Director-General
You will recall your direction that I prepare for the Minister, before his visit to the Territory, a submission on the health problems created by the Northern Territory native and make recommendations in respect of these.
This submission has now been prepared and copy is attached for the Minister’s information.
CE Cook
(Note inserted by the Director-General)
Forwarded to the Minister with a note noting the views expressed in this paper are those of Dr Cook and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of myself.
(signed) AJM
The Minister:
- During 1950 following correspondence between the Prime Minister and the Premiers of Queensland and Western Australia, a medical officer of the Department undertook a survey of health and social problems created in Northern Australia by the sparsity of white settlement and the maladjustment of the native component of the population.
- Dr. Cook, who made the survey, has reported as follows-
(i) White residents of the more remote localities of this region suffer considerable disadvantages in squalid housing, inadequate and unsafe water supply, restricted diet, poor sanitation and exposure to the risk of certain tropical disease.
Falling incomes and rising costs of transport of material and labour, both of which must be imported, make replacement, repair and new construction difficult or impossible in most areas and in all but a few favoured localities, homes are sub-standard and overcrowded.
Water supplies from surface sources are unsafe and often inadequate or impermanent. Not infrequently in the months of the dry season water must be purchased from carriers who convey it long distances in tanks or drums at the risk of pollution. Costs are high – the extreme recorded being 10/- per 44 gallon drum.
(ii) Under these and other influences, the white population in some long-established settlements is decreasing. Simultaneously, the mixed blood population is increasing with relative rapidity and must be expected in the absence of some new stimulus to settlement ultimately to displace the white.
(iii) The mixed blood population has not been conditioned to self-supporting, productive enterprise. It is, for the most part, entirely dependent upon wage employment by the white men. In the predictable event of the white man’s displacement by the coloured component of the population, the successful continuance of productive enterprise in this region seems improbable. The background of their training from infancy through adult life has been once of dependence upon service to the white population.
(iv) Notwithstanding that wages are high, the standard of living of mixed blood natives is extremely low, event amongst those exempt from Native Affairs control. Typically, these people live in small ill-ventilated, one-room huts of bush timber and scrap salvaged from rubbish dumps, the floors unpaved and ablution, culinary and sanitary facilities lacking. Families of 8-10 may occupy one such hut, sleeping on the floor or three or more to a bed or sleeping bench.
(v) The mixed blood component, deriving its infections and its low standards of sanitation from the full blood ancestor, imperils the present and future health of the population of the region. It fosters the increased incidence of Hookworm, Leprosy, bowel infection and Tuberculosis in both coloured man and white and not only jeopardises successful future settlement, but the welfare of established population in adjacent parts of Australia.
(vi) Anomalously, the benevolent policies of Commonwealth and State Native Administrations seem unfortunately to be contributing to the aggravation of the problem. Natives living happily in reasonable comfort in their tribal hunting grounds are encouraged to concentrate and remain on missions and Government native settlements for the purpose of education. Here they are systematically taught new wants and indulgences without any instruction in the means to gratify them except by acceptance of a state of permanent dependence upon the settlement. The diet on these stations is uniformly inadequate, unbalanced and uncertain in quality and quantity. All are grossly insanitary and contribute largely to the progressive impairment of the native health and his habituation to a filthy environment. No effort is made to teach the native the fundamentals of community hygiene which are alien to his own experience. Housing, where it exists at all, is of the most primitive and grossly insanitary. Water for personal ablution and other sanitary purposes is not usually provided; no effort is made to teach care in the preparation and service of food or in the disposal of human wastes.
Persons of mixed blood and natives reared under these conditions, unsuited to or discontented with tribal life, or impelled to white settlement by mission created wants, tend to congregate near townships. The squalor in which they live, their disreputable and filthy appearance, the fear of disease and suspicion of vice, make them in more advanced localities unwelcome to the people of the towns around which they hover. Excluded from the built-up area, kept beyond the limits of the community water, light and sanitary services, deprived of building materials, it is impossible for them to maintain a standard of existence acceptable to the community or agreeable to themselves. So is engendered in some a consciousness of being aliens in the country of their birth and a resentment of their “treatment” by the white man. The smatter of education received permits them at least to read subversive propaganda made freely available to them and to heed the agitation of Communist and other agents of social disunity.
(vii) Other activities of Governments designed to avert or correct the development of economic and social problems in this region which, in fact, make some contribution to aggravating them are –
- Improved road, rail and air services provided largely by Government expenditure for the purpose of assisting the rural producer to effect ready communication with southern centres of population, have diverted much of the trade of the richer hinterland from the small ports which originally provided their gates of supply. These ports, situated in poor country and wholly dependent for survival upon transport and agency services to the interior, have so been deprived of the cream of a profitable trade. Whilst bulk loading with a low transport profit margin continues to enter at long intervals through the local port, thereby perpetuating its precarious existence, the port itself must obtain the greater part of its perishable and regular supplies from a point of supply beyond its own hinterland. This might be a matter of small moment but for the fact that its environs are unproductive and poor and it cannot economically meet the charges which the hinterland can successfully sustain.
- Because the hinterland has been provided with internal transport from the south, roads connecting it with the ports are neglected, costs of local transport rise, loads become fewer and the district enters a vicious cycle of reduced business and increased costs.
- Lavish Government expenditure upon special enterprises in restricted areas, concurrently with a nation-wide labour shortage has caused wages to soar to a level it is unlikely that local industry can of itself profitably sustain and attracted from elsewhere a large temporary population. Any recession in this artificial local prosperity must be expected to be followed by mass emigration of white labour and a further deterioration in the living standards of the coloured population bound to the area.
- Disbursements by Commonwealth and States in native affairs administration appear to be achieving little more than the segregation, pauperisation and degradation of the native population.
- Child endowment payments to missions intended to enable them to improve the diet and general care of native children are being expended largely in improving diet by the issue of special foods – dried milk, vitamin extracts and the like. By removing an urgent stimulus to effort, these payments have unfortunately led to discontinuance of attempts at local production of the diet equivalents of these special foods so that no supply is available to the individual whose entitlement has ceased.
3. The difficulties confronting the Department of Health in excluding quarantinable disease from Northern Australia have been immeasurably increased by the deterioration of health services in adjacent parts of South East Asia and by the rapid development of air transport.
4. Under the poor sanitary standards existing in the North, the control of quarantinable or other communicable disease once introduced to the area would be extremely difficult, whilst the elaborate system of air transport would render rapid dissemination to the more populated South an imminent probability.
5. Furthermore, the social and economic trends in the North, as revealed by the survey, promise and early and grave deterioration even in the poor conditions at present existing.
6. This department, having the responsibility for excluding quarantinable disease from Australia and for controlling tropical and other communicable diseases in the Northern Territory, is vitally concerned with the economic and social influences which create conditions favourable to the endemicity of disease or which frustrate practicable measures of prophylaxis.
7. It is felt that formulation of an enlightened policy for the improvement of living conditions in North Australia is a matter of the first importance nationality. It is also felt that the unco-ordinated planning for this area by the several State and Commonwealth instrumentalities with responsibilities in the area offer prospect only of further deterioration in an already grave situation.
8. It is recommended that the diverse aspects of the problem of the North should be studied in detail at the highest level for the purpose of evolving an overall policy of development and administration compatible with and adjusted to the many unusual sociological and economic features of the region. To this policy all the various agencies concerned should direct their activities in concert and with constant mutual consultation.