sources of infection. Rogers’s methodology was, he argued, supported by his own and pathological research which indicated that ‘Hansen’s bacillus is not always found in early nerve and skin cases’. People in this category were best treated as outpatients. Those with higher infectivity could be isolated but only if skilled treatment was provided.

While these arguments were being propounded another observer of Aborigines’ customs, manners and daily lives arrived in the Kimberley. This was A.P. Elkin. Adolphus Peter Elkin (1891-1979), Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney from 1933 to 1956, was one of the few scholars who spent time in the northern area of Western Australia during the 1920s studying the customs and manners of the Aborigines of the Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley districts. Inevitably Elkin had to confront the problems of Aboriginal health and its administration. The views he developed there were to have profound implications for government policy in a number of States: they underpinned the protectionist and later assimilationist policies which most governments adopted during the last decade of this study. Like Walter Roth in an earlier era, Elkin was a scholar whose influence extended beyond the seminar room, particularly in Western Australia.

Elkin was born in March 1891 and received tertiary education at both Sydney and London Universities, graduating from the latter with a PhD. in anthropology. After arriving back in Australia Elkin did much of his early fieldwork in the area between the Gascoyne River and the Anglican mission at Forrest River south of Wyndham, where the head missionary was the Rev. Ernest R.B. Gribble. Privately Elkin was highly critical of Gribble’s policy, practices and personality. Gribble’s manner was authoritarian but he was a humanitarian and had proved fearless in exposing the massacre of Aborigines by police near Forrest River in 1927, when an unknown number of Aborigines had been killed and burnt. Although Gribble had become a legend in religious circles, and to those white settlers in the Kimberley, Elkin learned that he was regarded as a ‘reckless tortured tyrant, so oblivious to comfort that he lived on bush rations and expected everyone else so to do.’ According to Elkin, ‘Gribble ran his world with meglomaniacal fanaticism.’ If the blacks stole his cattle, and they did, he went after them, unarmed and into the wildest country to catch them. Gribble dealt summary justice where he was the judge and his sentence was to horsewhip the culprit. Elkin, astonished by what he had heard and seen of Gribble, viewed the missionary as holding utopian ideas, though often gripped by defeatism, and possessing the mean streak of a tyrant.

Elkin endeavoured to put these views aside while he visited missions in the Kimberley. On his first field trips to the region in late 1927, he travelled to Wyndham from Broome by mission lugger with Gribble. Once in the Kimberley, he travelled extensively. In his 1926-8 journal he described his experiences:

Before I went to the Kimberley, my knowledge of individual Aborigines as persons was almost nil. My thoughts had not turned to their condition or the effects of contact on them. I had no humanitarian motive. My task was to record and analyse Aboriginal social organisation, ritual and mythology and to that task I stuck.

He travelled by lugger from Broome to the mission at Port Georges via Cape Leveque, Kings Sound and the mission at Walcott Inlet. On another occasion he travelled by steamer to Forrest River via Wyndham. He made numerous other trips around the Kimberley, either by foot, donkey or horseback. Travelling east along the Margaret River to Mt Frank and north via the government cattle station at Mulla Bulla, he then went to Violet Downs near Turkey Creek and back to Halls Creek along the Ord River. Later, he crossed the Ord from its western side near Carlton Hill travelling west to Wyndham, making diary entries as he passed abandoned sheep and cattle stations to the north.

Elkin noted that Aboriginal labour was cheaper than white labour. Workers’ diets consisted of some meat, bread, tea and sugar, some tobacco and occasionally some clothes; they earn all they get on these stations Elkin wrote. Similarly, he took an interest in sick camp people. After visiting one camp, he wrote:

I rode out with the half-caste boy to this camp and had an interview with the old blacks. On the previous evening, one of them was very ill, and by way of remedy had grass string bound around his legs (thighs) upper arms and chest. This morning, however, it was all discarded except one bit from an arm. On my asking ‘how sick-feller’, he replied ‘me sick-feller’; he was sitting up and having a drink. He took quite an interest and part in the talk about their marriage rules which followed. They take shelter during the day in a shade made from branches....The old sick fellow has since died.

After a visit to the Beagle Bay mission Elkin described the people and buildings there. The people were diverse and on the five hour trip to Beagle Bay he recorded his impressions of his fellow passengers:

The other passengers were a sister from the mission (Irish), a Salesian brother going out on a short visit to Broome (Spanish), a black boy to open the gates and to go for help in case of trouble....Then there were two German mission brothers who said little....The sister was ready to talk and tell me plenty about the blacks and half-castes. She had been out there 21 years, [but the journey ended without further talk].

He found buildings constructed of bricks manufactured on the reserve. According to Elkin they were of poor quality but they lasted longer than wooden buildings, which were attacked by termites. Government health authorities made no visits to monitor the health of the church mission establishments or their populations. District hospitals sometimes experienced overcrowding and tents located at the rear served as accommodation for Aboriginal patients at most of the hospital facilities he visited. Elkin became acutely aware of the number of specially segregated hospitals, something not present in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, his home region. The number of Aborigines suffering from venereal diseases was also an unfamiliar sight. This, he noted, was a major responsibility of the government which was to subsidise hospitals that treated the sick and frail, and to give medicines to Aborigines affected by yaws, syphilis and gonorrhoea.

Elkin observed an increase in these health problems during his time among the Kimberley Aborigines. The Chief Protector’s reports to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly confirmed this trend but claimed the increase was only a temporary aberration. The number of patients admitted to the Port Hedland ‘native hospital’ in 1928 rose to 60 compared with 23 the previous year. A total of 11 patients remained from the previous year making a grand total of 71. The number of cases of venereal disease stood at 25; 58 patients had gone home as cured, and 6 patients had died, leaving 7 under treatment. Of the 71 patients admitted 32 had contracted Granuloma pudenda, 17 had gonorrhoea but none had syphilis, and 24 had a variety of non-venereal complaints. Elkin was surprised to confront such an epidemic but thought the treatment that Aborigines were receiving was the most up-to-date available.

Elkin’s knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases was limited and extended more to a concern about what he saw. The government health initiatives to arrest and control venereal diseases in Aborigines had been in progress for some years. When Elkin offered the criticism that venereal disease was on the rise he failed to observe that two things were already happening. First, although the drugs used to treat venereal infections in Aboriginal patients had been employed for some time, they were receiving the most up to date medication. Second, the incidence of venereal infection had begun to fall in the late 1920s. The treatment for granuloma normally began with antimony tartrate – tartar emetic – given intravenously at weekly intervals. According to a 1928 report on the operations of the Native hospital, by the Medical Superintendent Dr Davis, a two per cent solution in distilled water made up the standard treatment. The method of application adopted by Dr Davis commenced with a 1 cc dose to 6 cc of diluted normal saline. The dose had to be increased weekly by 1 cc up to a maximum of 8 cc, which represents 2.5 grams of antimony tartrate, and, according to Dr Davis’ report the dosage was never exceeded. As Davis indicated, the patient coughed a lot but did not vomit. Some patients, depending on the degree of infection, would require a second round of medication. Even so, the duration of stay was longest for those suffering from syphilis, the victims of which were few. The forms of the disease presented were congenital syphilis (that is transplacental infection or Treponema pallidum), of which there were several cases; and two cases of sexually transmitted syphilis disease. None of those had recently been infected, but one patient, an older male with cerebral syphilis (Neurosyphilis) died.

At Moore River reserve, as Biskup has demonstrated, the settlement hospital opened later in the decade and was referred to officially as the Midland District Hospital. It consisted of a single ward with accommodation for male and female patients, ‘including women in labour and patients with communicable diseases such as syphilis’. The bathroom doubled as a surgery, and the same room was used occasionally for sick babies from the camps. These babies were often kept in the bath tub to prevent them from wandering back to the camps. According to Biskup, ‘the hospital had no resident doctor and relied instead on the services of the doctor at Moora and Mogumber and sometimes even Perth when epidemics of measles, mumps and influenza struck.’ This depot population in 1930 rose to 150 people when people came in from nearby bush camps infected with influenza, from which five people died. Biskup and others reported that this was a group suffering from a range of health problems, and ‘The State Psychologist, Miss Stoneman, states in her 1929 Annual Report that one hundred...children...were underweight for their age.’ It was possible for missionaries to decide to start a mission and rapidly attract an Aboriginal population. Services in the north were dealing with other more exotic infections and involved a wider public fear and a greater expectation of Commonwealth involvement.

As Biskup has demonstrated, the Moore River settlement hospital opened later in the decade and was referred to officially as the Midland District Hospital. It consisted of a single ward with accommodation for male and female patients, ‘including women in labour and patients with communicable diseases such as syphilis’. The bathroom doubled as a surgery, and the same room was used occasionally for sick babies from the camps. These babies were often kept in the bath tub to prevent them from wandering back to the camps. According to Biskup, ‘the hospital had no resident doctor and relied instead on the services of the doctor at Moora and Mogumber and sometimes even Perth when epidemics of measles, mumps and influenza struck.’

Occupancy levels at the native hospitals – of which there were five between Wyndham and Moore River – always remained high. In 1929, for instance, the total number of patients admitted to Port Hedland totalled 54, compared with 68 the previous year of whom 7 were ‘incurables’ from the previous year, leaving a total of 61 for 1929. Of those treated, 40 had been discharged as cured, four inmates had died and 17 patients were still under treatment. Dr Albert Davis of the Port Hedland Native Hospital wrote that:

the activities for...1929 suggest...that we are slowly...reducing the incidence of venereal disease among the native population....Fifty seven patients were treated compared to 71 the previous year. Of the 57 there were 35 suffering from venereal complaints, the remaining 22 being inflicted with various illnesses….All the venereal complaints were...granuloma.

By 1930 venereal diseases among Aborigines could be described as being under control and although the method of isolation remained the same the means of treating the disease improved.

In 1920, Western Australia restructured its Aboriginal protection administration. This change created a period of austerity that unwittingly fostered an exodus of Aborigines from government reserves and old style church missions. At the same time a new style of missionary emerged in the fringe-camps in the southern areas of the State. In the north, as rumours of an impending leprosy epidemic spread, closer public interest in disease gripped rural settler society. Leprosy featured as a subject of criticism from international experts. The study of Aboriginal customs, manners and social organisation was beginning to occupy the mind of government politicians and administrators, but public opinion would be a new influence on the administration of the health of Aborigines, a subject I now turn to in Chapter six.

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