by Harry Giese
March-May 1981
Series No. NTRS 226, TS 179
This record of interviews is based on the verbatim transcript, amended by Dr Cook’s corrections, deletions and supplements. Dr Cook found the OH process difficult and
he was not pleased with the initial result. While he made copious notes on the original transcript, he did not return them to NT Archives. Robin and Barry interpreted Dr Cook’s hand-written notes, listened to the tapes against the text and corrected transcription where necessary filling some gaps in the process.
The two interviews have been combined in this document as if it was one continuous session, so the information is more readable. Robin and Barry completed the revision in 2009 and returned the transcript to NTAS with the original tapes in 2019.
The Chief Protector’s Role
INT: Mick, could we begin with you explaining something about your role in the Northern Territory from 1927 to 1939?
C.E.C.: South Australia did very little towards organising any system of protection for Aborigines apart from the first appointments on Finniss’s staff which made Goldsmith Surgeon/Protector and gave him a number of rather hypothetical duties like seeing that contracts with Aborigines were scrupulously honoured, that women weren’t exploited for prostitution and debauched with alcohol and so on. There were no legal provisions for these ‘duties’, which were instructions only. Nothing more tangible was done until 1910, when a special Act was passed. First of all, the Commonwealth appointed a Dr. Basedow, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Burston. These were to be the Aboriginal Department with Basedow as Chief Protector. Basedow resigned after three months and Baldwin Spencer who replaced him, decided he didn’t want this medical set-up at all.
The Administrator, Gilruth, appointed Holmes as Chief Health Officer for Darwin. Burston left and there was no medical service within the Aboriginal Department. So, though they had always had the surgeon to be the Protector in South Australian days they had no medical staff at all in the Aboriginal Departments after Baldwin Spencer took over for the Commonwealth.
INT.: Was Baldwin Spencer a medico as well as an anthropologist?
C.E.C.: No, I don’t think so.
INT.: My understanding is that he was an anthropologist, not a medico.
C.E.C. Yes.
INT.: And this condition continued then, up to the end of the War?
C.E.C.: No. Spencer resigned at the end of a year and was succeeded by Stretton who set himself to be guided by Spencer’s policy. Stretton’s appointment was for a year at the end of which term the duties under the Aboriginals Ordinance were undertaken by Spencer.
But while Stretton had it, he made two decisions: One of them was counter to Baldwin Spencer and that was that the half castes -you see, he always had it in the back of his mind – been an advocate – that the half caste kids should be brought in and schooled. He also decided that he wouldn’t have camps of Aborigines all around higgledy-piggledy on the beach around Darwin. Baldwin Spencer had advocated the proclamation of reserves in various places all through the Territory.
INT.: And was this the first time that this proposition had been strongly advanced for the reserves?
C.E.C.: No, because the South Australian government told the original Goldsmith the Protector who went up with Finniss that he was to define reserves on to which Aborigines …….
INT.: these to be located in their tribal areas as far as possible?
C.E.C.: Yes. Nothing was done about that until Dr. Woods tried to make some reserves in the time of Parsons, a later South Australian Government Resident. But when Baldwin Spencer was looking through it he said the reserves were no good.
INT.: This was before Gsell was moved to get the Bathurst Island, Melville Island area declared as a reserve? That was 1907 I think.
C.E.C.: 1907. Wood was Protector from when to when.
INT.: You saw this as part of a policy which the South Australian government had developed?
C.E.C.: It was a South Australian idea to have reserves, but nothing effective was done about them. Wood made an effort, then the Commonwealth came in and Baldwin Spencer defined some for the Commonwealth. Until that time, nothing much was done in that way.
INT.: But this was part of Baldwin Spencer’s policy of dissuading Aborigines from congregating around the centres of white population as well as giving than a home in their own country.
C.E.C.: Yes. Well, the reserve for Darwin was chosen at Mylly Point which, in those days, apart from the fact that a few government servants were out there, it was all largely vacant land.
INT.: And that was one of the first reserves at Mylly Point?
C.E.C.: Yes. That was Kahlin Compound.
INT.: That was the Kahlin Compound down in the bay ….
C.E.C.: In the gully. The idea was that islanders could come in their canoes and beach there, you see.
INT.: Well, that policy continued then through to the end of the 1914-1918 War and then the police picking it up?
C.E.C.: Well not until the end of the War, because we moved them out to Bagot, in 1938.
INT.: But I’m thinking about until the end of the First World War – Stretton’s policy continued.
C.E.C.: Oh, yes.
Dr Cook in the Territory
INT.: When did you first go to the Territory?
C.E.C.: 1925 but not as a Chief Protector I only went up on a survey. 1927 was when I went up there as Chief Protector.
INT.: Well, let’s get that period. You went there in ‘25 ….
C.E.C.: To do a medical survey.
INT.: Under whose auspices did you do that survey?
C.E.C.: London School of Tropical Medicine.
INT.: And how did you become associated with the London School of Tropical Medicine?
C.E.C.: Because I had a Wandsworth Research Fellowship from London School and I asked Cumpston, who was the Commonwealth Director General at the time how I could use this on Australia because if I couldn’t use it in Australia I intended to surrender it. He told me that the West Australian government wanted a medical survey of Aborigines up the north-west coast and he thought this was largely a matter of leprosy; he thought that I should endeavour to incorporate that in a study which would continue the work of Ashburton Thompson the N.S.W. Commissioner of Public Health, who had written a history of leprosy in Australia from the earliest times to about 1912. He thought that it would be a good thing to continue that work and that I could incorporate the West Australian survey in it. That was to be done in 1924. In 1925, I said I’d better do the Northern Territory; I’ve been around Queensland. They said, yes, do the Northern Territory. I went to the Northern Territory in early June 1925. I made two trips – I don’t know what the dates were – but I made two trips. The first one was made in a Model 91 Overland motorcar and the second one I made in a utility.
INT.: Did you get into the coastal areas of Arnhem Land?
C.E.C. Yes, I could get to Arnhem Land. I went down the Roper and I was taken around the coast to Goulburn Island, Milingimbi, Elcho.
INT.: By the Mission boat?
C.E.C.: No, no mission boat. I don’t know whether anybody was particularly interested. There was no Department of Aboriginal Affairs, there was just the Chief of Police. As far as the medical part was concerned, the Chief Medical Officer was a General Practitioner Dr Leighton-Jones who wasn’t the slightest degree interested in me because I was an interloper coming up to do what he might be expected to be the authority on, you know? No need for me to come at all. In fact, he put in his report for 1926 that it was a stupid idea sending visitors up to do this sort of thing when it would be much better for him to do it, adding that he had already found two lepers and according to him, all the time I was there, I didn’t identify any.
INT.: But it was ever that way wasn’t it? The local bloke reckoned that he knew everything. But we all followed that tradition. Did you get out into the Port Keats area as well or did you do mainly the survey on the ground?
C.E.C.: Port Keats wasn’t there.
INT.: No, not as a mission.
C.E.C.: I didn’t get out there. Timber Creek and Daly River on either side of Port Keats were visited from the landward side. What we did was that Melbourne or Darwin arranged with H.C. Sleigh and they had the Kinchela, a little, boat that used to trade along the North Coast, New South Wales. The intention was have H.C. Sleigh to tender for a contract to provide a service to serve outposts along the NT Coast like Roper River, Borroloola and Timber Creek. I was told the arrangement was that they would take me around the coast letting me survey all points of landing. When I got on this boat, the first call was to be Oenpelli and we had to go up the Alligator River. But we had a fellow on board who was one of them money men, a bloke called Archibald – I don’t know whether he was a very important member of the Sleigh establishment (or what the hell he was but I know he was a bloody nuisance on this boat) but it seems he was to make this a pilot trip for the proposed tender. First of all, he said, well, we can’t go all the way up to Oenpelli up this river, we haven’t got time with the tides and everything, you’ll have to go up in a canoe. And they got an Aboriginal in a canoe to paddle me up the East Alligator River. Before we’d gone far, the tide turned, and the poor blackfella couldn’t cope with it, so he beached it while he had a spell. I remember this very clearly because he beached it right alongside a big crocodile or alligator, whatever they are, which dismayed me rather. But he was quite reassuring. So we waited until the tide had slackened and then he decided that he had to go back because Archibald had told him what time he had to be back with the canoe and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to cope with the up tide if he waited too long. So we didn’t get to Oenpelli. Leaving the East Alligator River, we went to Goulburn Island, Millingimbi and Elcho Island We went to Millingimbi and had no trouble there. There was no Mission at Elcho at the time but a party was looking for oil. Kinchela couldn’t take me up to Roper Mission I went there for (needs revision)
INT.: What were your general conclusions about the incidence of leprosy among the Aboriginal community at that time, Mick?
C.E.C.: Well, it was there, there were pockets of it. It was only starting, you know. And the impression that you got at that stage was that there were no kids so it was something new that you could possibly control. The next one we had to go out to was Groote Eylandt which was a story in itself as far as leprosy was concerned because they’d taken some lepers across there from Roper River. You’ve got it on your —
INT.: Yes, I meant to ask you that question about the lepers on Groote Eylandt.
C.E.C.: But when we got to Groote Eylandt he said, you want to go on to Groote Eylandt? I said, yes, that’s part of the contract. He said, no contract, no contract. He said, if you want to go on to Groote Eylandt you’ll have to pay extra money because we haven’t got time because we have to get to Borroloola. I said, now listen, I’ve got no money, none whatever. This is an arrangement that you made either with the administration in Darwin or with Melbourne. He said, you can’t pay me fifty pounds, whatever it was. No, I said, I have no money, I’ll be hard put to it to get there. So, no Groote Eylandt.
INT.: You were paying the money out of your research money?
C.E.C.: No I wasn’t. Transport was the responsibility of the Department of Territories under arrangement with the Department of Health.
INT.: I see, that was the arrangement.
C.E.C.: Yes, the arrangement was the salary was being paid from London. Expenses were the responsibility of the State or Territory concerned. No salary, that comes from London. In the Territory I had my own car and bore the cost of petrol but in Western Australia the government provided the car and the horses, and all the rest of it, you see.
INT.: And how long did the survey take finally, Mick, before you …
C.E.C.: Well, over the two periods, I had to go back because this bloke had messed me up so much, you see. Over the two periods it was about 5 or 6 months.
INT.: So you first went there in ‘24 and the Territory in ‘25?
C.E.C.: I went to Western Australia in ‘24.
INT.: In ‘24. Then on to the Northern Territory in ‘25 and then you came back to the Northern Territory. When?
C.E.C.: February 1927. When I went back I wrote up a report and I was posted to this Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville where I was posted to conduct and operate the hookworm survey in Cairns and then returned to Townsville where I worked at the Institute and was also a Quarantine Officer.
INT.: Who was in charge of the School?
C.E.C.: Raphael Cilento when I first went there. He went to New Guinea then Alec Baldwin took over.
INT.: Well, then you stayed there for how long, before you went back to the Territory again?
C.E.C.: I got back to Townsville about the end of ‘25 but during ‘26 Dr. Norris who had been the second doctor in Darwin died somewhere around mid-year, I think, July.
INT.: July of what year?
C.E.C.: Oh, he must have died in ‘26.
INT.: July ‘26.
Dr Cook’s appointment in Darwin
C.E.C.: It may have been earlier. So the Department had my report which said that there should be a medical service to embrace Aborigines, and that anybody that went up there as Chief Medical Officer with the view of taking control of hygiene administration and public health and so forth must have the powers of the Chief Protector otherwise he couldn’t possibly do his job as Chief Medical Officer properly. And the Medical Officer up there should be full-time, not to be permitted private practice.
INT.: So this was the first occasion on which they were considering the joint position?
C.E.C.: When Norris died they wrote up to me and asked if I would consider going back to the Northern Territory as Chief Medical Officer without the right of private practice, and devoting special attention to the control of leprosy. I said yes, I’d consider it.
INT.: And did you raise the point then of Chief Protector to Aborigines?
C.E.C.: I would consider it if I had the powers of Chief Protector. I didn’t believe that you could perform either job properly unless you had both. You’ve heard me say that.
INT.: That’s right I’ve heard you say that before, and I fully agree with you!
C.E.C.: So they wrote and told me alright you’re appointed, and I started work. I went up on the February boat and I started work
INT.: ‘27?
C.E.C.: And I started work on 1st March 1927.
INT.: In the two positions of Chief Protector and Chief Medical Officer?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: The first such appointment to be made.
C.E.C.: The first thing that happened was that I had only been there a few months when Jones got fed up. It had cost him a lot of money. I took his house – that was another condition I put on, that I got the Chief Medical Officer’s house. He got it rent-free but I had a wife and family, he hadn’t. But he had a dental practice there, and had an X-ray, and all sorts of junk. So they tossed him out – charged me rent, by the way, I didn’t get a house rent free.
INT.: What, did he then set up in private practice?
C.E.C.: He was already in private practice but he had to go and find another house and set himself up. He’d been trying all through ‘26 to sell the practice but nobody acceptable to the Department offered to buy it. Then he got sick late in ‘27 and early ‘28 and while he was sick, I was alone.
INT.: Were you the only two medical officers there at that time?
C.E.C.: Yes, but I was the only one because he wasn’t functioning you see. I was the only one for about six months until I got them to appoint Kirkland to help me.
INT.: But did he have the right of private practice?
C.E.C.: Railway agreed to release Kirkland provided Territories replaced him. You can have Kirkland, that was the understanding, but we don’t want him to leave the railway. We’ve got to have a doctor on the railway. So we had to get a third doctor but there wasn’t one forthcoming they were still arguing the point down in Melbourne about a third doctor, you see, until Koolinda came up in May of ‘28 and Clyde Fenton was on board.
INT.: Was that your first meeting with him?
C.E.C.: Yes, I was told there was a doctor down on the Koolinda. He’d left Wyndham and he was going back to Perth tomorrow. So I went down and saw him and tried to persuade him to stay with me. Oh, no, he said. I sympathise with the position but I’ve had this, I really must get back. So I said, anyway, come ashore, Kirkland’s down from Katherine and we’ll have a party. I had his things brought ashore and the boat went without him.
INT.: You know, I’ve heard a number of versions of that particular incident but coming from you, I’ve got the last word on it. What did he do then?
C.E.C.: He stayed three months by which time we got a locum called Salch. I was away for a while and I came back – I was supposed to meet Fenton on the way but his bike broke dawn – he was going to ride a bike down but as he was going away I was saying how sorry I was, he said, I’ll be back, I’ll be back. I’ll be back with an aeroplane. You know his Wyndham story don’t you? You know Fenton’s Wyndham story?
INT.: No. I don’t know that but it would be worthwhile having that for the record now.
C.E.C.: Well, he tried to cross Australia in a car from east to west. He and his brother set out to cross Australia in record time. This was a great time in those days for people to be making motorcar records.
INT.: That’s right, when the motor was just being used in Outback Australia.
C.E.C.: And they were just waking up to find that Australian roads were not all that good. So he and his brother set out but they crashed their vehicle somewhere in South Australia and they were very bitter about this and had to abandon the enterprise. So, he took a job as Medical Officer at Wyndham. When he got there he was looking around and was impressed by the possibilities of flight for transport, and decided to learn to fly, teaching himself to fly on this vast plain. So he bought an aeroplane. It arrived in a box and he had to assemble it himself – which he did. I suppose he had some assistance, I don’t know. There were not many people there, there were a few engineers over at the meat works probably. Anyhow, he assembled this aircraft himself. And having got it assembled, he couldn’t wait to fly it, you see.
INT.: Without any instruction other than what he could get out of the booklet?
C.E.C.: His argument was that the people who pioneered flying – the Wright brothers and all those blokes – had to teach themselves, and they didn’t even know the aircraft would fly. He, at least, had an aircraft that would fly! All he had to do was to get out on that marsh and fiddle around, until he could fly. Fair enough?
INT.: Yes, fair enough!
C.E.C.: The only thing was that he couldn’t wait to get on the marsh, you see. He tried to fly the thing out of Wyndham. And he never got out of Wyndham because he didn’t have room and on the attempt he crashed the aircraft.
INT.: On the salt flats, yes.
C.E.C.: So, he was so disgusted with it, he sent a telegram to Perth resigning his job at Wyndham and the Koolinda came up en route to Darwin with the replacement (doctor) and he got boarded it when it left for Perth via Darwin.
INT.: And came to Darwin, before going back. What I would like to get, if I could, is a little bit more about the sort of responsibilities of a Medical Officer on the railway line.
C.E.C.: Kirkland was appointed for railway constructions. They’d built a bridge over the Katherine without a Medical Officer but when they started to build the line they decided they needed a Medical Officer on the job. The Commissioner of Railways appointed William Bruce Kirkland to be that Medical Officer, and he arrived and was stationed at Katherine from January 1927. They gave him some sort of little hut, those sort of things they used to live in, and he had a car and where the rails were laid he had a rail car to go up and down the line. He was responsible for looking after all the sick and injured, the general health of the workers, as far as the railway was concerned. He had no female help – no nurse or anything – he probably had same first aid employee to work with him. I never really found out about that, we didn’t talk much about his railway job.
INT.: He didn’t have any private practice?
C.E.C.: No, he was employed by the Railway and there really wasn’t anybody there apart from the people at Manbulloo and the pub at Emungalen, there was really no population there to look after.
INT.: Roughly, haw many people were there in Darwin when you went there in ‘27?
C.E.C.: There were 4,000 in the Territory. I think the population of Darwin would have been about – not counting Aborigines – about 1,200.
INT.: Was there any breakdown of those? Haw many were Chinese?
C.E.C.: I’ll have to look that up.
INT.: Dr. Cook has details of the people in Darwin, the ethnic distribution, and also details of his early life and education which he will forward to us.
Dr Cook’s early life
C.E.C.: We came out on the Duke of Sutherland. I was an immigrant, and I was 2. We came out around the top apparently, round Cape York.
INT.: Where did you come from? England?
C.E.C.: England, yes.
INT.: And what was your first port of call in Australia?
C.E.C.: We came around the top – Cairns. I think we must have disembarked at Rockhampton.
INT.: So, you’re a Queenslander.
C.E.C.: From here – a Queenslander. And Dad had a practice at Barcaldine so we lived there and I went to State School there and 1909 I came down and went to school at Southport here.
INT.: The Southport Church of England Boys’ School?
C.E.C.: It was then the Southport High School run as a private school.
INT.: Then you matriculated there and you had to go to Sydney?
C.E.C.: I had to go to Sydney to do Medicine. But at Southport (you said, why did you do Tropical Medicine – this is a stupid sort of a story, I suppose). We used to have a Speech Day each year and a well-known figure used to come down, the Governor of Queensland who was Sir William McGregor. He was a doctor who had been Administrator of British New Guinea. I was very impressed with this figure – I don’t know why – a young boy, you know. And it just so happened I was very impressed with Sir William, and I decided I was going to do Medicine because that was what Dad did, but it had to be Tropical Medicine because of this bloke’s history. Anyhow, Tropical Medicine kept cropping up when I was doing my residency at the Brisbane General Hospital. I was put on to Wattle Brae the isolation ward, and there was a plague outbreak, a ward full of plague patients. I was more interested in Tropical Medicine. Dad didn’t want me to do Tropical Medicine; he couldn’t see any future or any reason for doing it. And he said if you do the D.P.H. (Diploma of Public Health) I’ll pay your expenses. I said I don’t want to do D.P.H.; I want to do Tropical Medicine. So he said, alright, you’re on your own.
INT.: There wasn’t a School of Tropical Medicine at Sydney at that time, was there?
C.E.C.: No. There was the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville that was intended to be a teaching school but wasn’t functioning as such at that stage.
INT.: How was that established, Mick? Was it established as a sort of annex of Sydney University or had Brisbane University been established at that stage?
C.E.C.: No, it was established as a special Commonwealth activity – an Institute of Tropical Medicine independent of any university.
INT.: In the same way as they had Institute of Medical Health at Kalgoorlie for a while – the Commonwealth?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: Where it was looking after mining – health of miners.
C.E.C.: One of the early advocates for the Institute at Townsville was the bloke we’ve been talking about, Goldsmith, and these Surgeons from the Northern Territory. Breinl was appointed Director and he did many researches in the Territory. I’ve got a photograph of him, if you want it.
INT.: Yes.
C.E.C.: He did quite a bit of research in the Territory – finding where the malaria was and all that sort of thing, where it was environmentally, and leprosy. Well, I went to London. In those days —
Dr Cook’s post graduate study
INT.: On a postgraduate scholarship did you? Or, you just went under your own steam?
C.E.C.: We didn’t have those benevolent sorts of governments that we’ve got now, when the taxpayer pays your way over. You had to make your own over. But in those days there were passenger ships, you didn’t have to fly.
INT.: And you could go as a Ship’s Surgeon?
C.E.C.: I went as Ship’s Surgeon. I think the pay was one shilling a week all found. So I did the course there –
INT.: At the London University.
C.E.C.: Three months course in Tropical Medicine, at the end of which they appointed me a demonstrator in tropical pathology and entomology at the School and this enabled me to please Dad by crossing the road and putting in three months towards the first part of a D.P.H. at London. So I didn’t have to take his money because I had this tinpot job which paid the board – the board was thirty-five bob or something; around the corner. I went to have a look at it the other day, but it must have been bombed out in the blitz, it’s all been rebuilt.
INT.: And how long did you spend in England then?
C.E.C.: Six months, three as a student and three months, as a demonstrator.
INT.: Can you recall what year it was?
C.E.C.: ‘23.
INT.: Where did you do your residency? You did your residency in Australia before you went over?
C.E.C.: Before I went over. With Dad of course in Barcaldine, apart from Brisbane, I’d been at Mount Morgan Hospital, Longreach Hospital, general practice in Hughenden – I hated general practice, it was not for me – I was incompetent and useless. I was always on the ‘phone to Dad.
INT.: And then when you finished there, what did you come back to in Australia?
C.E.C.: Well, while I was employed as demonstrator, and doing the D.P.H. (Part I), this Wandsworth Research Fellowship came up in Tropical Medicine. One of the doctors there, suggested I apply for it. I said, what will I do with it? He said, if you study Tropical Medicine you can go to India or whatever, you see. I said, I don’t want to go to India, I want to get married.
INT.: Had you your eye on a particular girl at this stage, Mick?
C.E.C.: I had. She was a Barcaldine girl. So, that’s when I said if I get it — now before I apply for it I’ll check with Cumpston that I can use it in Australia — that’s when I got that reply that they wanted a survey in Western Australia so when the answer came back I applied for it and got it. It remained then to come out, so I came out on ‘Hobson’s Bay’, a Commonwealth Line steamer as Ship’s Surgeon, again. You could write a story about what happened on that trip.
INT.: Some time I’ll get that on the record. When did you finally marry?
C.E.C.: We got back here towards the end of ‘23 and my fiancée and her mother met me in Melbourne and came across to Sydney. Incidentally, as part of this trip on this boat, I was supposed to come to Brisbane and go back to Sydney. But owing to some disagreement with the captain of the ship in Fremantle, which is another story, he let me off in Sydney; he said, you can get off in Sydney, I’m not taking you any bloody further! So I started in on the study at Sydney, and around about N.S.W., and up through Queensland. Premier Theodore (Premier of Queensland at the time) gave me a rail pass on the Queensland Railways and I went all over Queensland.
The Leprosy survey in W.A.
INT.: Were there significant problems of malaria at this stage?
C.E.C.: Not at that stage, no. I was on leprosy at that stage.
INT.: Was there a high incidence of leprosy in places like N.S.W. as well as Queensland and Northern Australia?
C.E.C.: No, there had been quite a notable one – and it was historical – and there were still cases coming in, particularly in the Northern Rivers; wherever they had had South Sea Islanders labour.
INT.: In the Northern Rivers they had high incidence of leprosy?
C.E.C.: Yes. They originally got — it started down where that whaling bloke was – you know, down on the south coast, that was the first case of leprosy that came up. I forget his name now. When I went through Queensland on Theodore’s railway pass, did a lot of work in Queensland and then I got married 4 March 1924. We went on a honeymoon and got as far as Sydney, coasting around Sydney for a few days, and I was bailed up at Neutral Bay ferry gates – you know, where you go through the turnstile – by a Customs man who said, are you Dr. Cook? I said, yes. Oh, I’ve got a message for you from Melbourne. You’ve got to catch the train to. Perth tonight, they’re waiting for you over there to go on a trip. But I can’t go tonight, I’ve got a bride here. What’s all this hurry? Oh, an aeroplane’s flapping its wings and everything was ready for me to go and they hadn’t been in touch with me. So I made all the arrangements that I could for my bride to get her home and give her money and so forth, and started off for Perth that night.
INT.: And left your wife behind?
C.E.C.: Yes. I had to. I borrowed a quid from Cumpston in Melbourne to get across to Perth. I’d left my wife with all the money I had. He said that trans line is not completely ballasted, and that it would be a long trip. Well, I said, you’d better let me have some money, I haven’t any money. I wonder if I ever paid him back, I don’t recall. Anyhow, he lent me a quid and I arrived in Perth with threepence.
In Perth I called on the Commissioner, Dr Atkinson, who after a friendly chat told me he had a golfing appointment and handed me over to the Under-Secretary, Mr Huelin, who was surprised to see me and expressed at length and with some vehemence, his annoyance that I had arrived so soon. Arrangements for my transport through the north had not been completed and a start would not be possible for another four weeks. I offered to return to Perth at their expense but after a hurried calculation, Mr Huelin decided to lodge me in the King Edward Hostel, a Temperance Hotel nearby.
After a few days I was despatched to the Moore River settlement to examine the Aboriginal population there. This task took only a few days and I returned to Perth eager for more work. My return shocked the Under Secretary – apparently he had been congratulating himself for having transferred the obligation for my maintenance to the Aboriginal Affairs Department. I suspect that about this time he began to regret the proximity of the King Edward Hostel to his office. This convenience originally commended as a merit, permitted, even encouraged frequent visits from me seeking not only opportunities for employment but financial accommodation to supplement my resources which were still limited to the three pence with which I had arrived in Perth.
I came back again and he said the old men’s home they think there’s a leper there they’d like you to go out and see this fella. I said, oh, well (as I remarked to you before) how do I go? He said, use public transport. I said, what’s the fare? I don’t know what the fare is, a few pence, I suppose. Now, look, you’re not going to get my threepence! I’ve been at you for days now, for money that you won’t give me, even as a loan, and I’m not going to spend my threepence going out to see your old men’s home. But he wouldn’t make the fare available to go out to the old men’s home. Whether the bloke had leprosy, I don’t know, I never went out to see him. Whether he was ever seen, I don’t know. So, from that time forward I always had an attitude, a very hard attitude toward the Public Service – the lay Public Service – in a medical department. And then we travelled up to Wyndham.
INT.: You went to Wyndham by boat did you?
C.E.C.: No, we went to Derby by boat. A Blue Funnel steamer called the Minderoo or something. We had a very elaborate little Ford car – all brass headlights, and polished fittings and all this sort of thing, you see, which all started to fall off as we went along. We had a load of spare parts heavier than luggage and the passengers put together, spare springs and things. Because the history of the area, all transport had been along the river, horse drawn, the road went along the river, which meant that every now and again, every few hundred yards it seemed to me you had to cross a tributary – because they had to be near the water. Well, these tributaries were sandy, steep banked, sandy bedded. The wagons had gone through and a car couldn’t use the road because the track was too wide, and the wagon wheels were too deep. So we had to try and work this out for ourselves. What it really meant was that the youngest drove the car. I was young in those days. I had an old fellow with me representing the Native` Affairs Department. He was the Member for Roebourne. I think he was about 60 or something. We used to try and push this car across through the sand. If you got behind it, the wheels spun. If he tried to reverse, he couldn’t see where he was going. When you got to the other side and you finally got the damn thing with the wheels halfway up the bank, it had a gravity feed tank underneath the seat the carburettor got higher than the tank, petrol stopped.
INT.: So I take it, you had a pretty grim period.
C.E.C.: We had with us, as well – apparently the government of the day was of an economical turn of mind – a police inspector, I think he was a sergeant at that time, who was to go up, and in conjunction with my fella, the Native Affairs fella, investigate an incident that was supposed to have occurred (with) the Sergeant of Police at Wyndham. It was alleged by one of his prisoners who had reported to the Minister that he had gone out with his natives and he’d said to them, go and go out and get that bloody nigger, and bring him back, dead or alive. The story is that they said, alright they’d bring him back dead, it would be less to carry, they’d carry his head. Chopped his head off and brought it in, in a sugar bag. That’s the story. So this Sergeant of Police and my fella, Teasdale his name was, instead of taking me through the station there had to investigate —
INT.: Make their inquiries about this incident.
C.E.C.: So the police arranged witnesses to be at certain spots at certain times, you see. When we got to Mullabulloo – you’d know Mullabulloo at that time Native Affairs took up the station run by Aboriginal Affairs. This policeman said to me, (there were quite a few there, about a thousand, I suppose, 700 anyway) how long are you going to be here? I said, oh, a couple more days I think. Well, he said, it’s not much good me hanging around here. I’ll go in to Hall’s Creek and see my men in there, and you can pick me up there. I said, it’s alright with me. He was to talk to Teasdale about (things). Anyway, two days later we went in, and we got to Halls Creek and we said, where’s the Sergeant? Oh, he’s gone on. And he went on in a buckboard with a couple of horses. He said, you can pick him up at the Black Elvira. When we got to the Black Elvira, he wasn’t there, he’d gone on, and dispersed the witnesses that were to be there. We pursued him to Wyndham, he and his buckboard and we in our car, he got to Wyndham three weeks ahead of us and was gone on the boat by the time we got to Wyndham. What the hell report went in about that policy inquiry, I’ve never found out.
(Break in interview, now talking about Aboriginal Protection before Cook arrived in Darwin)
Aboriginal Protection before 1927
C.E.C.: He (Stretton) decided that he wouldn’t have camps scattered all around Darwin. There were some on Lameroo Beach, and all this you know. Everybody had to go to Kahlin Compound – everybody. He was pretty punctilious about this.
INT: How did he police it? Was this a local rule that he made, that they had to be in Kahlin campsite after sunset?
C.E.C.: As far as I can gather from the record that he made Darwin a prohibited area for night time, and from sundown to sunrise every native around Darwin had to be at Kahlin.
INT.: Does this include those that were employed, and lived sometimes in the backyard?
C.E.C.: As far as I can gather, it included everybody. Whether he exempted individuals where they had accommodation, I don’t know. But I think from his point of view he wanted them all out because they were too much of a problem in Chinatown.
INT.: This was the prostitution and opium smoking, and so on, in the Chinatown area.
C.E.C.: Prostitution and opium smoking I think it was. It was so prevalent that you could even get photographs of — you know –
INT.: I’ve seen a couple of photographs of two Aboriginals smoking a pipe – these have come up in our records recently.
C.E.C.: I’ve got a few of those I’ll send you. Anyway, that became the Compound, that’s where the natives lived. And when he started to bring the kids in, the half-caste kids in, they went to the Compound. They came in to be educated, and he started his little school there. The boys came in as well as the girls.
INT.: There were boys and girls?
The Kahlin Compound and Darwin Half-Caste Home
C.E.C.: There were both boys and girls come in originally. When the school started they used to do both the boys and the girls. Well, it didn’t take him long to find out that when the boys grew up they had to separate them from the girls, and vice-versa. And public opinion, I suppose, didn’t want them all mixed up. So by degrees they abandoned the idea. This is not Stretton now this is subsequent —
INT.: How many would Stretton have had – half-caste boys and girls – would you have any idea?
C.E.C.: No.
INT.: They weren’t big numbers – they’d be in the 20’s – something like that would they?
C.E.C.: More than that I think. Around about 50 or more. I think I’ve got it dawn there somewhere. Anyway, they didn’t bother anymore bringing the boys in. They’d bring them in while they were kids – toddlers and so forth but then they’d let them go. But the girls they kept in, and they put them in a house next to the Superintendent of the Compound which became a half-caste home.
INT.: That was next door to the Superintendent’s house? He lived just on the edge of the Compound did he?
C.E.C.: The Superintendent lived in the – it’s hard to describe now because the contours have changed now. But the Compound used to be inside a fence which ran down from the Mylly Point Road to the gully. One of the streets is Schultz Street.
INT.: Where was the hospital? The hospital was on the edge — ?
C.E.C.: The hospital was on a gully way back – Packard Street
INT.: Doctor’s Gully – what was called Doctor’s Gully.
C.E.C.: That was further back – it had no relation, at that stage, to the Compound at all. And the Superintendent of the Compound lived in one of those Government houses opposite the gate of Kahlin Compound. And the half-caste’s home was in the same road going back along that street, a similar house to the Superintendent’s.
INT.: Where was that in relation then to the Army house? Where was the Superintendent’s house? You know, where the Army house was subsequently built on Mylly Point? ‘
C.E.C. At this time, Mylly Point was only one row of houses on either side of the street. At the end of that street there was a fence that cut off the end of Mylly Point. That was supposed to be where the Administrator was going to build his mansion. The Administrator never built a mansion there because be never had any money to build it. But when the Army came they built it – like armies always do.
INT.: Well then, that must have been a fairly substantial area?
C.E.C.: Oh, yes. It was quite empty, all that (Mylly) point.
INT.: And the Superintendent’s house then had next door to it this home for the half-caste girls?
C.E.C.: No, he wasn’t anywhere near Mylly Point.
INT.: No, he was up on Schultz Street.
C.E.C.: Yes, yes. A row of about: five houses, much the same, I think. It’s hard to remember now, the number. Well, the kids were locked in there, of course. It used to bug me, night after night. I used to think what happens in case of fire. On reflection, it wouldn’t have mattered much as there were only those damn slats that they could have kicked out.
INT.: They could have kicked them out and jumped out, yes.
C.E.C.: But I used to worry quite a lot.
INT.: But the girls were occupying just one of the ordinary houses?
C.E.C.: Ordinary houses, yes. And they were all ages, of course. So I used to watch it very carefully because it was like the bus from Burleigh Heads to Brisbane, nobody ever gets off, but everybody gets on. It was not very often than anybody ever left the half-caste home, as there was schooling, they stayed there until 14 or 15. But the policemen (as Protectors) were always bringing these kids in, whether they were very, small, it didn’t matter that much. The numbers kept going up. They were taught to sleep in beds and so forth. In spite of what Mr. Herbert might say to the contrary. Incidentally, while I was away in Singapore to a League of Nations Malaria Study, Kirk put Herbert on as Superintendent of the Compound.
INT.: Of the full Compound, not just the …..
C.E.C.: No, he took both jobs you see. His wife would be matron of the half-caste home. When I came beck, he’d gone, which was a good thing – to save him getting sacked.
INT.: So, he didn’t last too long?
C.E.C.: It would be three months, I suppose. But he went to the Northern Standard as editor or something. And he started blowing about broken cups and all this sort of stuff, you know. He was no longer an employee of the administration so he could say what he liked. But the point was, it was his responsibility to see that there were no broken cups – you know that.
INT.: That’s right’.
C.E.C.: The things that were wrong, he should have corrected, or called attention to. We’ve had people far more reputable in that job than ever Herbert would have aspired to be. You’ve met Sister Dunlop and Giles?
INT.: No, I didn’t meet either of them, but I’d like to talk to you about their …….. And you had several very good people there.
C.E.C.: We had Ruby Green – remember Ruby Green, was she there in your time? Ruby Selman?
INT.: Yes. As a matter of fact, Selman is in Brisbane and I want to talk to him. Your understanding was that Herbert spent only a very short time as Superintendent of the Kahlin Compound, and it was during your absence in Singapore.
C.E.C.: While I was in Malaya.
INT.: Do you remember when Giles and his wife were Superintendent? Harold Giles and his wife were Superintendent and Matron?
C.E.C.: They were there when I first went up.
INT.: That would be ‘27.
C.E.C.: Today I would say they would have been the best combination in my day. They were succeeded by O’Sullivan and his wife. He was pretty ineffective but she was a good manager and very busy, and she wasn’t trained like him. At some stage, Herbert got in, I don’t know, perhaps they’d been on leave.
INT.: All the part-Aboriginal people that I’ve spoken to, who were associated with the home at that time, speak with a great deal of affection of people like the Giles’ and others who were there. It was only the blokes like Herbert that you get who make some of the observations that you’ve indicated.
Administrator Abbott
INT.: Tell me about CLA Abbott
C.E.C.: In the time that Abbott took over, I was about the only bloke to my knowledge that I discussed the matter with in the Northern Territory that was glad that Abbott was appointed. He’d been Minister for a few months during my early service before that election that put Scullin in, and I’d been rather impressed with him, the few contacts with him. So, when Abbott was appointed to be Administrator after Weddell went, I said he’d be a good Administrator, but he wasn’t. I think I saw him early on, he said to me when he first arrived and we had a talk, a long talk, in the course of which he asked me whether it wouldn’t be better to separate the Health Department from the Aboriginal Affairs Department, and I told him my well-known opinion and he nodded and made no comment. I saw him another time and he asked me, as Chief Medical Officer, he had heard that a girl in the Public Service had gonorrhea, was this true? And I refused to make any comment on the matter at all. It wasn’t his business. And he said he had these responsibilities, and I said any responsibilities in this matter, I will assume on your behalf. If you’re not satisfied to leave these things with me, well, you’d better get rid of me. But I can’t divulge any information one way or the other in case I don’t know what you know, or what you’ve been told, and anything that I say (even if I’m trying to be cautious) may be the wrong thing to say. He didn’t like it, and from that time forward he never trusted me, he never told me anything, and he never asked me anything.
INT.: How long was he there, Mick?
C.E.C.: He must have come up in ‘37.
INT.: And he was still there at the outbreak of war?
C.E.C.: Yes. I think he was there 12 years, but not 12 years with me, he saw to that.
INT.: The Administrators under whom you served were Gilruth, Weddell and Abbott. Any others?
C.E.C.: When I went there in 1925, there was a fella there that used to be Commissioner of Police in Queensland, Urquhart. I wasn’t there with Gilruth. He had a record of being able to look after blacks and used to take out expeditions to the Gulf.
INT.: Yes, I remember, but I can’t remember his name.
C.E.C.: Then there was a fella called Lean, who had been a Brigadier in the First War. He was there for a while. He must have followed this police bloke I think. Then there was Playford who acted for a while. The only ones that I really worked for, were Weddell and Abbott. Oh, Carrodus, of course, he was there for a while.
INT.: What about your colleagues. in the Public Service? What about people like the Superintendent of Police, and the Education people, did you have much to do with them?
C.E.C.: When I first went there, Dudley, he lasted about a year with me, I think, but I got on quite well with him; he seemed a nice sort of a bloke. I wasn’t there long enough to know, but there might have been score sort of resentment in the Force that he had been brought in from outside, and put over them, Major Douglas, you know? I suppose he must have been a Major in the Provost Corps, whether it was Australian or British Amy, I don’t know. But I think in the police force they thought, oh, they’re bringing blokes in and sitting them on top of us, you know. A lot of them admired him.
INT.: But there seemed to be some resentment to the appointment?
C.E.C.: There seemed to be some resentment. I could be wrong, but it was the sense I had. Anyhow, he left, and Stretton took over. Stretton lasted all the time I was there. Oh, Lovegrove.
INT.: Lovegrove was the Superintendent in Central Australia – was the Sergeant. Lovegrove was in Central Australia for most of the time wasn’t he?
C.E.C.: I first struck Lovegrove at Rankin River. He was in charge there with a fella called Sargent; a young new policeman. That would have been in ‘25. Lovegrove afterwards went to Alice Springs, as you say. Sargent married and came up to Newcastle Waters.
INT.: That is the Sargent from Newcastle Waters? Well, that’s interesting. He’s in an old person’s home in Brisbane at the moment, and he’s one of the ones on our list. And he was Lovegrove’s assistant, or off-sider at Rankin River?
C.E.C.: I forget whether he was the first one at Newcastle Waters, I think he might have taken the pub over.
INT.: Yes, I don’t think he was the first pub-keeper there.
The Bleakley Survey
INT.: About Bleakley, you went around (the Territory) with him?
C.E.C.: North Australia and Central Australia were two separate Territories. I was indignant, to begin with, to be appointed the new Chief Protector in 1927 with very little chance to do anything except find my way about and extricate myself from general practice during ‘27, to find (this was Abbott again, I suppose) the Chief Protector from next door appointed to tell me how to run the joint, when I was supposed to be introducing a new policy which hadn’t been tried anywhere else. So I may have been biased against the poor old bugger all the time. You see? But he came to us (in North Australia) from Central Australia where he had recommended that half-caste Abos be left in the camp – boys and girls, not make another problem, you see. So this was the direct antithesis to what my attitude was, so we didn’t start off on the same footing. I went around the Territory with him, as a driver, and we got on quite well. But so far from teaching me anything – I spent my time teaching him, you see. And his report – if you get them both – report from North Australia and Central Australia are two entirely different things. All I did was to pursue my own course and if the Bleakley report was in accord with what I was going to do, I did it. If it wasn’t, I just did what I was going to do, and ignored the report. So, I don’t profess to be an authority on the Bleakley report, beyond saying that, as far as I was concerned, it played no part whatever in my administration all the time I was there.
INT.: You didn’t see it as offering any constructive suggestion so far as you —
C.E.C.: Where he was in accord with me, I went along, not because he reported it but because that was what I was going to do anyway. Where he was different from me, I simply ignored the bloody thing. You’ve got to remember in these days we had one boat a month – that was the communication with Melbourne or Canberra as it came to be later. One boat a month. The boat that you wrote on was the boat that left three weeks after their letters had come up. You might not be able to get your stuff done in time even for that (boat) if you had to travel (away from Darwin).
INT.: To go on that same boat.
C.E.C.: The mail came up later in the month, the inward mail about the 18th whereas the outward mail went down a week or so earlier on the 12th or thereabouts of the month. Their boat came up on the 18th. They couldn’t answer your letters in the same month. Arriving in Darwin on the 18th with a month’s mail, some of it was a lot to handle, a lot to think about. You may not get your report back to their mail by the 6th of the next month. So it was some times a matter of several weeks, apart altogether from the sailing of the boat (the time the boat took) between letters and the reply to them. So it got that way, after a while, that we had the situation where the Administrator (or Government Resident as he was called then) could make regulations under the Aboriginal Ordinance, or any Ordinance, you see. Eric Asche was a great friend of mine and we used to talk things over and he’d draft regulations and we’d put them through the local gazette, you see.
INT.: His son is Mr. Justice Asche in Victoria, that’s the one.
C.E.C.: Yes, yes. So we made a lot of laws up there, in my time.
INT.: Was Eric Asche a clerk in the Administrator’s Department?
C.E.C.: He was Crown Law Officer. We made a lot of laws up there on our own decisions. For instance, half-caste apprentices: We were stuck with these girls and if you wanted to marry them to half-castes they had to marry some half-black fella, you know, who was brought up in the black’s camp uneducated. It seemed as if you were going to educate the boy up to school age 14 standard and then send him back to be tutored by a black fella by Victoria River Downs or Wave Hill, it didn’t make sense. So we decided that they had to treat them as apprentices so they could qualify to be a white stockman when they grew up. So we put that through. To see how it would go, I’d get the union in, and I’d get a couple of employers like Grants and Vestey’s mob, and talk about this. Decide that it was viable, having decided that it was viable, it would go. Canberra would find out about this when somebody would complain about it, like Senator Durack. Then they’d say, ‘oh, what’s going on here’, and after a few occasions, we got an awful lot through. Wages for drovers: The theory was that on a station like Limbunya or something, they didn’t pay the Aboriginal stockmen because Limbunya wanted all the Aboriginals to stick around the camp and not harassing the cattle in and out the bush, and all this sort of stuff, and it cost them that much, they used to say. We used to check and we used to think that if they’ve got to be kept off they need animal protein. If they’d get animal protein in fairly reasonable quantities by sitting down at Limbunya homestead then that’s alright with us as long as they satisfied themselves. But the argument was that you couldn’t pay six stockmen white man’s wages for being stockmen and incur the expense of feeding all these others, you see. That was the theory. But drovers wanted the same cop. They wanted to pick up (a) boy up here, take him down to Charleville and bring him back and pay him nothing because they were feeding him. So we had to have drover’s regulations. Sometimes, of course, they didn’t even have a blanket, so we fixed that with drover’s regulations. Only then the senators would start screaming about the heinous offence of trying to drive the small man off the station in the Territory, joined in a chorus by every missionary that had a voice. Did you find that?
INT.: Yes, yes, Mick. Did you ever have anything to do with Yorkie Walker when he was the N.A.W.U. organiser?
C.E.C.: No, the organiser in my time was first of all a cove called Toupein, he was quite a reasonable fella, and another bloke was MacDonald.
INT.: You didn’t have anything to do with Yorkie Walker?
C.E.C.: No. Was he Darwin?
INT.: Yes, he was in Darwin. He was the predecessor of Paddy Carroll, but Carroll wasn’t in the job when you came there, he came later on towards the end of the War.
C.E.C.: No, they were my two – MacDonald and Toupein.
INT.: And you had an arrangement with them that you would discuss these matters with them …..
C.E.C.: No, no arrangement with them, but if I was going to do something, I used to make sure to do my homework first, and I’d get the union point of view and the employer’s point of view; if not separately, then anyway together. But I used to find they’d get stuck into each other, end up in an argument. So I used to see them separately first of all. Well then, when this half-castes apprentices regulations and drovers regulations caught the eye of Senator Durack, and he started spouting about them in the Senate, it was a Labour Government and they suspended them – these regulations – and the Minister telegraphed up that they had to have a conference with missionaries and the union, representatives of the employers and sort this bloody thing out. To all intents and purposes that had already been done, except I hadn’t consulted the missionaries. On those we had a meeting which ended up by a resolution approving the things we had done and congratulating Dr. Cook on this thing, which I thought wasanice thing to send back to Senator Durack. Duffey never saw it. But what they did – the point I was making was that we made a lot of laws that suited us, without ——
INT.: Having to worry about getting an approval from down below.
C.E.C.: That came to an end because they made it that of all the things the Governor’s Resident could make laws about, or the Administrator could make laws about, not Aboriginals, they fixed that.
INT.: And you found Abbott fairly difficult on these issues, did you?
C.E.C.: I didn’t find him difficult at all. I simply didn’t know of his existence. He never consulted with me, never told me anything. I’ve seen – Kettle sends me down a cutting reporting a Hansard report of a report made by Dr. Donald Thompson. Dr. Thompson expressed appreciation of the co-operation he’d had from the Chief Medical Officer in the supply of drugs and whatnots for his survey and that was the first I’d seen of it – that was 1936, and I saw it in 1981.
INT.: He was a funny bloke, Donald Thompson.
C.E.C.: He may have been, but he wasn’t as funny as Abbott! He told me that he’d never told a lie in his life. I thought to myself that couldn’t be the first, but it might be the second.
INT.: I don’t think the full study of Abbott …….
C.E.C.: You never knew where he was. I can tell you something as you’ve been Chief Protector. (There was) correspondence between the Minister (Perkins) and Elkin, and he had a long discussion with Elkin, about the need for medical attention to Aborigines, and Professor Elkin had brought to his attention the existence of a doctor in Adelaide who would be interested in being appointed as a doctor to look after Aborigines in the Northern Territory, giving the doctor’s name. The next thing is a letter to the doctor from the Minister offering him the appointment and a letter from the Minister to Elkin telling him of this, a letter from Elkin in reply expressing his appreciation of this and discussing salaries and standing. “Of course, Mr. Minister” says Elkin, “doctor would not want to be responsible to the so-called Aboriginal Department in Darwin, he would want to work independently”. And apparently an accord that they would pay him so much and the doctor would go and see the Minister when he came back from England, next week or next month, whenever it was. And he had first to go to Adelaide and discuss with some friends whether he would set up in private practice there. Then, it gets down to departmental level, you see. Carrodus called attention to the fact that there was already in the Northern Territory a medical service of which the Chief Medical Officer is Chief Protector of Aborigines. It would not be possible or, at any rate, desirable, to have anybody working outside that organisation in the same field. Had the matter been discussed by the Minister with the Administrator of the Northern Territory and the Chief Protector and Chief Medical Officer? The department suggested it would not be practical or desirable to have such an appointment independent from the NTMS. Then all of a sudden the bloke decided he was going into practice in Adelaide. You wouldn’t think it would get to that stage!
INT.: No, well, I can quite understand that that could happen. I had much the same sort of thing in respect of an investigation that was done by a Director of Child Welfare from N.S.W., from Nott’s Homes State and I ran into the same sort of difficulties with a bloke that really didn’t know what he was talking about.
C.E.C.: I seem to remember Nott’s name very clearly for some reason or other. I must have had some sort of contact with him. I remember Wise because I knew he was a Western Australian – a surveyor but Nott —
INT.: You were Director of Public Health I think in the Department. No, you wouldn’t, it would have been before ….
C.E.C.: He was Premier, when I first went there.
INT.: That’s right.
C.E.C.: I don’t know what Nott was – I don’t remember seeing him at all.
The role of Police as Protectors
INT.: When you first went to the Territory, what sort of arrangements were there for the police to issue rations, blankets, to Aboriginals, either on a regular basis or in times of special emergency?
C.E.C.: Well, as all through the South Australian time, one of the functions of the Protector was to issue blankets for the winter. More particularly to the aged and infirm, and, of course, where necessary to the kids. When Strangman insisted on getting the Protector’s responsibility transferred from him because of his practice, it went to the police. It had always been the function of the police on behalf of the Protector to do this issuing because the type of native entitled to a blanket would probably be living nearthe police station anyway, being old and on rations and so forth. So, when I took over as Chief Protector, my only staff for Aboriginal purposes would be policemen. In fact, they were Inspectors of Slaughterhouses and everything else.
INT.: They had a multifarious list of duties to do, yes.
C.E.C.: But as far as I was concerned, and as far as they were concerned, they were traditionally the police and they were issuing the licences for employment and all those sortsof things on my behalf. And they were, for my purpose, Protectors. When I went there with the ideas I had in mind for control of diseaseandso forth, it became essential that I have some idea about how many people there were of this sex or age in that particular spot. And, of course, the census, the Bureau of Statistics, tookno responsibility in regard to Aboriginals at all. People today don’t seem to realise that in those days the Aboriginal was like a gumtree – nobody cared, and nobody worried, he was just there – and no civic obligation was involved.
INT.: There was no registration of births, or deaths, marriages or anything?
C.E.C.: Nothing whatever. You couldn’t organise any elaborate system, but we did try to keep what we called “a registration card” on which every native that the policeman could make contact with, had a card which carried the name of his consort and any kids. And, if possible, to get all his family on the one card, to try and organise that where three or four adult Abos were, in fact, brothers or members of a group together to get that back to some old man or old woman that brought them all on to a registration card. So the theory was that in every police district there would be a comprehensive list of Abos showing their relationship one with another.
INT.: And those that were aged and infirm, and particularly women and children, and so forth.
C.E.C.: Some of them did this very well. I remember a fella called Hemmings who was down at Timber Creek. He did an excellent comprehensive record. I mean he took a lot of trouble with it.
INT.: How far afield would he go, Mick, though, from his police station? Would he only do it in respect of those who camein or …?
C.E.C.: His police district. Well, he used to put their language (group) and everything. He used to put a lot of stuff in.
INT.: Tribal group and so on?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: Age? Would he make any attempt to get an age? Or just simply “aged”?
C.E.C.: He would just guess. It was no use pretending that the age was right. A baby was alright. Actually around five years or near enough.
INT.: Could you recall roughly the numbers that you had on those cards – 8,000 or 10,000?
C.E.C.: A list ofindividuals.
INT.: But overall in the Territory, haw many names would you have had recorded?
C.E.C.: Well, we’ll have to come to that. In addition, we had another card which was called “the individual’s employment card and his health card” because everybody — the theory was that where it was practicable, and in towns, of course, it was practicable, that before anyone was employed, he had to be signed on. In a town, he had to be signed on to an employer and the employer had to make an agreement with him to do various things – keep and clothe him, and feed him and pay him ………….
INT.: Did this carry a clean bill of health for him – the employee?
C.E.C.: We made the point, that he couldn’t be signed on for this purpose until he was medically examined and fit. We knew from the type of employment whether it was an industrial hazard to let him be employed in that job. The other thing was, that as the Chief Medical Officer, I had access to information which helped me to decide whether that bloke was physically fit to employ a native or he might give him tuberculosis or whatever. A separate card then was an “individual card”. The first card was called “registration” and that was to try and get everybody who was tied up with anybody all on the one sheet of paper. This other one was an “individual card” which recorded his employment and his health. As I said, Hemmings did this very well at Timber Creek and some of the others did it reasonably well. I decided eventually, getting to a stage where I might find or know something, no telling what I wanted to do. In the middle of all this, you’ve got to recollect that all of a sudden I was the General Practitioner for Darwin and could not give a great deal of attention to it at that time. Thensomeof the police force objected to doing it – it was a very tedious task and, if done properly, like Hemmings did, very time-consuming. I have a suspicion that, once or twice or on a number of occasions, when the Inspector of Police has been going around or looking at the police records for various districts, he’s found some on a mission, something not done, something neglected which has been the “fennel on the ground” – well, the bloody stuff we’ve got to do – how the hell am I gonna …” So the result was that the police were forbidden to do it (a statement corrected below). And that was the end of that.
INT.: They were forbidden to do it were they?
C.E.C.: Yes. They were told that this was a task that they weren’t expected to do. I don’t think they were forbidden to do it – I must correct that statement (above), but they were given a let out – which they grabbed.
INT.: That’s right. So they didn’t pursue it with the sort of application that you wanted in order to get accurate …….
C.E.C.: That was the registration. The other one, the employment, continued because that would be mostly done in Darwin under my eyes where the agreements were sighted. In most towns the agreements were signed but in country districts there weren’t agreements – they were just employed under a group licence. So the registration card got to be discontinued and the health and employment card come to be a Darwin/Tennant Creek/Katherine one.
INT.: Did this record throw up such things as the incidence of leprosy among particular groups of Aboriginals?
C.E.C.: That would not readily – it was an individual card.
INT.: But the health record would throw up some information about numbers of those who were suffering or had had leprosy or been treated for leprosy?
C.E.C.: Yes. For most districts there would be no problem. In some districts there might be two or three lepers over a year or two. They would be personally known to me because I happened to be the bloke who was doing medical review of leprosy.
Leprosy patients and treatment
INT.: And you had a leprosy register of some kind at that time?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: Howmany did you have in Channel Island?
C.E.C.: Well, that varied. The first one, of course, was what they called Mud Island and Leper Point.
INT.: Was that going when you first went there, or was that closed?
C.E.C.: Well, I can give you all that on paper. But the thing was, of course, that Mud Island you couldn’t afford to treat because the treatment in those days required daily doses of something or an injection of something. You couldn’t rely on the patient to take a daily dose if you left the stuff there. Injections – you couldn’t go over necessarily every day or evenly regularly of any frequency particularly when I was alone.
INT.: Principally isolation, this was about all that could ……
C.E.C.: Isolation was about all you could do. Now the isolation part of it meant that, as far as women were concerned, you couldn’t isolate the half-caste girls there. On Mud Island, they were all Aboriginals, except a half-caste fellow we had at one time.
INT.: Any Chinese among the lepers at that time?
C.E.C.: No, the South Australian practice had been to repatriate them, if they didn’t die in the meantime. We had to isolate leper girls at Darwin Hospital before Channel Island was opened about ’32 or ’33. It was a godsend because there was ample accommodation and ample water and, in spite of what happened later on, it was quite an attractive spot to be to be got well – good fishing, well wooded and with ample water.
INT.: Despite what was said it was, in it’s time, so far in advance of anything else.
C.E.C.: —– You could do the treatment there because there was a matron there, a trained nurse who could give the injections and she could also supervise the daily doses of whatever medicine had to be taken orally.
INT.: Does your account tell when the Sisters of the Sacred Heart first came in as the nursing sisters? They came in fairly late in the piece.
C.E.C.: Not in my time. Well, there was always a man who was the manager and his wife who was the matron. We started off with Mr. and Mrs. Jenkinson.
INT.: Yes.
C.E.C.: The Sisters came on post-war, I think. It might have been during the war. It was in Kirk’s time anyway.
INT.: What about malaria? Were there large groups of Aboriginals that were …. ?
C.E.C.: I’ve got the malaria written out for you. (This comment indicates Dr Cook supplemented this OH record with written statements, which are known to be in his archive.)
Aboriginal population estimates
The police estimated the figure, each from his own district, year by year, and it was accepted that there were so many in Arnhem Land reserve, you see. Well, from time to time, it will be necessary, you would consider, to reduce the number. I think that before my time every time that you reduced the number, there was a squawk from somebody about the de-population going on. Why doesn’t somebody do something? Nothing definite, but somebody must do something about this. I think that previous Administrators whatever the information that they got were content to leave it around there, leave it around there.
INT.: They were very round figures that they put – I can remember the figure being given.
C.E.C.: Sixteen thousand got to be a figure that lasted for many years.
INT.: That’s right. As a matter of fact that’s the figure I picked up in 1954 when we started to do a full census.
C.E.C.: ’54 was your year was it?
INT.: That’s right.
C.E.C.: Well, we did start to reduce it, and then we started to realise that, in some districts, whatever was going on in Arnhem Land, the numbers were increasing. We were rather prone to think, well, leave it status quo until we’ve got a system of counting these people, and getting the best information. The point about it was that you were counting deaths without any information about births. You were counting births because they took place where a doctor or nurse assisted in Katherine, Maranboy, or wherever, but you weren’t counting deaths that took place out in the bush. And the whole turnout was so uncertain and unreliable that it had to be regarded as an educated guess, and as an educated guess it should remain, so nobody started to take this as an authentic figure, like the statistician would turn out.
INT.: By the same token, people like Hemming and the work they were doing would give you an indication whether there was some increase in the numbers of Aboriginals in that particular area. You could get some reasonably accurate figures from Hemmings’ statement.
C.E.C.: Yes. One thing I noticed myself towards the middle of my time, I suppose, that in certain areas, like the Barkly Tableland, you had young men and young women with no children. Now, it was difficult to explain this on a factual basis because my presumption was that this was a matter of infertility in the female, probably arising in gonorrhea infection that used to come along the main road into the Territory, particularly during the Depression. But that was an educated guess – there was nothing that I could do for it – I suppose there was – to check the lubras around the area. But that improved afterwards, after penicillin. And that leads me to believe that my educated guess was probably all right in the first place.
INT.: Did you notice any significant change in the marriages of old men to a succession of wives or the young men, or other men in the group, taking wives at younger ages? Did you see any significant changes in your period in that respect?
C.E.C.: What I noticed throughout the whole period was that when the pressure – economic pressure – started to get on, young men taken out of the tribe to work on stations – actually, as far as the tribe was concerned, they mustn’t talk to this one and they mustn’t go up that hill, and they mustn’t go in the river, and they mustn’t do this, and mustn’t do that. But the demands of the employer – the requirements of the employer – and they quite acquiesced in complying with this – would require them to ignore the tribal sanctions. Now, the old men would be the blokes that would be worried about this tribal sanction but if they found that any interference from than was going to cost them a bullock, or whatever, —– And with regard to them marrying, missions, of course, completely disorganized this – because if a mission grew a girl up in a dormitory – as they mostly did …….
INT.: I wanted to get your comment on the dormitory system, if you would, as you saw it as it affected marriage?
C.E.C.: A mission grew up a girl in a dormitory, the same way as we brought a girl up in a half-caste home, except that they were bringing up full-blood natives in the dormitories. And, of course, when boys, if they were bringing them up, as they did, when the boys got to a certain age, and the girls got to a certain age, the mission decided it was better to keep the boys out in the camp. So a girl would grow up with all the refinements of a missionary woman, like various little sewing arts and skills, and cooking and dressing, and personal hygiene, and so forth. Missionaries couldn’t reconcile themselves to marrying those girls off to blackfellows living down in the dirty old camp down the back, whether the girl liked it or not. So the missions would realise of course that this girl wasn’t just somebody they were going to marry to a blackfella, this girl was, in fact, somebody’s wife, even though they’d had her from childhood and everything. So, this had to be met, and what they used to do, they used to want to marry that girl to this boy, they were mutually attracted, why not marry them, and they would marry them.
INT.: According to the rites of the church?
C.E.C.: According to the rites of the church. And I suppose the old men might think this is not much chop. But on the other hand, it’s alright here, we’re living on the mission, why make a stir. Things got to be accepted by common usage. They weren’t anything like as strict about what was Aboriginal culture as Xavier Herbert is – he’s much more strict than they were.
Anthropologists
INT.: Or some of the modern anthropologists who want to return to those
C.E.C.: I was on the Institute of Aboriginal studies for a long time, ….. but what got me about these people was that all of a sudden the Larakia, who were practically extinct in my time, about 50 years ago, want land rights now.
INT.: So they discover some Larakia’s.
C.E.C.: So they go to the Institute of Aboriginal Studies and get some co-operative woman that shouldn’t be allowed around asking questions about Aborigines anyway to work out all the lore and culture for them and then they put in a claim they want a point of land extending from Delissaville to the sea, or something. This is all done by so-called experts who’ve trained themselves, not very expertly, by questioning people who haven’t got much knowledge but are very anxious to give an answer, you know? That’s all very exciting news (?). And when it costs the taxpayer money I think it is most exasperating.
INT.: It’s become something of a problem because the tribal association with some of the Aboriginal groups must be very, very tenuous. Even in your day this has happened.
C.E.C.: Kakadu and all up there, where the uranium is, there must be very, very few dinkum ones up there. There would be the Aborigines from all over who would trek up to Oenpelli, would come across from the island and would happen to be there at the time.
INT.: In your day, have you ever heard about the matrilineal descent and it’s association with land, or have you always understood that the authority in the land passed through the patrilineal line?
C.E.C.: Well, the mother’s brother is apparently a complication in the inheritance theories. But most of them, either didn’t know, or didn’t acknowledge, that sexual intercourse had anything to do with childbirth. The result was, where you had to have a man who was responsible for the woman’s son, it had to be the woman’s brother. Dad got no credit for it at all because nobody knew whether he was right or not! There was a thing about the mother’s brother business was the most important man in the boy’s life, I think.
INT.: During initiations he was the person who led the ceremony.
C.E.C.: And it would be, as far as that patrilineal line is concerned, and it would really be matrilineal to the extent that it would be determined by the mother’s brother, not, as you say, by the father, because either they never knew the bloke who was supposed to belong to the girl, I suppose, he was really the father, although the spirit entered into her because she passed a certain spot. She was in fact, his wife, so he was the father.
INT.: And his land association, or land affiliation was derived from where she was at the moment she believed she conceived.
C.E.C.: Could be, yes.
INT.: Yes, there are some nice problems in relation to determining …
C.E.C.: All could be readily resolved by the anthropologists.
INT.: Yes, yes.
C.E.C.: An anthropologist doesn’t know anything about Aboriginal culture that he hasn’t learned from talking to Aboriginals. The important question is that he’s got to talk to the right people, and he’s got to be told the right answers by the right people, and there’s no means of knowing whether this is so or not. Any anthropologist like Strehlow, who grew up with these kids will tell you that the Aboriginal will tell you what you want to know; he wants to please you, and he wants to tell you what he thinks you want. On selected occasions he’ll tell you what he regards as being the truth because he wants you to know, and he doesn’t want to tell you a lie. But ordinarily speaking, one would say when you’re talking about Aboriginal culture, even if you’re a skilled anthropologist, you’ve got a problem, either in selecting the fellow who’s going to be your informant and deciding a) whether he knows what he’s talking about (because he’ll talk to you anyway, because he wants to please you) and b) whether he knows what he’s talking about – which is another problem altogether. And the third point is there are many inhibitions on this prohibition ambit, and for example, women shouldn’t know anything about some things at all. A lot of interviewing with tribes these days is done with women, by women; women anthropologists interviewing lubras. And all that must be suspect: First because of the women who aren’t supposed to know when most tribal culture restricts – the women won’t know anyway – they can only tell you what’s been women’s gossip. And the other is that white women, (anthropologists) aren’t supposed to be told at all, so it’s probably not factual. The very considerable difficulties are ignored, and only recently, just before I left the Institute, there came a complaint from Aborigines in the Kimberleys – the Kimberley side – that certain information that had been collected by women anthropologists was inaccurate and they were complaining about it being collected and they had put a ban on talking to women anthropologists. This was a great problem to an organisation which relied for its information on women anthropologists.
INT.: Yes, this is one of the problems – one of the very real problems …
C.E.C.: When I first went up there and first knew about Aborigines it was always my understanding that women were nothing – she was a chattel. And if she was an annoying chattel you’d just belt her over the head with a knob-kerri stick and send her to hospital. But as I see it today, I went to a medical conference in North Queensland where we were entertained as guests of the local doctors to a display of Aboriginal culture – all women, which I thought unusual, if not possibly entirely deceptive. No men there at all.
INT.: There is a growing feeling among some of the anthropologists that, like the sacred sites, the position of women in society as we’ve understood it, is simply because there is a degree of secrecy attached to what they can say, that they haven’t told people before, and it’s only now coming out that women have a significant role to play in the traditional society. What would be your comment on that?
C.E.C.: Whether the old boys that were the repository of all the lore gave us some time, in fact, told the women everything, which they purport to know now, is another very contentious problem. Becauseif the old boys are, in fact, devoted and sincere, and wholly dedicated to their culture, the way we expect them to be, their prohibition against telling women anything determines that they won’t tell. Either they’ve given all that away and can tell anything and the fact that they will talk to women, or will let you talk to women, or will let women talk to you, means that they’ve abandoned one of the first principles of the culture they’re supposed to be expounding to you. If they’ve done that they could have abandoned others.
INT.: You’ve mentioned Strehlow’s name. Did he come on to your staff as the first patrol officer in the Northern Territory, or ….. but you would have met him?
C.E.C.: Yes, he came on my staff, not up there, only in the Alice Springs area – the western desert he was in.
INT.: I’d be interested in examining that a little further. He was the first patrol officer to be appointed in Central Australia?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: And he came on to your staff at that time, with a background that few other people would have had?
Tribal law and British justice
C.E.C.: Yes. He’d grown up amongst them, at Hermannsburg. There’s quite a lot of stuff in the various departments of his. They’d get a problem of a lying witness, or an unreliable witness in the court and they would ask his opinion about Aboriginal testimony. I was reading one the other day, it was quite interesting …..
INT.: He’s written a number of books, a number of articles, dealing with Aboriginal testimony and the operation of Aboriginal law. There’s a bit of a move these days to write some of the principles of Aboriginal law into the criminal code. Do you recall in your time, where a patrol officer or somebody would speak on behalf of the Aboriginal where the court did not have some concern for the tribal implications of a major crime like murder?
C.E.C.: A major crime had to be brought before a Judge of the Supreme Court. It had to be (in my time, anyway, and for considerable periods before and after) – the defendant had to be defended by learned counsel. There were incidents in history, where Government Residents and things played ducks and drakes with this. But in my time, and I think I could safely say ever since Gilruth’s time, certainly all the Commonwealth time, in all major crimes Aboriginals were defended by barristers. But these boys were always intent – well, they wanted to do a good job, and distinguish themselves as barristers, they never missed a point like an interpreter hearing a long story from a boy in the box – he say, no. This bloke’s spoken for three or four minutes explaining seething, and it’s interpreted “he say, no”. Well, these boys were always alert to that sort of tripe going on. And the Judge, particularly, Wells, was always very suspicious of second hand evidence. He didn’t like interpreters. I think when Wells was assigned a black fella he got a very good go.
INT.: I’m interested to hear you say that because there is a tendency still to denigrate the work of people like Wells and Kriewaldt and others, (Kriewaldt was in my time) and who were at great pains when Aboriginals appeared before them, not only to see that justice was done, but for all the appearances for justice to be there. Did you have anything in the nature of antecedent reports where say, Strehlow would prepare a statement about the tribal implications of a particular incident that was before the courts?
C.E.C.: They’ve always been at that. But, in those days, Strehlow would have been used for that purpose in Central Australia, but up at the Top End the lawyer would use this – but this would simply be – it wouldn’t be an anthropologist’s statement of opinion – it would be a statement by the defendant through his counsel, those sorts of things.
INT.: To come back, were you associated in any way with the aftermath of the ’36 Coniston massacres? Do you remember those when the old man was speared in The Granites?
C.E.C.: Where?
INT.: At Coniston, just between Yuendumu and the edge of Coniston Station.
C.E.C.: I don’t recall this. I was probably involved in it as Chief Protector; the trial would be in Alice Springs, I guess. Was the massacre by natives of natives, or the police?
INT.: No, it was a follow-up, punitive, it was probably the last – well, it’s so-called ‘punitive’ party” by police and Aboriginal trackers on a group of Aboriginals.
C.E.C.: The Minister gave a direction – I was reading this the other day and it reminded me – at one stage that no Aboriginal should be charged with an offence against Australian Law if (particularly, if this was a capital offence) it involved complying with tribal law. Unless, in the opinion of the Chief Protector, (poor devil) this was dictated by tribal obligations, he wasn’t to be arrested and charged with this offence. Now the Minister’s rule (?) was doing this sort of thing and the occasion came up (it might have been the occasion you’re talking about) where I was asked about something and I gave the opinion that this was dictated by tribal law. And that would have meant that the defendant shouldn’t be arrested and charged. The police complained, on the other hand, that Common Law (British Law) imposed upon the constable the obligation that he must arrest. And the question came up here, oh, you tell us not to do anything if the Chief Protector says it’s tribal, we ask the Chief Protector and he says it’s tribal, and these policemen have gone and arrested him what now? So the first question went to Asche about this, and he said, whether the Minister was competent to give this direction. The first opinion was that the minister was competent. I think, being a friend of mine, he might have said, to save complications you’ve been told it’s a tribal offence, yes, the Minister is competent to give this direction.
But the police wouldn’t let it rest there because it put them in the wrong and they said we get people bashing people on the head all around the place, and we can’t do anything about it, unless we can find the Chief Protector, and we’re supposed to be arresting these people. So Abbott got into the act then, and from that time forward I heard no more about it, and he wouldn’t tell you what was going on if it concerned you. I don’t know what happened. I’ll try and find out on the file what happened. I think that Asche came back again and said that it was an obligation on the police to arrest and therefore the thing was a bit of a mess up, and they’d better scramble out of it the best way they could, which was probably told for the Minister to withdraw the direction. But what actually did happen, I don’t know, because as I said, Abbott never told me anything; he made a point of hiding everything.
INT.: But it’s interesting in the light though, of the move by the Law Reform Commission now to write elements of the traditional law into the Australian Statute Books so the commission of acts which under our law which might bring a penalty would only bring the tribal penalty, whatever that penalty is, where the misdemeanour is committed under tribal compulsion.
C.E.C.: I can’t see any rationale in it, Harry, and I never could, because I feel this way: The police are there to maintain order. If Jackie hits Billy over the head, knocks him rotten, and I say, oh, that’s only a tribal offence, the police can say, what about when Tommy comes along and bashes Billy for killing their cobber – that’s tribal law too! We can go on and on, and on – and there’s nothing done about it.
INT.: Where do you draw the line because that offence, under tribal conditions, draws some sort of payback situation in the …..
C.E.C.: You’ve got to civilise the country to apply the law, or you can abandon it altogether and just have anarchy. —-
Missions
C.E.C.: (The purpose of the Missions’ activity in entering) and disrupting the privacy of a reserve was a) they were going to propagate the gospel and Christianise these heathens and b) they were going to educate them so that they would know enough to come in and live with us in harmony. The last one I went to was in ’53, I think.
INT.: The Missions Administration Conference?
C.E.C.: The mission thing. And there they are talking about a compromise of letting the Aboriginal retain his culture, but Christianising him – turning him into a Christian but letting him retain his own culture. Now, these things are completely incompatible, completely incompatible. His own culture will permit him or prevent him talking to this boy, talking to that girl, marrying that girl, going up there; the mission can say, go over there and bury the night soil, or dig a garden, marry this girl, take this fellow with you and play football or something; all perfectly innocent activities as Christians, but perfectly sinful as far as Aboriginal culture is concerned. And what’s more, as faras the Aboriginal culture is concerned it’s not a matter of religion, it’s a matter of law: He must not do this otherwise he disrupts the social order.
INT.: And for which there is a very substantial sanction in most cases.
C.E.C.: But nobody knows what they want – that’s why I was so anxious in 1953 to get the Minister to say, now, this is what we want, if you don’t like it, argue it now, and shut up! But let’s get on with it!
INT.: But this is the dilemma that faces the churches.
C.E.C.: – What was the right policy and one I wanted to talk about was the anthropologists who said put them on inviolable reserves and let them live their own lives. Now, I described this as apartheid and the anthropologists shot up sky high! It is apartheid!
INT.: That’s right! It’s the homeland situation that you’ve got in South Africa. And where do you go from there?
C.E.C.: Well, there was sufficient opposition to it to blow the anthropologists down, and they had to concede that the missions could go in – which I think was the (most) ruinous mistake they ever made. If they wanted to proceed, as Hasluck did, with assimilating the black population into the white and making it one homogenous community, the worst thing they should have done was to just let sporadic missions go into isolated spots and yabber, that must be done on a concerted basis, like Hasluck decided to do it. Hasluck tried to do it, I think, and it proved too big a job, too quickly attempted, and too unstable an opinion in the Australian people. If the Australian people had backed Hasluck right through til now, we’d have made a lot of headway, in one direction; though it mightn’t have been the direction that the anthropologists want. I don’t know whether these people want to be left as a museum specimen.
INT.: I’m sure that they don’t.
C.E.C.: They want their wireless sets and their comforts.
INT.: That’s right; they want all these things and these are …….
C.E.C.: They want land rights to get rich from the uranium companies.
Aboriginal Employment
INT.: What was your policy working towards in relation to the employment of Aboriginals on pastoral properties?
C.E.C.: Well, for reasons I mentioned before, we expected him to maintain and feed all the dependants of all the Aborigines that he employed, and this, according to him (that’s the employer) involved feeding the dependants of employed natives and possibly a number of unemployed natives as well because they were associated with the boys that were employed and they didn’t want them scattering around and frightening the cattle.
INT.: They were members of that particular family or tribal group.
C.E.C.: And what they used to try and do then was to give them token employment. Like if a Chinaman cook had a garden, get a whole lot of jam tins and punch holes in the bottom and let them walk around watering cabbages and so forth with this improvised watering can – those sorts of things. They had them as goatherds to go out and sit with the goats to see that the dingoes didn’t get them, and those sorts of things. So on the ground they had to demonstrate that they did, in fact, feed these people, and that the diet, was in fact, a satisfactory diet. On that ground we could easily prove that at the rate of five bob a day, or week, whatever it was, (five shillings a week) that the blackfella was earning as a paid employee, that it was costing him far more to do this job than to pay the wage. In addition to that, we made him join a medical benefit fund. According to the number of natives he employed he had to pay so much a year to a medical benefit fund which entitled him to, and demanded of him, that he report illness amongst his employees and amongst the dependants on his station. The point was that if he made a stockman he could rely on him probably to report that this fella had a broken leg and get him sent into Darwin or Camooweal, or wherever, for medical attention …….
INT.: Who ran this medical attention? Was it a government fund?
C.E.C.: Yes, it was a government run fund. The Department ran it in conjunction with the white medical benefits.
You couldn’t rely on him reporting illness in a nomad that happened to be in his camp at the time. If this had been an accident and he wasn’t working for Brunette or he wasn’t working for Anthony’s, there was an accident in the camp, or somebody hit him over the head and he was moribund or something, you can’t expect the station to take somebody off an important job and put him in a truck, put the black fella in the truck send him into Camooweal or Cloncurry or up to Darwin, at his expense. So, to make sure that he did it at his expense, he had to join the medical benefits fund and then he could send anybody in, where he might have felt oh, I’ll pay for this fella. There was no necessity for him to say, I ‘m not going to pay for that bugger. He’s paid for already anyway, you see. So, we were able to put him in a situation where he would report all illness and send for medical attention when it was necessary, without cost to himself. Now, this is one of the reasons why we wanted numbers from them, you see. We’d be guided by that from the local police station. He was told he had to put down a strip and he couldn’t get his licence unless he put the strip down.
INT.: This is license to employ Aboriginals?
C.E.C.: Yes, in the country district. So, on the pretext he didn’t have to pay a wage he got quite a number of obligations. He had to put down a strip so we could get into him, and he could get his natives out, and he had to do this feeding business for people that were concerning him, and he had to join his medical fund. Altogether, judging by the nature of native labour, and its unreliability in most cases, particularly like the people who watered the cabbages with jam tins, I think that he did spend more on these, but that’s not to say, when they started to pay them white wages that it would cover it. When they started on white wages, they had to move them all out.
INT.: What about the general conditions such as housing and things like that, there was no obligation on him to provide those?
C.E.C.: He had to provide accommodation for them if he kept them. Sanitary accommodation he had to provide if he kept them at the station, or wherever they were. But that’s not to say he had to go out to the corroboree ground and build them houses out there. On his station he had to build than waterproof shelter.
INT.: And a water supply and night soil disposal arrangements that sort of thing.
C.E.C.: Actually employers – I went around in retrospect in 1950 – afterwards – to have a look. I would say the Aborigines employed on cattle stations were no problem. The problems were on the missions – that’s where the problems were.
INT.: In other words, you probably hold the view that there was a symbiotic relationship between the management and the Aboriginals which worked in the interests of both of them?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: And when large numbers were there – when I say large numbers – in total – and with the attitude of most managements towards Aboriginals, they were getting a pretty fair spin.
C.E.C.: Where there were women on stations, there got to be some after a while, you noticed that the women were quite solicitous when they were employed – you probably noticed it yourself?
INT.: That’s right.
C.E.C.: Where there were women they got affection from different ones, and they (blank) from these kids, and that woman. It was much easier to be sure everything was alright when there was a woman. On one of the old stockmen-boundary rider stations when I first went on up there, you know, two men in a galvanised iron hut and forty or fifty blackfellas including thirty or forty gins.
INT.: That did present a problem. But I think it would be fair to say that in the Territory, in my time, the changeover from Aboriginals being located in large numbers on 250 of the pastoral properties to the missions and settlements was a period of some stress. Because the missions and settlements were not geared to look after them in terms of hygiene facilities and housing and so on and the congregation of the larger numbers created some massive problems. This was brought about pretty largely in the mid-sixties by the introduction of Award wages, and more stringent conditions.
Missions
C.E.C.: I had no experience of the Award wage system. I do know, from my own experience, that the great objection to the mission was that somebody would go along, looking for a site for a mission, and they would find a place where there was permanent water, the water had never been known to fail, and so that would be a good place to start a mission. They’d send a missionary or two missionaries down there with or without their wives and they’d build them a house and they’d start a mission. Now what they never visualised, apparently, was that the mission that started off with twenty or thirty blacks around this homestead would, during certain seasons, and ultimate years, attract 600 or 700, and the country couldn’t feed them, unless some food was provided by the mission. Now, no mission that I ever saw provided any food locally except cassava. They might give somebody a stick of tobacco for bringing in a kangaroo or a big fish or something but speaking generally, without careful thought, I cannot remember a single mission, in my time, where they gave real attention to horticulture to the extent that they could feed themselves, except with some damn carbohydrate, like cassava, where they really would go to town sometimes.
INT.: There were some people like Shepherdson at Elcho, where they had an adequate water supply, were able to produce a good deal of fruit and vegetables during some parts of the year.
C.E.C.: Well, most of the ones I saw, had attempted it. Hermannsburg had grown grapes and made wine but they couldn’t feed anyone in the drought without giving them scurvy. Millingimbi, and those missions down there in Webb’s time (Webb was a good man, you wouldn’t remember him, you’ve probably heard of him). All the good ones like Warren and Webb got bumped off by motor cars or something – motor accidents. But what they would do, you’d find that one missionary would go heart and soul into a vegetable garden, and then he’d get sick, or be transferred on leave, and somebody would come up and relieve him —-
INT.: And he wouldn’t know enough about agriculture.
C.E.C.: One place I went to had quite a big herd of nanny goats, but no billy. No milk, no youngsters, no nothing. How do you get like that?
INT.: Was there much evidence of scurvy in your days?
C.E.C.: There was an outbreak of scurvy up here – berri berri they had on the Tableland. Kirk got involved in that, I didn’t get involved in that. But I was down here at Tanumbirini on the malarial survey in ‘29 and I came up to Brunette (they had a wireless set there) to get in touch with Darwin and I got a telegram there from (Minister) Abbott to tell me to go to Hermannsburg where there was an outbreak of a mysterious disease, and there was considerable mortality. Hermannsburg wasn’t in my area at that time; Hermannsburg was Central Australia you see.
INT.: And that’s when there were two separate administrations?
C.E.C.: That’s right, they had a doctor. They weren’t stuck together again until 1931, and this was 1929. Well, what they were doing there was rationing them on flour and water. Each native was entitled to so much flour. At one stage they got an outbreak of diarrhoea and thought they’d better do something about it and put barley with it. By and large, they were on flour and water for a matter of about five months. They started to get sick, haemorrhage in the joints, and falling of the teeth, bleeding and so forth. They lost quite a number.
INT.: You didn’t see any of the signs of massive yaws condition – that was mainly in Central Australia right out in the desert areas?
C.E.C.: We saw a lot of yaws. We almost had it controlled. You didn’t see much yaws?
INT.: I only saw one case of yaws in the period I was there.
C.E.C.: What we did first of all we got every case of yaws that was brought in and we treated it with arsenic – mother and child. But later on I used to train the police how to give them an intramuscular shot – this arsenic stuff – and where there were women out there, like Mrs. Turner – I’d train them and they would get the kids up and they would give them these injections. So we reduced the incidence of yaws quite a lot.
Arsenic poisoning
INT.: Do you think the stories relating to the poisoning of Aborigines by giving them arsenic, derived from some of the stories that developed out of this sort of treatment for yaws?
C.E.C.: No, I’ll tell you an actual story now: This is one that will have to wait a hundred years.
INT.: O.K., we’ll put the embargo on this one.
C.E.C.: There was a fella that took up a station, up on the Wilton, and he was doing well there, I think he might have been a returned soldier on a soldier’s block or something, you see. Time comes and he goes away and brings back a girl, a white girl. They apparently live there quite successfully and quite happily until one day the constable at Roper River says to me, you know, we’re going to have trouble here, he’ll kill her. I said, why would he want to kill her for? Oh, he said, she’s always interfering with him. She wants him to marry her daughter and he says he’s in no condition to be marrying a girl. I said, who are you talking about, anyway? Who’s up there? Oh, her mother, her mother’s up there. She’s always nag, nag, nag, and he comes down and tells me his story – about nag, nag, nag, up there. He’11 bump her off, you watch. Why didn’t she go south and take the daughter with her, some stupid remark like that, is the way he goes and the case was closed.
About two months later he reports to Darwin that Mrs. so-and-so is dead and he suspects foul play, and he wants to arrest the bloke, you see. And he describes the illness, you see. She had vomiting, she had a temperature, she had this and the other. And Stretton said to me, what about this? I said, malignant malaria, I think, it’s out there. I don’t think he had any reason to be jumping to arsenic poisoning; he’d been telling me he could have bumped this woman off for a while, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t die of natural causes in spite of that. And he said well, what do we do? Well, I said, you send a bloke out and bring the body in, or specimens of the body, including the hair, and I’ll do tests on it to see if there’s any arsenic in the body.
So, Kirk and the constable went out to do a post mortem on the body, such as he could, it had been buried about a fortnight, and I telegraphed down to Canberra and asked for the chemicals for a test for arsenic, you see, which is zinc and sulphuric acid and whatnots. So while Kirk and this copper were still coming in with the remains of the body, this stuff comes up. I don’t know, they’d never been so quick before.
Anyhow it came up and I said I’d better check this god damn stuff out to make sure there’s no contamination, we don’t want to hang somebody because the chemicals got arsenic in the glassware. So all the material, glassware and everything that I would use in the test, all the chemicals, I ran a test on the glass tube, and it was positive. So, if her specimen had been in there, he would have been convicted for arsenic poisoning. So I promptly telegraphed back and said ‘this bloody stuff was no good. You’ve got arsenic through the material which was required for the capital offence case in the Supreme Court ultimately’. So the stuff came up again, and I did another test and this was quite alright.
So by which time Kirk had arrived and I put these bits and pieces in his elementary specimens, his hair, and bits of stuff – completely negative, so no arsenic poisoning. Now, because that woman died, the policeman said she died of arsenic poisoning. He didn’t know why she died but she had to die of arsenic poisoning. Now, it is my view, that all these — lots of natives have died from various illnesses – moribund, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, and what have you, were bumped off by arsenic – there’s no shortage of disease in this country to have wiped out all these people without any assistance from poisoning. Whether there was ever any truth in those, I don’t know. If it had happened – once – there were probably people who boasted of doing it – I don’t know. I have heard that there have been rumours.
But as far as we were concerned I don’t think there was ever an occasion when it was used in the Territory, or any case for it being used in the Territory. But down here, I am sure, it is over exaggerated because, you know, as well as I do, these people that are closely associated with being do-gooders with natives are awful liars, and they get all sorts of fantastic stories we get stuck with.
Self-Government for the Territory
INT.: I’d be interested to know what you think of the Territory’s move towards self-government and the affect this could well have on some of the areas in which you and I have been interested over the years.
C.E.C.: Well, I think it is the greatest thing that has happened to the Territory in my lifetime. I would have particularly appreciated it because when we wanted to get anything done, in making a submission we had to make it long enough to embrace all the opinions that could come up from any of the staff from the office boy through to the Secretary to anticipate every question that might be asked and every objection that might be raised, to answer it so that the information was all there. After all, the document would go down in the first or second week of the month and a reply could not come back until late, and probably, the month afterwards, at the earliest because so much that was not understood in Canberra had to be conveyed from Darwin to Canberra for the staff to read and understand and, I believe, that quite frequently, because when this thing arrived – they only arrived originally once a month, with a deal of other mail – and it was seen to be five or six pages, or perhaps twelve, trying to cover every possible objection to meet (their requirements) and get a decision with one mail, this would be thrown into the “too hard basket” or the pending basket because it was too long to read. I don’t know, and can only hazard a guess, how much of what was so laboriously sent down from Darwin by different staff, never got an intelligent reading, let alone ministerial approval.
The Bleakley Report
INT.: You have some observations to make on the Bleakley report?
C.E.C.: To comprehend the Bleakley report, its origins, its implications and the purposes actuating its recommendations, some knowledge of the economic, social and administrative structure of the Territory antecedent to it, and contemporary with it, is necessary and I shall precede my own comments with a short introduction.
Throughout any discussion of Bleakley’s report here, I am to be regarded as CMO and CPA of North Australia, speaking in 1928-29.
From the time of Finniss’s expedition to Adam Bay and until 1910 South Australia had in the Northern Territory, no administrative machinery, no special legislation for Aboriginal care, nor any form of native welfare department. Until 1906 when Strangman made his first representation about it and in 1908 it took effect. Dr Strangman had the office transferred to the police because it interfered too heavily with his practice.
The office of Colonial Surgeon and Government Medical Officer in South Australia designated N.T. embraced that also of Protector of Aborigines – no special powers, no staff and no legal machinery had been provided. The duties for the function were largely hypothetical and in reality limited to the areas of the medical professional practice of the holder.
After 1908, when Dr Cyril Strangman had the duties transferred to the Police, Government Residents and police persisted in efforts to have legislation provided by the South Australian parliament to enable protectors to regulate conditions of employment and to control miscegenation. Their efforts were unsuccessful until 1910, when an Aborigines Act was promulgated by the South Australian parliament. It had not yet been implemented when the administration of the Territory was transferred on 1 January 1911 to the Commonwealth but W.G. Stretton, an officer of South Australian the police, had been appointed under the Act to act as Chief Protector for the Northern Territory and after transfer continued for a period as Chief Protector for the Commonwealth Administration in the Territory. He took the opportunity immediately, to put into effect some measures which as a South Australian officer he had long advocated. These included the clearance of native camps from the vicinity of town and Aborigines employed in town to live in reserves set aside for the purpose. For Darwin, Kahlin Beach and the high ground overlooking it was chosen for such a reserve. Another project dear to his heart was the rescue of half-caste children from native camps and their accommodation in special institutions for schooling.
After a brief and abortive attempt to establish a system of protection staffed by medical officers under Dr Burston, the Commonwealth appointed Professor Baldwin Spencer to frame an Aboriginal policy consistent with his knowledge of Australian Anthropology. Baldwin Spencer believed that there could be no prospect of improving the native living standard until the rising generation could be trained in industry. Spencer recommended the establishment of special native reserves. He suggested these should approximate 7,000 square miles each, in areas of heavier native population carefully chosen to cover the favoured tribal migration and ceremonial areas of each tribe in country suitable for ultimate pastoral development. His concept was that on these reserves, Aborigines as the local tribes, should continue free of interference, to live in traditional fashion, at will supplying labour to pastoral industry around them, whilst the young under the direction of married managers were given an opportunity for education and trading in pastoral management and associated trades and avocations, with the objective, ultimately, of making them and the reserve self-supportive. The staff would include at least one education officer and the duties associated with moral and ethical civil instruction could be offered to church organisations, on a distinct understanding that this was a government settlement and under strict government control. The regulation of employment would be effected by a system of licence and agreement, requiring payments of a statutory wage, for which part would be retained by the protector to serve as a means of training in the principle of saving as insurance against periods of unemployment.
Spencer acted as Chief Protector for a year, until December 1912 and during this time, set out the principles of his system and the machinery of an Aboriginal protection branch in the Administration. On his departure, the officer of Chief Protector again, was left for a year to Stretton, who was followed by a succession of officers responsible to the Government Secretary. Little progress in advancing Spencer’s policy was possible during this period owing to the disruption of administration consequent upon the outbreak of war – 1914-18 – and industrial turmoil associated with popular revolts against the Gilruth administration.
From 1920 until 1927 attempts to develop and evolve policy lapsed. Aboriginal administration, limited to the behavioural clauses of the Ordinance and the regulation of employment, was undertaken by the police. In 1927, the federal government appointed the North Australia Commission to undertake the development of the Northern Territory, without the embarrassments of civil administration. The 20th parallel of south latitude was set as a dividing line between two separate administrative areas, North and Central Australia, each with its own Government Resident. North Australia was to be administered from Darwin and Central Australia, from a new town to be established north of Heavitree Gap and called Stuart, with the intention of ultimately completing the north-south railway. Railway construction was undertaken to connect Oodnadatta with Stuart and Katherine with Daly Waters.
Between Darwin and Stuart, a distance of 1,500 miles – apart from the over telegraph line, was by pack-horse or horse or donkey team and the north-south Road which traversed largely unsettled country and was merely a track leading linking natural waters and bores. Along this track at intervals of some 250 miles, were repeating stations for the overland telegraph line, these being staffed, usually, by two telegraph operators and a linesman. Communication between Stuart and Darwin was not important as each territory capital was in communication with the federal seat of government at Melbourne (later Canberra) by telegraph over the OT line. In addition, Darwin had a monthly service conducted by an overseas steamer. Stuart had a coach and horse or camel service to Oodnadatta, which was subsequently of course, replaced by a motor service and later by rail connection. Protection as a function of administration in each territory was completely independent one form the other although they both functioned by virtue of the law – the Aboriginal Ordinance 1918-1925, which had evolved from the original South Australian Act of 1910. Subject to approval of the Minister, each territory was free to make its own regulations and seek its own amendments to the Aboriginal Ordinance. The first change, in 1927, was an important innovation transferring of the office of Chief Protector of Aboriginals from the Chief of Police to the Chief Medical Officer.
No such change could be made in Central Australia until 1929, when DR W.B. Kirkland was detached from North Australia Medical Service and posted to Stuart, as Medical Officer and Chief Protector Central Australia following an outbreak of scurvy with high mortality at Hermannsburg Mission.
INT.: And he was the first medical officer to be appointed in that area?
C.E.C.: Yes. They had occasionally sought the services of medical officers on the staff of railway construction companies.
INT.: But Kirkland was the first officer to have general medical duties, in the area, as distinct from the railway?
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: Okay.
C.E.C.: As a result of their separate systems of administration, significant differences developed in Aboriginal policy in these two territories. Central Australia continued with the outlook and routine procedure inherited from the South Australian police. The population of approximately 400 in Central Australia had mentally developed a rigid attitude toward Aboriginal employment and protection without suggestions of change intended as improvement. In 1931 both territories were reunited, reverting to a system of administration by an Administrator at Darwin with direction of Aboriginal affairs by the Chief Protector of Aborigines, Darwin, who was also chief Medical Officer of the Northern Territory Medical Service. With this change, amendments to the Aboriginal Ordinance effective in North Australia after 1926, became automatically and suddenly effective in Central Australia, occasioning bitter controversy.
From 1930, Central Australia was connected by rail to Adelaide and convenient for persons interested in Aboriginal affairs, political and academic, to visit Alice Springs and study the position there. Slow to adapt to change, and voluble in the controversy of change, the public in Central Australia (some word) a great deal of uninformed and misinformed criticism which made Aboriginal administration in the Northern Territory a persistent source of academic and political complaint. These differences in outlook were developing in Central Australia when Bleakley made his survey there before arriving in North Australia. This is a point important to remember when reading his report, for he was reporting upon two entirely different administrations in one report of a single survey. Conditions in Central Australia and North Australia were in many respects not similar but, in a single report, what he noticed here and what he noticed there were not distinguished by identifying the territory concerned. In consideration of the Bleakley report, my comments will be dictated chiefly by my own experience and opinion in North Australia. In Central Australia at that time, I had no jurisdiction and any comment I make will be purely incidental to a remark of Bleakley’s or a reference to North Australian policy.
Visitors with a South Australian background of sympathy for advancement of the Aboriginal and impatient of delay in demonstrable improvement, (and) became partisan in the controversy and did not understand but could at least agree who attribute all problems of administration to government neglect or incompetence.
INT.: Go ahead.
C.E.C.: Aboriginal employment: Employment of Aborigines by any person was legally permitted only under licence and the terms of employment could be set out by agreement between the employer and a protector. By virtue of the powers as Chief Protector, the Chief Medical Officer was able to specify special conditions of employment in particular cases, and to require licensees to conform to special measures, in particular circumstances. In towns where the licence to employ Aboriginals provided for individual contracts and agreement endorsed by a protector, this review would be effected by a medical examination on commencing or ceasing employment or when withdrawing money from the trust fund. Business under the Aboriginal Ordinance was, of course, transacted at the medical service office. Visitors to town, for example, prisoners or witnesses, brought in by police, employees accompanying employers or travelling under their cognisance, were submitted to medical review on arrival, as were visitors to the Kahlin Compound.
In country districts where the employees were employed without an individual contract or agreement, the licensee was required to muster and present for examination by a medical officer or other authorised officer of the medical service, all natives, including children, living on the property whether employed or not. Employment in country districts did not always require payment of a cash wage. Employment of the young able bodied, in stock work, did entail diversion of the most agile hunters from providing for the tribe. In addition, graziers tended to encourage natives to camp near the homestead in order to prevent them harassing stock grazing around isolated water holes elsewhere on the station. This encouragement took the form of issuing beef, flour, tea, sugar and tobacco, sufficient to induce them to minimize migratory hunting.
To ensure that neither of these factors led to inadequate feeding of the unemployed, it was necessary for the Chief Protector to assure himself that the total value of food issued as rations issued to employees and tribal dependents was not less than the total value of wages earned by the employee and where the Chief Protector was satisfied that this was so, payment of a cash wage was not required. Indeed, payment of wages in cash was not favoured at this time, because in country districts there offered no acceptable use for money. It favoured the development of gambling, which in turn led to more objectionable vices. To substantiate any claim for the waiving of a cash wage, the employer was required, subject to checks, to disclose the number and identity of natives employed and those unemployed and claimed to be fed.
The Chief Protector required also, that all individuals be provided with cover for medical attention under the Aboriginals Medical Benefit Fund, and as a condition was also required, as condition of his licence being issued, to clear and maintain a landing strip with prescribed dimensions for the Northern Territory Medical Service plane, permitting visits from medical officers for inspection and medical attention and evacuation of the sick and injured. It was therefore to the employer’s interest, and so required, to muster and present for medical examination all natives available. Inspections were conducted as routine at least once a year and in addition, whenever medical calls were made at the station.
Employment of Aboriginals in country districts also included droving and there was no opportunity for a drover to undertake the feeding of the employee’s dependents. Inquiries into the conditions under which Aboriginals were employed by drovers, suggested that there were dependents left behind. These could suffer neglect during the employee’s absence. To ensure the employee, himself too, in transit with a mob, was adequately cared for when leaving, for instance, the warm coastal area to take cattle across the tablelands to Queensland was adequately clad for the bitter cold of the winter nights on the open tablelands, regulations were therefore gazetted to safeguard the care of the employee’s dependents during his absence and to require payment of a cash wage for himself, enabling him to buy extra blankets and clothing if these were not provided for him.
The conditions and cash requirements imposed by these regulations had been carefully researched and discussed with drovers, who agreed to them before they were gazetted. Before being permitted to employ Aboriginal drovers, employers were required to enter into a recognizance to return the native to his own country and these precautions were embodied in the conditions of the recognizance. The Chief Protector directed that it be made a condition of recognizance by protectors, that the employer enter in an agreement to comply with the prescribed conditions to the payment of a wage to the employee, sufficient to safeguard the nutrition of his dependents and to provide him with funds for his own comfort during his time on the road. These regulations were disallowed by the Senate, but the agreements had already been signed by most drovers and this disallowance did not invalidate the agreement for the droving season that year.
By the next season the regulations had been approved, subject to a reduction in the rate of wage; a secret (blank) of this incident was a revocation of the Government Resident powers to make regulations under the Aboriginals Ordinance.
The ordinance empowered the Administrator or Government Resident to make regulations under the Aboriginal Ordinance for giving effect of the Ordinance.
INT.: But these were subject to disallowance by a vote in the Federal House?
C.E.C.: Yes. These would be tabled in the House, so it was open to parliament to disallow them.
INT.: Disallow them – yes.
C.E.C.: The Minister could disallow them too, I suppose.
INT.: Without having tabled them? Could the Minister disallow them without having tabled them?
C.E.C.: Yes, before – he would just tell us – – –
INT.: It is not on?
C.E.C.: Yes. As part of the plan to raise the status of persons of mixed blood, the Half-Caste Apprentices Regulations under the Aboriginals Ordinance were delivered. These empowered the chief protector of Aborigines to require that the holder of a licence to employ Aborigines in the country districts, to employ and train half-caste apprentices – half-caste boys – as apprentices, in the pastoral industry. The apprentice was to be paid a prescribed wage and must be housed and treated, not as an Aboriginal but, as a white employee.
Like the drover’s regulations, these regulations had been researched for the Chief Protector and agreed upon with pastoral employers and the North Australian Workers Union. The conditions of employment imposed by the regulations was that the boys must be provided with accommodation and living conditions of a standard not lower than that required by the pastoral industry award for white employees. About this time an Employees Accommodation Ordinance which prescribed standards of accommodation for pastoral employees, similar to that imposed but, not in operation, in Queensland, was disallowed by the Senate on the ground that its conditions were too exacting. The Half-Caste Apprentice Regulations, like the drover’s regulations, were subsequently allowed and became law.
This detail of employment is included here, to explain the attitude of the North Australia Aboriginal Administration to the employment proposals suggested by Mr Bleakley – it is to be noted that the existing and planned North Australia procedure was well in advance of the suggestions made by Bleakley in his report. The attitude of the Bleakley report – the recommendations of the Bleakley report in regard to the Aboriginal compound at Darwin should be considered in the light of the North Australian policy which I shall now detail.
It might eventually prove to be the ultimate (blank) of federal government policy in respect of the Myall Aboriginal. It was clearly necessary to recognize that the best interests of both races demanded that the detribalised Aboriginal already living permanently or semi-permanently in contact with white settlements, must be educated without delay to live in comfortably and habitually at a standard hygienically, legally and socially compatible with complete acceptance in the general Australian community.
INT.: That is a very interesting observation.
C.E.C.: To this end, I had planned to establish elsewhere than at Kahlin compound, an Aboriginal settlement with its own hospital and outpatient department and special clinics, its own police force and a school for the education of Aboriginal children in accordance with the Education Department standards. Later, Bagot was chosen for this purpose, but no proposal for the development of Bagot had been initiated whilst the Bleakley report was under consideration. However, my attitude to Bleakley’s recommendations was determined by the fact that I had plans of my own, which were incompatible with his.
At Bagot people were to be housed in hygienic accommodation, designed to advance individual families from bush whirly and scrap iron huts, to a conventional type home conforming to the standards described by the building regulations for the Territory, each with its own kitchen, ablution and toilet facilities. Here it was hoped the Aboriginal child, youth and adults, without any conflict of tribal culture, would learn to understand and accept the responsibilities of the individuals living in a settled community and would himself, adapt to and conform to it in habit and behaviour with the hygienic principles and social obligations of a new social order.
With the environment under close medical observation, with controlled nutrition and a supervised hygienic environment, it was intended to study the problems to be confronted and the techniques to be developed for use on missions, settlements and elsewhere in educating the detribalised individual and his family to a comfortable and acceptable coexistence with the white community. It was recognised that this would require basic education but, in addition, it demanded infiltration of a sense of community responsibility, the voluntary adoption of certain standards of behaviour and spontaneous compliance with community sanction. This must include acceptable standards of personal and domestic hygiene, recognition of social obligations and the responsibility to report illness and to comply with prophylactic ritual and maintenance therapies in the prevention of communicable disease.
Attention is to be given to infiltrating in both sectors and all ages a constant trust in medical officers, medical assistants and nurses and for this purpose the unity of medical service with Aboriginal protection staff, was expected to be invaluable.
A school for Aboriginal children was established and a special teacher was appointed in 1938. At the end of the year, 42 Aboriginal children were enrolled and the daily average attendance was 36.
(With) projects (in mind?) and with these intentions I personally, could see no value in the recommendations made in the Bleakley report. The alternative in considering the report in detail was the change in medical and health administrations affected by the 1927 amendment. The South Australian government had made some provision in its original appointment to provide for the care of Aboriginal health and seemed to have recognised that disease in the Aboriginal might be fostered by contact with the white race. It does not appear that this concept influenced decisions from that time forward. Certainly, during the South Australian administration, no special effort was made by the certain protectors to get access to the native population, to study disease or to treat it and the alacrity with which Dr Strangman’s request to be relieved of his Aboriginal duties because it interfered with his practice is a sufficient indication that medical and health work amongst Aboriginals was purely a secondary matter, taking a low level of precedence after morality and employment.
The Commonwealth, in 1911, apparently, intended to provide special medical service for the Aboriginals. Indeed, three medical officer appointments were made under the direction of Chief Protector, himself a medical officer. However, this organisation never really functioned. The Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector (Dr Basedow), resigned after only a month; the remaining medical officer being posted elsewhere.
Baldwin Spencer’s policy included no medical component in its administration. He would not have in his department the medical officers who had been chosen to serve with Basedow. His argument appeared to be that if the Aboriginals required medical attention, there was no medical attention a doctor could give him in the bush. Only minor maladies and casualties could be attended by a medical officer in the bush and these could probably, quite as efficiently, be cared for by a layman with a medicine chest. What was overlooked in this attitude and subsequently right through Commonwealth policy until 1937, was that much disease in the Aborigine was preventable, and a medical officer who had trained to detect preventable disease, which could not safely be regarded as adequately cared for and recognised by laymen or even by a layman trained as a first aid officer.
Another point was that communicable disease introduced to the Aboriginal population was being disseminated by the Aboriginal to the white race in the Territory. Other diseases, nutritional and infective, and metabolical diseases which would respond to medical care by an expert, were in fact simultaneously contributing to the extinction of the Aboriginal race. Indeed, policies at the time were openly avowed to be ‘smoothing the dying pillow’. In 1927, the policy was to seek out disease in the native by regular examination by a medical officer. Identification of preventable disease, identification of curable disease and as far as possible undertaking the task of detection, prevention and cure: no attempt of this sort had been in any states at any time. Its importance and its value do not appear to have been recognised anywhere in the Bleakley report, although Bleakley does from time to time refer to clinical treatment for the relief of acute disease.
In the 1927 plan, it was thought that only an officer trained in medicine could competently handle the problem of disease in the native population and in the sense that he must have access to every native, must be able to dictate the terms under which the natives were employed or under which they lived and where they were better to migrate. To be effective as a hygiene officer, he must also be a protector with all the powers provided for the protector under the Aboriginal Ordinance.
A suggestion that patrol officers should be appointed as protectors to travel or to be stationed in situations where they could study and direct the behaviour of myall tribes, overlooks the fact that unless these people were trained medically, they could not pretend to identify disease in its early stages. They could not pretend to identify circumstances developing in front of them which would favour the element of disease in native tribes. They could not identify defects in nutrition which would occasion serious consequences and they could not, of their own initiative, devise methods of prevention necessary to apply perhaps immediately. This argument, as far as I was concerned, made it obligatory that Aboriginal protection and Aboriginal medical service must be administered by the same organisation.
INT.: And this was one of the areas where you found yourself at serious opposition to Bleakley, who had recommended the lay administration?
C.E.C.: Another point of difference between myself and Bleakley was the attitude to missions and missionaries. While conceding the value of motherly women in the care of children, the missions as constituted and as maintained were repugnant to me, for the following reasons.
Mission sites were not always well chosen. A site chosen because of water supply had never been known to fail but visited occasionally by one or two visitors, could not necessarily withstand the permanent settling of some hundreds of visitors brought in by the mission for education or for religious instruction.
Similarly, the local diet source of nutriment, native foods available, quite often could not withstand the onslaught occasioned by the sudden and sustained increase in local population. Efforts to supplement the diet by imported food to meet this crisis, were usually objectionable in that they were not designed to provide a scientifically and nutritionally balanced diet and each mission was often at risk of epidemic or an outbreak of deficiency disease.
The next objection was that the average missionary appeared to be quite oblivious to the necessity of maintaining the mission in a strictly sanitary and hygienic condition. Pathogens introduced by the mission staff were permitted free dissemination on most missions by the unhygienic conditions under which the people lived or under which food was prepared and issued.
Hookworm, introduced by mission staff, became established in this way on account of inefficient sanitary services. In fact, (it) might be disseminated by using bare-foot children traversing infected soil as hygiene orderlies.
Other infectious diseases, for example, tuberculosis: playing victims amongst the mission people following introduction by sufferers, on mission staff. In addition to this, the practice of a mission attracting from a distance, members of tribes not strictly concerned in the area in which the mission was planned. Visitors encouraged to come in and have a look, were exposed to infection by the diseases introduced onto the mission and these went back to their own countries which were free of these infections, taking the new infections with them and this submission was consistently governed by consideration of efficient hygiene and epidemiological control. I could not reconcile myself to favouring the establishment of new missions in new sites or even in some instances of the mission continuing in the site in which it was located.
Bleakley, on the other hand, seems to have had great faith in the efficiency of these institutions and had learned, in his own country, to rely upon their assistance. My own experience as a health officer, before I came to the Territory, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Townsville, had already satisfied me that the mission in Queensland had no merit enabling it to claim superiority to the mission as administered in the Northern Territory.
Indeed, Bleakley’s claim that the use of the mission included the provision of first aid for illness and injury, could not be sustained in the Northern Territory. Few missions maintained a dispensary or clinic satisfactory for even the elementary procedures of first aid. Drugs, dressing and all necessary equipment for emergency medicine and minor surgery, were supplied by the medical service to every mission, as were the other stations.
INT.: Did the missions employ fully qualified nursing sisters?
C.E.C.: Only as a later development.
INT.: That was a later development.
C.E.C.: But in quite a number of cases, these medical supplies were
allowed to deteriorate under adverse storage conditions, were lost amongst tins of jam, potatoes and other supplies and housed in a condition of disorder and filth, which should have been avoided. When I went through in the 50s, the government station, across the road – Delissaville.
INT.: Delissaville, yes.
C.E.C.: I suppose they reckoned they were near enough to Darwin they didn’t need any (blank) down there. Hermannsburg, which has been a mission for many years, experienced a scurvy epidemic in 1929, which caused loss of life. Not only did they have no hospital, but they had nowhere for these poor sick Abos to lie, in their pain with their blood infiltrated joints. They had to lie around a fire which filled their little hut with smoke and made their eyes sore – lie on hard ground or concrete floor – no hospital and no water supply.
This is the country or the institution that he recommended these to send all half-caste people from Alice Springs . I don’t know that I want to do all the half-caste bit.
The point is, of course, in 1926, I suppose, I commenced duty on the 1 March 1927, having arrived there on the boat, what would be somewhere round the middle of March – previous March – February. Well, Aboriginal protection had all been a function of the police. There was no Aboriginal Department for me to take over the staff and they weren’t giving me any police staff. I was supposed to do everything for the Health Department and the Quarantine Department, with the staff left me by the private practitioner, who had a health inspector and a clerk for the purpose of looking after the quarantine stores and reporting on the health of the town.
INT.: But those were his only duties. He had no responsibilities in the field of Aboriginal health?
C.E.C.: None at all. They recognised the difficulties. They gave me an extra clerk – Harry Partridge – to do all the Aboriginal work and he was a good fellow, nice fellow – gentleman – and he stayed with me all the time I was there. But he didn’t have the experience or the capacity to do all the Aboriginal work by himself, because the health inspector resigned and replaced by a stock inspector – Inspector Tony Tivendale – and the other fellow, as I told you, was a bit shy on top and he had to be resigned. In the middle of all this, of course, I had to try and organise the medical service. When I got there, the nurses were all on strike and I was just about getting my feet on the ground when the private practitioner got sick and later left, so I was left alone to look after or be the private practitioner in Darwin as well as trying to do all these other things. Well, as I say, we didn’t get properly staffed until Vern White came.
INT.: And when was that?
C.E.C.: It must have been in 28 – 29.
INT.: But by this time the government had appointed Bleakley to make a study of Northern Territory conditions.
C.E.C.: Yes.
INT.: Had there been any consultation with you at all about Bleakley’s investigation?
C.E.C.: No, I don’t think – I think that, from time to time, questions might have arisen about – they never quoted Bleakley at me. The only people I got worried with Bleakley about, were the do-gooders who were always at me – you know, particularly in Adelaide, who were upset about conditions in Central Australia, which I had – – –
INT: Was this Doctor Duguid and his group, the Aboriginals Advancement group in South Australia?
C.E.C.: The Aborigines friends and – (break in the recording)
… frequency and popularity, and stories such as this. With local folklore, one must be careful not to be deluded by fantasy. When and where these gin sprees were acknowledged by Bleakley to have occurred is not stated. If they were a Central Australian experience, and I would not have known of them officially, but this time there were so few motor cars available in the area, I should have been incredulous, had I heard of them from any, but a police source. Had they occurred in North Australia, I must have heard of them officially, for all police – I must have heard unofficially, from gossip columns of the local newspaper, never negligent of an opportunity to proclaim negligence or profligacy in the police. There were no towns outside Darwin, at this time. The railway to Oodnadatta had not yet crossed the border to Central Australia. The white population of Central Australia amounted only to 400, including women and children.
Cars were a novelty and a rarity and the owners were known and easily identified. Urandangi and Camooweal suggest themselves as possible, but these were not Territory towns at all and were Queensland towns under Queensland police. Finally, the word ‘Gin’ is not the word used in North Australia for the female Aboriginal, which is lubra.
INT.: I think that also was used in Central Australia.
C.E.C.: I think that here, Bleakley might have been reminiscing from his experiences in Queensland or recounting tales he’d been told during interviews in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
In 1928, North Australia adopted the policy of integrating the mixed blood into the white population. Large numbers of both male and female half-castes had been reared in Darwin as white children. On attaining the age of 21 they were entitled to be regarded as citizens.
INT.: Full citizens – they had no restrictions placed on them under the Aboriginals Act of the Ordinance of the day?
C.E.C.: Faced with the anomaly that large numbers of uneducated and loosely integrated coloured people, would become eligible for inclusion on the electoral roll in North Australia, it was decided that these people would be educated from childhood, as white. In Queensland, this was not the policy. In Queensland, an Aboriginal or half-caste for purposes of ready administration, was defined as an Aboriginal. Although this definition also operated in North Australia, it was never used to send a mixed-blood individual, back to the blacks’ camp. The recommendation that those of mixed blood – those of half of Aboriginal blood, or more, be sent back to be reared in the blacks’ camp was unequivocally rejected in North Australia.
Statements made by Bleakley and before him, by Baldwin Spencer, and others, that the individual of half Aboriginal blood could never be adapted into the white community, was shown to be bunkum.
INT.: Were they as unequivocal as that in their statement that this could not happen?
C.E.C.: In my notes they are.
I shared Bleakley’s views on the objectionable features on miscegenation but many did not. In a country where white men deprived of any female society of their own race for months and possibly years, at a time, it did not seem realistic to suppose that regulations expected to be enforced by the police, could control sexual relations, when there was no Aboriginal moral sanction or any white, ethical restrictions in the individual. Indeed, Spencer, Gilruth and later, Urquhart, regarded sexual relations between whites and Aboriginals as being a social relationship which must be tolerated, provided that both partners – provided that there was no reluctance on the part of the lubra to participate. In the ordinary course of such a relationship as it occurred in the Australian bush, there was no indignity and no (blank) – the loose use of the word – my concern in these elicit relationships were the risk of disseminating venereal disease and indeed, spreading of a mixed-blood population. But I believed that any effort to impose chastity upon a reluctant population by regulation, was a waste of time, and that if these relationships were to be discouraged, this should be done by the adjustment of circumstances, to make – to reduce the temptation or to minimize the opportunity. That is all I can say about that – and the policy of the government at the time, to encourage the migration of white women into the Northern Territory. This was to be achieved by improving the conditions of medical and health service by assuring ready medical attention and assuring that the circumstances for the rearing of children were sufficiently attractive to the white mother.
INT.: Did you see any marked increase in the number of part-Aboriginal youngsters from part-Aboriginal unions, rather than from the further increase in the half-caste youngsters?
C.E.C.: A point of fact, the number of half-caste children born in any year, at the time I was associated with the Territory, was never less than 2/3rds half-caste with half-caste, to 1/3rd white-Abo. The use of the word ‘prostitution’ is not warranted.
INT.: That was what I was going to ask you. Were many of these unions between a white man and full-blood Aboriginal a continuing relationship?
C.E.C.: References by Bleakley and others to prostitution of Aboriginal women probably requires comment. There was the word – has been used, not only to include the casual indulgence of coitus for financial reward in an acknowledged brothel, for instance, in Chinatown, but also for the occasional surrender to natural sexual impulse by a white male and an Aboriginal female under circumstances of spontaneous mating urgings. As the term is always used to imply moral degradation of the virtuous female Aboriginal seduced by the unscrupulous white, it may be proper here to consider the implication of morality involved. They are a race which did not firmly accept sexual relations as determining pregnancy. There was no great need for moral sanctions in Aboriginal culture and in fact, the – our attitude of expecting chastity in the virtuous girl, would not be a feature of Aboriginal society.
The elderly male with two or perhaps more wives was ethically and morally at perfect liberty to use them to procure food for him, whether this meant transitory or protracted cohabitation with the white man or an alien and no moral sanction would attach either to him or her in their cultural code.
INT.: That, I think, is one aspect of this subject about which people tend to have short memories and this applies also to some of the anthropologists?
C.E.C.: The anxiety of authority to prevent sexual relations between Whites and blacks and the difficulty of policing it, are clearly demonstrated by the frequency of amendments to section 53 of the Aboriginals Ordinance, and their vain attempts to impose chastity and self restraint by regulation.
INT.: Mick, did you have authority under the Aboriginals Ordinance to prohibit the marriage, the formal marriage of a white man with a full blood Aboriginal?
C.E.C.: I have a paper here about Aboriginal law and that was a feature of our law in this context – no white male should have sexual relations with an Aboriginal or half-caste female to whom he was not married, under penalty of heavy fine or imprisoned or both. It seems rather exacting when related to the further prohibition in the ordinance that – or defer recommendation to Bleakley, that white and black marriages should be discouraged or discounted. From my part, I never gave authority for a marriage between an Aboriginal (woman and a white man.)
There are recommendations in his report; some appended to the particular section of his report after its discussion and others as general conclusion following completion of his report. Some of these were acceptable in principle or already in practice in North Australia. Others were regarded as undesirable or unnecessary. A feature of a great many of them was their tendency to express a long-preferred objective without providing any intimation of a means of giving effect to them.
It may perhaps be best to take these recommendations (of the Bleakley report)
Page 9 – Recommendations in regard to employment:
1. A recommended definite scale of wages for permanent workers.
Method of payment and provision for saving: as far as North Australia is concerned a satisfactory system for this purpose already existed. The recommendations proffered by Bleakley were indeed inapplicable and no further comment need be made here.
Recommendations on station camps: The objectives and the purpose of management of camps of Aboriginals whether on station, whether in town or in nomadic areas, have been detailed earlier and it was the intention, regardless of anything in the Bleakley report, to pursue this policy unchanged unless the report could proffer and advance that appeal. No such advance appeared to attend the recommendations as made and they too were inapplicable.
Page 14 – Compound: The plan for a new compound and a new purpose and a new method of administration for the compound have been detailed earlier. Suggestions and recommendations made by Mr Bleakley appeared to offer no attractive alternatives to that already planned.
Page 16 – Mixed Blood: Authority for mixed blood children in North Australia and particularly in Darwin where their elevation to accept the white standard of living. The recommendation that children with 50% or more of Aboriginal blood or a preponderance of other dark blood be sent to settlements on Bathurst Island or Goulburn Island Aboriginal Mission, is unacceptable. There was no intention at any time in North Australia of permitting a mixed blood child “rescued” from a blacks’ camp to be educated in part or to an advanced stage of achievement, only to be sent back to the environment from which he had been rescued. Apart from the fact that it was not intended to treat these children differently to other mixed blood children, there was no intention of accepting the recommendation that they be isolated on an island for the purpose.
A recommendation made elsewhere for the disciplining of the refractory full blood as an alternative to going to Fannie Bay. Nor would the suggestion that they be brought up by a missionary be accepted for reasons already detailed.
Pages 19-27: Description of Mission Stations: (This) found no great agreement amongst officers of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Administration. On the contrary, the mission cited by Bleakley, were in the opinion of North Australia officers, inefficient, unhygienic and generally unsatisfactory as sites for the accumulation of natives for any purpose. Elsewhere, it had already been stated that in our experience, education, medical care, general management of the mission, left much to be desired. Indeed, two of the missions included in the report, for North and Central Australia, one was recommended to be closed before – even before government had closely studied the report. One had been closed by the mission authority maintaining it and the third had so ineptly supervised the nutrition of the Aboriginals in its charge, that it had suffered an outbreak of scurvy attended by a high mortality.
Policy: recommended policies of mixed blood included seven separate recommendations. All of these may be said to have been current Aboriginal policy at the time the report was made. Several measures for the advancement of the Aboriginal half-caste were made to the government, from Darwin, at the time and subsequent to the report being furnished, but these do not appear to have attracted attention in the report.
Proposals and future administration: Proposals for future administration have been set out for North Australia earlier in this document. The proposals set out by Mr Bleakley on page 29 and subsequently, offer nothing that is not already in training, in process or being applied.
Page 35 Survey of Administration: the recommendations listed under this heading were, for the most part, ineffective, in that, their receipt and consideration by government synchronized with the onset of the Great Depression, when instead of incurring new expenditure, the first financial reaction was a cut of 20% in existing expenditure. An appropriate comment might be, that as the government’s Chief Medical Officer was also Chief Protector, a recommendation for assistance to permit the medical inspection of natives and native Aboriginal institutions, was superfluous, these functions being integral to the purposes of dual appointments. (See, I think he is – they should leave him because what he is doing he is saying instead of me sitting down fiddling around with black fellows in Darwin, I should get out and find someone else to do it.
Page 39 – A list of 14 Recommendations: Except 10 and 13 these were acceptable and compatible with Aboriginal policy of North Australia as already set out.
10: Recommending mission management of institutions for the reasons stated was not favoured.
13: Requiring removal of native offenders to islands was also not favoured because it provided opportunities for dissemination of endemic disease to new areas and suggestion that the Chief Protector should be provided with official suitable coastal patrol vessel was consistently advocated over a period of years by the Chief Protector, without success, until two fast patrol boats were purchased for the administration ostensibly to patrol the air routes from Kopang to Darwin.
When he says ‘uplift those whose tribal life has already been destroyed by white civilisation’, what do you do – do you give them a jack or lift, or what?
INT.: It could be matched by half a dozen or dozens of reports that have been written, after that, using the same language and based on much the same sort of unwarranted assumptions.
C.E.C.: General recommendations made on page 40 have already been covered elsewhere. To the extent that they were practicable and considered desirable, they were already part of North Australia policy as already outlined. For the rest, they were already part of this policy or the general management of native affairs over the years. One intolerable recommendation is that suggesting that the marriage of half-caste and full blood be employed.
(blank) applies to that recommendation, mixed blood of Aboriginal (extraction?) should be educated in institutions with Aborigines. For this, North Australia should have no truck.
INT.: Thanks very much, Mick, for that comment on the Bleakley report and its recommendations. It certainly will enable those of us in the future, who are making some assessment of the contribution which was made during your period in the Northern Territory, to be better understood and recognised.
The N.T. medical benefits funds
Int.: What I would like to do now is look at one or two other subjects which – one of which has a bearing on the Aboriginal Affairs area but another is slightly apart from that, and that is your association with the Chinese people, but I would like, if I could, to get your comments on how the medical benefits fund, which you established, how the idea originated and how it developed under your jurisdiction.
C.E.C.: With the appointment of full-time government medical officers to what was called the North Australian Medical Service, it became necessary to fund or be prepared to fund, the employment of extra medical officers or medical patrol officers. With the onset of the 1930 Depression and the statutory 20% cut in estimates, it was only possible for the service to survive and expand by raising the funds required for this service, in the Territory itself.
For the white population, this was achieved by organising a medical benefit fund to which prescribers could ensure for themselves and their dependants, free medical attention, hospitalisation, transport etc, from the service, on the payment of an annual subscription. With the imposition on the person licensed to employ an Aboriginal – with the imposition of the obligation to report every illness and to supply transport at his own expense, to the nearest source of medical attention and to defray any expenses involved in this hospitalisation, it became desirable to include in the conditions of the issue of the licence, to provide the opportunity for the employer to subscribe to a medical benefit fund, subscription to which, relieved him of all other financial responsibility in respect of Aboriginal’s sickness or injury and at the same time assured the Chief Protector that this freedom from risk of expense, would operate to be no hindrance to prompt and full notification.
INT.: Did it take the place somewhat of the workmen’s compensation scheme, because there would not have been any workmen’s compensation at that time?
C.E.C.: Workers compensation did not apply
INT.: Over all, what do you think – –
C.E.C.: Section 14 of the Ordinance is commended to provide a scale of charges to cover their obligations.
INT.: Have you got an idea as to what the total income was from this fund?
C.E.C.: It would be in the annual report for that year. I wouldn’t know, now.
INT.: No, you wouldn’t know off hand what they were.
C.E.C.: They are here too – I looked for them this morning.
INT.: We will see if we can get hold of those. I can get those from the report anyway, but they were set out each year in the annual report. Was this one of your initiatives to set up the medical fund – Aboriginal medical fund. It wasn’t for the other people in the community – for the Aboriginals?
C.E.C.: For both of them.
INT.: For both?
C.E.C.: Yes. We couldn’t get any money, unless we could stir it up ourselves and this was the way we could get a few bob in.
INT.: But that was so far in advance for its time, no other state would have had such a scheme in order – – –
C.E.C.: No, I don’t think so; not for Abos anyway – not even for white people.
INT.: That’s right. It was very much a new means of developing a service for Aboriginals for which there was some payment by the people who would be responsible.
C.E.C: Yes, yes, yes, that’s why I got sore about old Black Jack saying we didn’t . . . we had done nothing.
Sickness and disease among Chinese
INT.: You had done nothing. I’d be interested to know the extent to which the Chinese used the medical services, the incidence of sickness and disease among the Chinese.
C.E.C.: The only Chinese I ever saw – I can’t speak now for Fothergill and Catalano – but the only Chinese I ever saw, were moribund babies.
INT.: So they did not bring them to the hospital for child birth. They had their own midwives?
C.E.C.: They’d bring them to hospital if I told them because that’s where I was. They’d bring them to show you and they’d be moribund, in some sort of condition and you’d tell them what to do and give them stuff, but whether they used it or not, I don’t know. They always had funny bits of stuff stuck on somewhere. And the only adult Chinese I ever saw, was a woman that was a patient of Fothergill’s who died of a post-partum haemorrhage following the expulsion of a cyst. But I only saw her because they didn’t believe she was dead.
People that die of a haemorrhage can get muscular twitches, you see, and because they didn’t believe she was dead because of these Australian doctors they had her over the grave that had been dug on two logs and they were lying across 2 logs watching her and at some stage she gave a twitch- “She isn’t dead – doctor no good”. The order for burial was all fixed up. So they wouldn’t plant her. So an old fellow, white man, who was familiar with them – they told him what trouble they had with these bloody doctors. Here, this woman wasn’t dead and she couldn’t get any treatment and they were supposed to bury her. “Why do they bury her alive”? So I was the (‘picture of Mum’) and it was the year Peter Pan won the Melbourne Cup. I tell you why I know that. Tom Harris came up to me and said “A bloke down at the office wants you urgently – something about a dying carnival”. So I went down and he said “Have you got your car, doctor?” And I said “Yes”. He said “That’s all right, I won’t have to give you a donkey ride on my bike”. I said “What’s the trouble”. He said “Big trouble out at the Chinese cemetery. There’s a woman there Dr Fothergill certified she’s dead and she’s not dead and they won’t bury her”. I said “What am I supposed to do He said “You’re supposed to see if she is dead or not”. I said “but Doctor Fothergill said she’s dead”. “Oh yes, but they don’t believe him”. I said “Well they won’t believe me either”.
Anyway, we went out and I had a look at her and she was quite dead. So I assured him and told him to assure them and I tried to assure them, and you could see the disbelief in their eyes, while you were talking to them. So they left her there and they buried her the next morning. And why I know that it was the day that Peter Pan won the Melbourne Cup, the bloke said to me on the way home.
“Well, doctor, I can’t give you a fee”. I said “That’s all right. I am not allowed private practice”. Anyhow there were no benefits used – whether that woman’s dead or alive, but he said “I called you”. Anyhow he said “Just by way of remuneration I will tell you the winner of the Melbourne cup” and I said “What is that” and he said “Peter Pan”. It was too.
INT.: You reckon some clairvoyancy?
C.E.C.: It didn’t make any difference to me. I didn’t know how to put any money on it.
Generalconversation:
They couldn’t have a woman at all, day or night. No women (long blank) the whole of Darwin, unless there were some special people that had cattle or something, they got
INT.: And they could live in the backyard of the person – – –
C.E.C.: They had a proper place – might sleep under the house, but that was nothing. You know the cyclone came and blew the house on top of them.
INT.: But there was a dispensation in special cases. I was talking to Mrs – –
C.E.C.: There was an exception to it.
INT.: I was talking to Mrs Lyons and she had an Aboriginal family for many years – John Lyons – Tiger Lyons, wife. She had a family there that identified themselves with them and finally they took their name.
C.E.C.: Where is she?
INT.: She is living in Sydney, I think. (END)