The hopes contained in the policy of ‘protection’ had almost faded by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, and continuing patterns of infection marked the decade. The pandemic of Spanish Influenza is thought to have been spread by soldiers returning from the European theatre of war in this period. It lasted from early 1918 to late in 1919, killing more than 20 million people worldwide. In Australia some 12,000 people died from influenza. Of these 1,030 were Queenslanders of whom 315 were known to be Aborigines, that is about 30 per cent of the Queensland death toll. Nevertheless, the greater contact between indigenous peoples and white, Asian and Pacific Island peoples brought new health challenges such as the introduction of wider range of respiratory and parasitic infections during the period from 1910 to 1920.
The belief that reserves could segregate Aborigines from white, Asian and Pacific Islander influences was not working as intended. Protection had been introduced to arrest the effects of opium supplied to Aborigines by Asian mine workers. Settlers and visitors to Australia harboured some infections which spread quickly among indigenous groups. Similarly, starvation forced people onto depots and others into prostitution as a way of earning cash. To cope with police action against the numbers of prostitutes being removed from country towns by hospital workers who were forced to send patients to government and mission depots. Finally, for people who were starving, the government created three new ration depots as a way of coping with the numbers of Aborigines moved.
The opening of these institutions was due to the initial efforts of the protectors in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. In the second decade, however, it was due to the poor condition of Aborigines as a result of disease and sickness. Archibald Meston’s enthusiasm in documenting the Aborigines’ physical, social, cultural and economic position said something about everyone’s concerns for what was happening to indigenous people in the face of the expansion of white settlement. In addition, Walter Roth created a vigorous administration which attempted to arrest the depressed morale under which indigenous people struggled. Aboriginal population growth continued and exacerbated poor health conditions.
Once the processes of protection began operating more effectively, they facilitated the growth of populations of people of both full and mixed Aboriginal descent. The former groups grew very slowly due to the demographic problems arising during the nineteenth century. The latter grew more quickly and as governments brought them together on reservations and incorporated them into the State’s health and relief programs they thrived demographically under the protection policies. As in Western Australia, some observers had difficulty understanding whether the Aboriginal population was increasing or disappearing. There was continual confusion between enumerated and estimated Aboriginal populations in Queensland. Adding to the confusion, changing definitions and interpretations of Aboriginal identity clouded understandings of who persons of full-, half-caste and other mixed-descent were.
The enumerated total of Aborigines of full-descent increased from 6,670 in 1901 to 8,687 in the 1911 census. At the same time the people of mixed descent increased from 951 persons to 2,508. It is almost certain that cohabitation between full-blood males and females with both half-castes took place. Similarly, miscegenation occurred between Aboriginal females and various white, Asian and Pacific Island male populations. This sexual contact resulted in an increase in the numbers of ‘half-caste’ children. Moreover the rising number of children taken from camps to institutions came from this population increase. It is impossible to explain the dynamics of the full-blood Aboriginal population because of the paucity of recorded information, as I argued earlier, but it is possible to say that after the previous imbalance in favour of males, from 1901 a change occurred and the balance was restored somewhat. It was becoming obvious in the early part of this period, that the survival of Aboriginal females of younger ages was improving because in these younger age groups there were now only marginally more males than females. Aborigines were apparently cohabiting more with each other than with peoples of other races. This meant that endemic venereal disease was largely confined to the Aboriginal social groupings, though transfer of infections continued among Asians and Kanakas.
Venereal disease appeared to be one cause of death which could be handled by keeping white people away from Aborigines. The removal of Aboriginal female prostitutes from service centres where whites settlers, Asians fishermen and Kanak cane plantation labour congregated became a major issue in some locations. One explanation for the spread of venereal disease could be attributed to the health authorities themselves because they sent Aborigines to depots and disease camps where they infected other Aborigines or members of the public with whom they had sexual intercourse. In addition hospitals refused to treat venereal diseases for social status reasons, a choice adopted to avoid offending other patient’s sensibilities. Furthermore, health workers experienced difficulty in determining what particular ‘wasting disease’ contracted by the Aboriginal patient needing medical attention. Few establishments existed at this time were either leprosy or tuberculosis and venereal infections could be managed properly. And while some island in the Torres Strait Islands were converted into leprosariums, the Pacific Islanders and Asians seamen made up the majority of inmates. If Aborigines suffered from these infections they went back to their bush living places and tended to infect other family members. At the same time, knowledge of Aboriginal health was about to improved because in 1910, the Office of the Chief Protector of Aborigines put into operation a register of Aboriginal deaths by disease and by sex.
In 1907, the first death and disease register was established in accordance with section 2 clauses (xii) to (xv) of the regulations of The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897. These regulations instituted the recording of Aboriginal deaths. Protectors from all around Queensland now sent information to a central register located in the Chief Protector’s Office in Brisbane. Thus, when Aborigines died from infectious diseases the particulars were entered into the register. Richard B. Howard was still the Chief Protector of Aborigines when this occurred. He travelled extensively throughout the areas in 1910 to all locations where the government and churches operated relief depots and ration stations informing them of the new changes. The visits made to the north ‘showed that the last year was a fairly healthy one for Aboriginals.’ For the first time since the protector’s office began operating he was able to give some indication of the incidence of chronic diseases among Aborigines and the number of deaths from those diseases. He could do so because in 1910 the Queensland government began recording the number and cause of Aboriginal deaths.
Howard’s report highlighted the venereal disease question which moved Aboriginal; people south. In 1910, six female Aborigines went to the Brisbane General Hospital from Barambah near Ipswich. Dr Junk of Wondai, who now visited Barambah once a month, reported to the Chief Protector that two of the women came back to Barambah cured of venereal infection, while four had been pronounced incurable. In addition, 27 people had died at Barambah during 1910. This was from a State total of 61 deaths from disease. Two of the 27 deaths were caused by the effects of venereal disease. In the whole of Queensland only three other deaths were attributed to venereal disease, though in other parts of the State syphilis was commonly observed and of those identified many suffered from external sores or ulcerated limbs.
Venereal diseases were not a notifiable disease under the Infectious Diseases Act of 1892. In 1911 the Queensland Parliament amended The Health Act 1900—1911, Sections 124 to 129 of which now included powers to remove and detain in hospital people suffering infectious diseases. The sections were primarily designed to deal with people who had no proper accommodation. There is no reason to believe that the legislation was designed to imprison Aborigines, but it empowered police to detain and remove Aboriginal women to hospital for treatment. Once police had removed prostitutes, other Aborigines could be removed to nearby camps or missions and relief depots. Thus the legislative powers for removal already conferred by the 1897 protection legislation were now reinforced by the health legislation.
In Queensland venereal disease was a general health problem and ot on an exclusive Aboriginal health question. In a few Aboriginal groups, particularly in the north, there was no trace of the infection, but for southern women having or wanting children, great problems arose. A number of northern missionaries reported to the Chief Protector that
the health of the mission inmates has been satisfactory, and a great contrast is observable between those who have gone through the mission routine and those who were not so fortunate. The former are healthier and comparatively free from disease, and the women are in consequence more prolific. Six births and...[eight] deaths took place on and near the station during the year. Most of the deaths were the result of tubercular and venereal diseases, and the latter disease is still very prevalent among old blacks.
Polygyny was practised mainly by the older generations and, as implied above, Christianity had a great impact on the practice of mission residents who abandoned the practice of having multiple wives and sexual partners.
Interpreting what health authorities, legislators and health workers meant when they spoke about venereal disease is as much a problem in Queensland as it was in Western Australia. Sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis could be mistaken for other diseases which caused open wounds and pussy lesions. Because these issues were unresolved, the Aboriginal population’s capacity to sustain an infectious pool and to develop immunity to either viral or bacterial infections remains a matter of some uncertainly.
In 1912, the Health Commissioner of Queensland hoped that venereal disease could be eradicated by Parliamentary action and that ‘the difficulty will, it is hoped, be overcome when Executive authority is obtained for the gazetting of the new Venereal Diseases Regulations.’ Syphilis, he pointed out, could be treated if it were identified quickly enough, otherwise treating the long term effects was expensive. Moreover, if left untreated, the cost to society was greater because lunacy might be the long term effect. The issue in Queensland was becoming a matter for concern because, in the metropolitan area alone, 1,477 people between the ages of one and 60 years were infected in just one year.
Among Aborigines the disease had also become a major problem. The results were birth defects, infertility and long term wasting of male and female genitalia. As soon as police suspected Aboriginal women were harbouring sexually transmissible diseases they sent them south to ration depots or under escort to sanatoria in Brisbane. At Taroom the local general practitioner treated 450 Aborigines and of these six presented with venereal disease. Similarly, doctors at Charleville, Hughenden, Normanton, Herberton, Innisfail, Port Douglas and Turn-off Lagoon all reported cases of venereal disease they had treated. Of those living at Barambah two deaths were due to venereal infection, and the medical practitioner there treated three other cases of the disease. This relief depot became a holding place for sick Aborigines from all over the State and held a high number of people sent there only to die. In 1910, the Protectors reported that of 61 Aboriginal deaths throughout the State, 27 took place at Barambah.
In the north of Queensland wasting infections were reported during this period. On Thursday Island, for instance, – a centre to which diseased mainland Aborigines, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Pacific Islander mariners were sent – it was reported that a high incidence of venereal disease existed among these groups. Similarly, on the mainland too, various body wasting conditions existed where open sores and peoples’ body parts were highly disfigured. Some of these infections were possibly tuberculosis, leprosy or yaws, and these infections were responsible for the majority of Aboriginal deaths reported from coastal regions in 1914. Venereal diseases accounted for 19 of the deaths. As the Chief Protector reported, ‘venereal disease, principally gonorrhoea and syphilis, [prevailed] in some districts, particularly the "gulf country", the coastal districts and the far west.’ Due to the high levels of illness caused by this disease, the government considered opening a lock-up hospital on Fitzroy Island near Cairns, but the First World War forced a postponement. In 1919 venereal disease was still a concern for protectors and missionaries in some locations. The Chief Protector’s official reports observe that
venereal disease was reported in the Gulf country, the Peninsula, the Torres Strait, and far west; and in the last area phthisis was also noticeable....In some communities upwards of 9 people received long term treatment for the effects of venereal diseases, and in some cases low births in some Cape York settlements remained a concern.
New government reserves had been created to cater for people being moved from the fringes of cattle property homesteads, rural towns and hospital grounds and shifted to reserves controlled by the Chief Protector’s office. Bleakley, the newly appointed Chief Protector, reported that between 1914 and 1917, 434 Aborigines had been moved to Hull River, and 256 arrived there in the following year. In March 1918 the new settlement was destroyed by a cyclone and work had already begun on new buildings as new Aboriginal residents were moved there from Greater Palm Island. Social problems generated by mining development on the Hull River, together with the problem of Chinese providing opium to Aboriginal men and women as payment for sexual favours, led to the mass migration of Aborigines to the mining camps. In 1919 Bleakley indicated that the existence of venereal infections, endemic in camp people, was a major problem. Many Aborigines worked not for money but for alcohol and opium, and whole families – young men, women and children included – worked for miners in exchange for ‘grog’ and opium and from this came epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases which plagued them thereafter. A common theme of government reports during this period was the prevalence of venereal infections, particularly in the Torres Strait and the far west; and in the last area ‘phthisis’ was also widely reported.
Venereal diseases among Aborigines in Queensland caused 116 deaths in the period from 1910 to 1919 (see Table 8.1 in Appendix 8 of this Chapter). The data reveals a steady increase in the numbers dying from venereal disease which rose from six in 1910 to 19 in 1914. No administrative system was devised to keep abreast of how many Aborigines contracted the disease during the decade, but the number of deaths does give an idea of the scale of the problem. Health authorities in general were never explicit about the full extent of sexually transmitted diseases during this period. Earlier in the decade the Queensland parliament was unable to gain public support for including venereal disease on the list of notifiable diseases. The reason for this was that venereal disease was commonly viewed more as a moral and social problem than as a medical one. Moreover the mobility of Queensland’s mining and plantation workers made sexually transmitted diseases among them difficult to control.
Because of the vague public perceptions of what sexually transmitted disease covered, even as late as 1917 venereal disease remained only a ‘reportable’ disease (i.e., one generally agreed by doctors) rather than a notifiable disease (one covered by law) under the Queensland Health legislation. Infected Aborigines living in isolated regions were sent under police escort to either the Brisbane infectious diseases sanatoria or to the relief depots at Taroom, Barambah and Palm Island. Palm Island had by this time, become a place of detention for people contravening the protection legislation, but it also acted as a screening depot for leprosy, tuberculosis and other ‘wasting’ diseases.
Health officials in regional centres such as Cairns worried extensively about Aborigines harbouring social diseases such as hookworm and respiratory infections. Hookworm was less important as an infectious disease but assumed prominence as a State, Commonwealth and international political issue, and consequently became a factor in the administration of Aborigines. What began in the latter years of the first decade of the Twentieth Century as a cooperative international disease eradication program continued into the second decade as an international initiative for public health. The program was interrupted due to the restrictions imposed by the First World War. When the fighting had come to an end the program recommenced.
In Queensland, the endemic areas of hookworm infestation in Australia correspond to areas of heavy rainfall, mainly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, where the eggs have sufficient warmth and moisture to hatch The districts of greatest infestation were Charleville, Longreach, Hughenden Rockhampton, Ayr, Bowen, Mackay, Ingham, Innisfail and Cairns districts. These were the areas identified by the Australian Hookworm Campaign as those with the ‘Aboriginal problem’. The Campaign’s report said that there was no doubt that hookworm existed in Aboriginal groups prior to white settlement, but only in a limited way. Papuans and Malays were most likely to have introduced the infection. With white settlement ‘the "natives" have been gathered into...fixed localities, such as missionary settlements and cattle stations.’ These conditions ‘were ideal for the spread of hookworm disease. In certain areas the hookworm rate among them on first examination was 90 per cent and after 50 per cent.’ This meant that if immediate eradication of the infection and the habitat where the eggs hatched, and by treating the Aboriginal hosts with an effective treatment program then serious long term effects would follow.
The report specified that ‘the Aboriginal settlements acted as centres for the spread of hookworm disease to Europeans, and...they still present a problem.’ In 1911 researchers located hookworm in north Queensland. Dr Anton Breinl pointed out that the disease occurred in children of the Townsville, Ingham, Innisfail and Cairns areas. In the period from April 1918 to September 1919, the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation provided money and personnel to carry out surveys. The coastal area from Cooktown to Townsville was the survey region and 22,844 people were screened. Of this number 4,605 people were infected, representing a total infection rate of 21.1 per cent. The number of Aborigines examined was 992 and this group revealed an infection rate of approximately 81 per cent. The differences in the infestation rates between one area and another closely matched ‘the amount of rainfall in the several districts, and it reflected the amount of soil pollution prevailing in the various communities.’ Following these results the Hookworm Campaign developed into a national program, which is described more fully in the next chapter.
Leprosy was a more disturbing hygiene problem than digestive parasites. By 1910 the Commonwealth Quarantine Act, 1908 had been extended to cover leprosy, but only prevented infected people entering the country. Leprosy by then had already taken hold as an endemic disease in some northern areas of Australia. Amendments to the Public Health Act, 1884, made notification of leprosy mandatory, forcing health workers to report on patients suspected of harbouring leprosy. But the legislation applied only to urban areas, completely leaving the rural population without an authority to care for their interests. These conditions, therefore, failed to halt infections in isolated Aboriginal missions, camps and reserves. The Board of Health had the legislative power to compel the detention of the infected but lacked a regulatory body to control the disease over a geographical area as large as Queensland. Leprosy consequently spread easily among isolated Aboriginal groups.
Between 1895 and 1900, there were 13 new cases of leprosy among Queensland Aborigines. From available data (see Table 8.2) this number increased to 35 by 1910. Among explanations for the increase were the growing influence of protectors, the vigilance of missionaries, interest in Aboriginal labour by pastoralists and the growing proximity of Aborigines to townships. Such factors increased the likelihood that Aborigines who had leprosy would be detected and reported. In the next decade the incidence of leprosy among Aborigines became proportionally greater than among the general population. Between 1895 and 1925, the number of recorded cases of leprosy in the wider population fluctuated, peaking in 1915 at 84 cases. During the six years from 1915 to 1920 the number of Aboriginal cases fell from 84 to 56. All new cases were now coming from northern Queensland. In the southern areas of the State no new cases presented in the 15 years from 1910 to 1925, suggesting that the disease had now become a north Queensland phenomenon. Leprosy was a disfiguring disease with social consequences and not one identified as a killer disease
Respiratory diseases killed Aborigines right across the age and sex range. The first entry made in the ‘Aboriginal Disease and Death Register’ by the Chief Protector in 1910 was for an Aboriginal man from Barambah by the name of Finigan, who died from pneumonia. From 1910 to 1920 Aborigines died in Queensland from a range of diseases, including pneumonia, venereal disease, senile dementia, tuberculosis, influenza, kidney disease and a large number of other complaints which were categorised as ‘other diseases’. Throughout the period, pneumonia remained a constant problem. In 1910, 18 people died from pneumonia; after that the number declined until 1918 when it began to rise once more.
The epidemics appearing periodically in Australia affected only parts of the population, and this was true for both Aborigines and the rest of the Queensland population. Many small family groupings living on isolated northern and western pastoral and mission lands escaped the influenza epidemics altogether, and as a result may not acquire immunity against later epidemics. Those Aborigines who were born after the influenza epidemic of 1895, or who escaped infection during later outbreaks, failed to acquire immunity. The reason is that influenza strains appear every three or four years and some indigenous groups were either too young or too isolated to have been infected, and therefore developed no resistance to later strains. This could possibly explain the reports of groups of Aborigines suffering from influenza that continually appear in mostly secondary reports and in Protectors’ reports at the turn of the century, and why some were affected as they came closer to white settlement during the various epidemics between 1895 and 1918. Such reports are problematic because they either lack clarity about the event observed by outsiders at the time who fail to reveal the kinds of information required by present-day investigators to draw accurate conclusions about the causes of particular epidemics. That was not entirely the case in Queensland when records were kept during the pandemic of Spanish Influenza which spread across the world in 1918-1919.
Close to a million American soldiers reached France from June to the 4 of July (American Independence Day) 1918. But, between August and mid-September of 1918, a strain of either the Spanish Influenza, or what locals called swine fever, infected and killed 1,500 American troops even before leaving the United States for France. Then, was even larger numbers of American troops left their homeland still infected with the influenza virus, they became ill and died on route to France. The consequence was that disease infected soldiers from both sides of the conflict who met in battle. From the front it spread to the civilian population on the continent, spreading to England and Spain, killing large numbers of people in both countries. Not since the Black Death in Fourteenth Century Europe had an epidemic inflicted such catastrophe on the people of Europe. After World War I hostilities ended the epidemic travelled back to England and America then on to South Africa and New Zealand before entering Australia by October 1918. In London and Manchester the pandemic had killed 1,600 people by October 1918. By that month the disease had also reached New Zealand, spreading rapidly throughout the country.
The number of people who were already suffering respiratory diseases when the pandemic reached the Aboriginal populations in Queensland makes it difficult to assess accurately the extent of the impact of the pandemic among them. Table 8.1 indicates the number of people suffering from pneumonia, tuberculosis and non-Spanish influenza, each of which were killer diseases among Aboriginal people. In Table 8.1, the category ‘pneumonia’ was a particularly persistent killer of Aborigines, and occurred most seriously among people already located in depots and the hospital camps on town fringes close to where sick white people were being brought to hospitals.
In the period 1910-1918, Aborigines recorded as dying from diseases (see Table 8.1) numbered 357 males and 224 females: a total of 581 deaths. Those dying from pneumonia in this period totalled 129, and consisted of 79 males and 50 females. The annual number in 1918 rose to 21 males, but only six females, a trend which probably related directly to Spanish Influenza even though it is difficult to know since only deaths of those people in institution (hospitals, doctor’s clinics, and government and mission depots and reserves), and those under work contracts of employment were recorded. Deaths from influenza is similar for both males and females and in this period which never rises above 12 deaths in any one year to 1918. It then jumps to 29 males and 9 females. But, from Table 8.1, these trends follow those of the total number of deaths from respiratory infections.
Deaths from tuberculosis rose in the same way and possibly conditioned the authorities to accept abnormally high mortality, so that in 1918 when the Spanish Influenza pandemic struck, people expected that many Aborigines would die. What complicated the picture was that at that very time, 64 males and 51 females succumbed to tuberculosis, or what was diagnosed as phthisis. In 1910 only two males were diagnosed as dying from tuberculosis while no female deaths were recorded. The number of Aboriginal males deaths increased to 15 in the eight years from 1911 to 1918, while in the same period females only rose to a total of 12 deaths. These figures with the rest of those dying from other respiratory illness set the base line for an even more serious number of deaths from the Spanish Influenza pandemic when it struck.
The spread of the disease onto mainland Australia was contained for two basic reason. First, the wartime quarantine restrictions were kept in place as the disease came closer. Second, as the troop and passenger ships from Europe arrived they were quarantined immediately. Anyone who was either suspected of harbouring the infection or confirmed as a carrier of influenza was removed to the Commonwealth Quarantine Station located in each major seaport. In this way these people were not regarded as reaching Australia and this somewhat distorted both the time at which it was officially recognised as arriving in Australia and when the first case was reported on Australian soil. In Queensland the State Government amended the Infectious Disease Act 1900-1917 to include pneumonic influenza as a notifiable disease.
It appeared from the beginning that this outbreak would affect Aborigines in the same way as the white population. Influenza was not an alien disease to Aboriginal groups but this new strain was particularly virulent, especially among weak and undernourished people. On 22 October 1918, Inspector Quinn of Rockhampton reported ‘the death of a half-caste named Butcher, at Comet, from influenza’. Apparently Butcher had arrived at Rockhampton several days before his death. According to The Brisbane Courier, Butcher came from the Springsure District to attend the local races. He remained at Comet for a few days before catching the disease and dying soon after. Sergeant Quinn stressed that he attempted to send Butcher back to his relations living at Emerald, but death came too swiftly.
At the beginning of May 1919 the number of Queenslanders dying of the disease stood at 49 and by the end of May 1919 about 650 people had been hospitalised. In Queensland the hospital system proved unable to cope with newly infected people. At Charleville The Brisbane Courier reported, influenza was still spreading in the district and ‘the Parish Hall has been fitted up with many beds.’ Hotels and theatres closed, inoculations took place everywhere, bed linen appeals went inter-state, as did the Queensland Health Minister’s requests for assistance from hospital nurses. This was the general situation in early 1919; however, a more dangerous predicament was developing among Aboriginal ration depot, reserve, labouring and fringe-camp populations. When the known deaths rose sharply, pleas for help were soon going out from government depots and church missions. Under normal winter conditions Aboriginal groups living in large depots and missions suffered bouts of respiratory infections. It was expected that Spanish Flu would impact heavily upon them.
The general level of Aboriginal deaths from influenza, however, never rose above 11 per year until 1916. In 1918 the number of Aborigines dying from pneumonic influenza throughout Queensland reached 38 (29 males and nine females). The excess of male over female deaths is difficult to explain but it should be remembered that Aboriginal male workers in the cattle industry were closer to normal white society than their families. As a result, as they fell ill with the flu their employers immediately despatched them either to public hospitals or directly to relief depots near the coast. As the depot and mission populations increased, the number of death rose sharply in early 1919 to 277 (174 males and 103 females). These numbers followed both the Australian and the world-wide trend of deaths from the Spanish flu. The total fell progressively from 28 deaths in 1920-22 to none in 1923. The true numbers of deaths from the pandemic were most probably higher than reported as some of the early deaths were entered in the death registers as ‘pneumonia’, or as ‘bronchitis related infections’. At the beginning of the pandemic its origins and seriousness mystified everyone.
There has been an extensive debate in the medical literature about the incidence of influenzal infection and the immune responses among Aborigines. The historical and anthropological literature in general accepts that the effects of influenza, including the pandemic of 1918-19, were catastrophic. The truth is that we simply do not know. Only the State of Queensland had a death and disease register from which accurate assessments can be made. In other States some confusion exists about the extent to which Spanish flu affected the Aboriginal populations. Most groups of Aborigines in rural areas and in bush camps had small populations and were isolated at long distances from white settlements. Although few reports exist of its actual effect it is probable that their small numbers made it impossible for them to develop any immunity to new strains of disease. It is also possible that some groups missed contracting the infections altogether due to their isolation. For most Aborigines who were infected with the virus, the probability of infection was heightened by their centralisation on missions, depots and confined living areas which served as reservoirs for infection. The next influenza attack after their arrival at the relief depots ensured that inmates became ready-made targets for infection. Peoples’ generally low nutritional level predisposed them towards infection from flu, as did their polluted and over-populated dwelling places.
At the time the flu broke reports were flooding in from around the State about respiratory infections. At the Mitchell River mission on Cape York had been reported as suffering from forms of tuberculosis. Cloncurry people were said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia combined with influenza. Diseased Aborigines were transported from all over Queensland to relief depots, complicating the general picture of respiratory infections. As Figure 8.1 shows an epidemic of pneumonia was already in progress when the Spanish flu arrived, and Aborigines came to relief depots to be treated for one respiratory infection or another. Some went directly to hospitals at Rockhampton, Mitchell and Burketown suffering from complications of tuberculosis. Some sick people from the pastoral properties were delivered directly to hospital by white property owners. But once there hospital staff moved them to hospital disease camps or directly to government relief depots at Duaringa, Barambah and Taroom.
A general gathering of people with serious respiratory disease already existed at the depots prior to the onset of the influenza pandemic (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). The number of Aborigines dying from combined respiratory infections had increased at least twelve months in advance of the pandemic reaching Australia. This phenomenon is clearly shown in Figures 8.1 and 8.2. For some time after the pandemic reached Australia it was contained in quarantine stations, principally those at Fremantle, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and its main impact was delayed until 1919. It became obvious in the south in February 1919, and peaked in August. The quarantine barriers had proved effective, at least temporarily, in arresting its spread, including to Aboriginal groups in Queensland.
The pandemic came first to the main seaports of middle to southern Queensland and then moved inland to urban and rural regions. It affected white people initially then began affecting Aborigines on top of what has already been described as an epidemic of pneumonia. As the numbers of Aborigines with influenza increased they were taken to disease compounds on the government depots which consisted of a fenced areas resembling huge wire cages, built with a ten foot-high cyclone fence and topped by barbed wire to prevent entry and escape. The huts at the relief depots were made of weather-boards with fire-places built outside for cooking meals. The compounds which had been constructed a decade earlier as punishment compounds for people who became infected with venereal disease were now being used to keep
Figure 8.1: Aboriginal deaths from respiratory diseases in Qeensland, 1910-1923
Source: Compiled from Table 8.1.
Figure 8.2: Aboriginal deaths from influenza in relation to total deaths from respiratory diseases in Queensland, 1910-1923
Source: Compiled from Table 8.1.
people suffering from Spanish Influenza away from the other inmates of the relief depots.
Aborigines who became ill often were influenced by beliefs about death, and as a result when large numbers of inmates died many other inmates reacted by escaping the compounds for the refuge in the bush. On 8 June 1919, The Morning Bulletin of Rockhampton reported that Dr Junk, a general practitioner from the town of Murgon, had attended sick Aborigines at Barambah at the request of the Home Department. He said there was a
‘state of panic at the dire effects of the epidemic which influenza caused among the natives at the settlement.’ Dr Junk also reported that 596 natives had became infected with influenza, of whom 69 Aborigines (24 were males and 45 were female) had died. Most of the dead were aged, infirm or diseased. Dr Junk said he found old people running about in a panic, and as a result some of the weakest of the older people died immediately. He noted that of those who had died later,many died of simple
He went on to report that two waves of infection had occurred. During the first wave about ten of the white staff suffered infections while caring for sick inmates. During the second wave a similar number of white and Aboriginal staff came down with the disease. He observed that a
‘notable feature of this disease was that there had been no deaths among the children.’ It is not possible to say why they were not infected by the
Figure 8.3: Aboriginal deaths from influenza per month and by sex in Queensland during the period January 1917 to December 1919
Source: Compiled from QSA, Series No. A/58973-58974,
‘Death Register — Where, Cause,1910-1936’.
adults. Nevertheless, neither Junk nor the Chief Protector
’s records were able to explain how long the children had been at the depot. Possibly, as at the Palm Island reserve, they escaped the impact of the pandemic because of the distance and isolation from the mainland.The pandemic caused general chaos. Such large numbers of deaths occurred with each outbreak that disposal of the dead was a major problem. Burials took place immediately. The worst periods were the months from March to October 1919 (see Figure 8.3). At Taroom, for instance, numbers were high from April, and the numbers rose until 10 people died in the last few days of June. Their burial took place in one session on 29 June. Similarly, on October 10, 1919, approximately 14 deaths occurred and the burials took place in one session at Mareeba, near Cairns. The dead among Aborigines of full descent at the relief depot went directly to the depot graveyards. At Yarrabah and Purga missions, and the various camps around Cairns, people of full descent went to government relief depots and mission graveyards, while people of mixed descent, including those exempted from the Protection Act 1897, went to public cemeteries. These high numbers of deaths of Aborigines from influenza were sustained until the end of November 1919.
By late 1919 the influenza pandemic was receding among the general population but in the Aboriginal relief camps the disease appears to have lingered into 1920. Although other respiratory diseases show no major outbreak, this could have been a return to the normally high incidence of pneumonia. It is also possible that the larger pastoral groups and hospital fringe-camps harboured and sustained the infection into the following year. The causes of the continuation of the infection in Aboriginal populations related both to their physiological and social circumstances. These two factors appeared to have acted independently of each other but, as this thesis shows, they also work together. Crosby argued that indigenous populations (similar to those in Queensland under observation in this period) were populations at risk because they had not
‘had contact within the lifetime of their oldest members with the disease that...[attacked] them and...[were] therefore immunologically... defenceless.’ This is the ‘virgin soils’ theory, and the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 supports Crosby’s hypothesis.The number of Aborigines who perished from the disease (see Table 8.1 and Figure 8.2) remained high for almost a year after it subsided in the white community. Chief Protector Bleakley mentioned in his 1920-21 reports that Aboriginal mortality remained throughout the two years. Depot and fringe-camp populations in Queensland lived in mostly small isolated groups in the bush. They also lived some distance from urban populations capable of harbouring the infection and becoming immune to that particular strain of the disease. If Aborigines were at a disadvantage by being unable to deal immunologically with new infectious diseases, they were not the first to fail in this way. The difference between the dwelling sites where Aborigines were born and lived for most of their lives, and the new environment was that bush people now lived under totally new hygiene and social conditions. Large numbers of people were gathered in a common or mass living area. These kinds of living conditions were unknown in bush camps or on pastoral properties. When sick Aborigines migrated or travelled away from their homes to seek treatment, their exposure to new pathogens and new social environments led directly to poor health. Their physiological system was unable to cope with the infections confronting them. Under the new circumstances in which the sick found themselves – one in which they faced a range of exotic viral and bacterial infections – good health was almost impossible to maintain.
In contrast to the quarantine and isolation measures implemented everywhere else, the pandemic moved to Queensland and sick indigenous people were brought to government and mission depots. Once there the pandemic was already established, and they soon became infected, the disease killing mostly the very young babies and the weakened aged. As it did it caused cultural chaos which in turn affected a whole range of Aboriginal peoples
’ social relationships. These relations were affected by the pandemic because it led to such rapid social change. It eroded traditional Aboriginal social relations by forcing people to travel long distances for treatment in unfamiliar missions, reserves, relief depots and hospital camps. Older people were commonly despatched to the depots from pastoral properties and from fringe-camps near coastal towns, which could help explain why so many older Aborigines became infected and perished soon after they arrived at their new place of residence. Many of those transported to the large population centres simply lacked the immunity and the strength to fight potent infections such as the Spanish Influenza. At the same time sick and dying Aborigines who were brought to depots were unable to understand the nature of the danger with which they were confronted. As such these sick bush people were unable to adapt quickly to a physiological threat from outside their normal customs, manners and habits. These social relations had been entirely disrupted as the disease uprooted them from bush dwelling places in which they were autonomous and shifted them to a new environment in which they became totally dominated.In the period 1910 to 1920, the increasing incidence of venereal disease, tuberculosis, leprosy, hookworm infection and the Spanish Influenza pandemic highlighted the need for a change in health delivery services to Aboriginal groups. Authorities searched for answers to such phenomena as more Aborigines were moved to government reserves from cattle properties for care and protection. Government officials, politicians, church leaders and even the State Governor worried over finding explanations and solutions for the Aboriginal predicament. Reform to the health system servicing Aboriginal groups was about to be introduced and, although some of the earlier preoccupations persisted, this is a topic I pursue in the Chapter nine.
APPENDIX 8.
Source: Queensland State Archives, Series No. A/58973 – 58974,
'Death Registers — Where, Cause, 1910-1936’.p.339 Tables 8.1 & 8.2