This book is about the OTHER Cook in Australian history — Dr Cecil (not Captain James), pioneer of Aboriginal emancipation, guardian of the nation’s health”
The true story of Dr Cecil Cook, the full authorised monograph of his working life, has not been told before. From the early 1930s Cook had a vision for Australia’s Aboriginal people being healthy, eventually all living as citizens in mainstream Australia. For 30 years he encouraged Governments and people to make it happen, in careful stages.
Cook was a true enigma, seeming to be one thing but being another. He was the Chief Protector of Aborigines who argued in 1933 for an end to protection – he called it a policy of euthanasia. Then when exemptions came in 1953 he argued for the Government’s retention of control, to protect the health of people who could not or would not care for themselves. And he flipped again when citizenship became certain, insisting Indigenous Australians [are] ‘entitled to expect and receive in full the privileges of citizenship in their entirety’. But there was a ‘but’- it depended on ‘the ordered behaviour of the individual himself’.
Nowadays it’s fashionable to excoriate Dr Cook as one of the architects of the so-called Stolen Generations policy. For instance, Prime Minister Rudd referred to him by his position in the Northern Territory, in his Apology Speech, as the Commonwealth’s zealous public servant. That was OK, but Hitler’s Holocaust was organised and carried out by zealous public servants. Blaming Cook for the present-day plight of Aborigines, however, is to misread history because Cook was, above all else, a protector – a role he took very seriously and fulfilled effectively within the constraints of his era.
Cook saw as a Commonwealth responsibility the education of Aboriginal people so they could take care of their own health Cook wrote that the Commonwealth must pay for this education, no matter how much it cost, no matter how long it took.
For many, indeed most indigenous Australians, this health future is a reality. For too many however, good health in all its forms is not a reality. It seems as though Cook’s responsibility model has not worked for them. But the Commonwealth’s health literacy and financial literary programs seem to be something like he had in mind.
A Vision for Australia’s Health: Dr Cecil Cook at Work tells the story of his being the Chief Protector of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory, and the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Health Officer, from 1927 to 1939. But this is only one part of Cook’s career; other parts were just as visionary, under the umbrella of public health. He had six other major interests that held his attention, each for 12 years or more. Read about it in: A Vision for Australia’s Health: Dr Cecil Cook at Work
Dr Ian Howie-Willis is an independent professional historian. The author of 20 books, he is the Historical Adviser to St John Ambulance Australia. His previous book was An Unending War: The Australian Army’s struggle against malaria, 1885–2015 (Big Sky Publishing, Sydney, 2016). He grew up in Melbourne and lived for ten years in Papua New Guinea and England before settling in Canberra in 1975. He completed his university training with a PhD in history from the Australian National University. He has been married to Margaret Willis (née Vale), a retired school principal, for 58 years. They have three married children and seven grandchildren.