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DISEASE, HEAL TH AND HEALING: aspects of indigenous health in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900-1940 Gordon Briscoe A thesis submitted to History Program, Research School of Social Sciences The Australian National University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 1996 This thesis is all my own work except where otherwise acknowledged Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my late mother, Eileen Briscoe, who gave me my Aboriginal identity, to my wife Norma who kept body and soul together while the thesis was created, developed and nurtured and, finally, to the late Professor Fred Hollows who gave me the inspiration to believe in my~lf and to accept that self-doubt was the road to scholarship. (i) Acknowledgments I have gathered many debts during the development, progress and completion of this thesis. To the supervisory committee of Dr Alan Gray, Dr Leonard R. Smith, Professor F.B. Smith and Professor Donald Denoon, who have all helped me in various ways to bring this task to its conclusion. To Emeritus Professor Ken Inglis who supported me in the topic I chose, and in reading some written work of mine in the planning stages, to Dr Ian Howie-Willis for his textual advice and encouragement and to our family doctor, Dr Tom Gavranic, for his interest in the thesis and for looking after my health. Thanks go also to Dr Jay Winter of Pembroke College Oxford University for his suggestions about the topic and the title of the thesis. To Professor Paul Bourke who supported both the thesis and other literary works completed by me during my time in the History Program I have a debt of gratitude. My student colleagues rate a high mention because they argued points of interest with me over coffee and they are, Dr Frank Bongiorno, Dr Craig Wilcox, Andrew Lee and Nicole McLennan. The History Program staff of Beverly Gallina, Anthea Bundock, Helen Macnab, and Janice Aldridge, helped me so willingly in far too many ways to mention as did the staff of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Among my friends at the Australian National University I thank Dr Nicolas Peterson for his moral support and for the rare sources he loaned to me. I thank John Clanchy and Brigid Ballard for their constant interest in both my topic of research and progress of my written work. A number of Institutions, and their staff, had an important role in the progress of this thesis. The staff of the Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University were extremely helpful in coordinating a number of sources from interstate which they did so effectively. The Librarians of the Menzies, Chifley and Life Sciences Libraries on the Australian National University campus helped me both to obtain special theses, and to find sources of great importance to this work. Off campus, the Australian Archives at Mitchell and the National Library of Australia gave a superb service on primary source and newsprint materials, along with secondary literature. Finally, I thank the Australian Institute of Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Studies provided important source materials and kindly invited me to give a paper on the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, and its effect on Aborigines in Queensland. (ii) For assistance in research carried out by me in Western Australia, I thank the History Program RSSS for funds to travel and to the Battye and Public Records (including the Archives and photographic collections) Library in Perth, and their staff who helped me enormously, both to gain access to historic records and to find, and provide me with, a large number of primary source materials. While in Perth I stayed with Drs Mary and David Dale, and two of their four sons, Dr Nick and John Dale, and I owe them all a great debt of gratitude which I hope some day to be able to repay. Also while in Perth I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr Peggy Brock and her partner Professor Norman Etherington who both gave me great encouragement to develop my perspective and my chosen topic. Peggy Brock kindly provided me with an opportunity to inform her students on the scope and shape of my thesis research in Western Australia. Other members of the academic community who gave me their time included Mary Anne Jebb, Anna Haebich and Dr Tom Stannage, all of whom met and talked with me about my topic as well as the location of possible source materials. The staff at the Aboriginal Planning Authority include the Librarian Robin South who both helped me to locate the files - Medical, Health and.Aborigines Department files - I needed in the massive indexes, and to gain quick and official approval for access to those extremely important files which date from the 1890s to the 1940s. Dr Christine Fletcher of the Research School of Social Sciences gave me valuable advice about Western Australian sources which proved crucial. For assistance to research which was conducted by me in Queensland, I must first of all thank Dr Jan Walker of the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs for permission to access a large number of files dating back to the 1880s and into the 1940s from the various Departments which housed the Chief Protector of Aborigine's Office. Likewise, the staff at the Queensland State Archives were not only prompt and helpful in getting the material to me for study but also they were helpful in locating material in the indexes which, for the history student, is vital, and I am deeply indebted to them all. I thank Professor Ross Fitzgerald of the History Department, and Michael Williams the Director of the Aboriginal Student's Centre, Queensland University. (iii) Synopsis In this thesis I examine aspects of disease, health and healing among the indigenous people in Western Australia and Queensland from 1900 to 1940. I argue that diseases have helped to shape and influence the interaction between the indigenous people and the various members of the settler community most concerned with them - government protectors, missionaries, pastoralists and health workers. In developing this argument I draw on the distinction made by Stephen J. Kunitz between the universalistic and particularistic approaches to historical epidemiology. Kunitz argues that the development of physiology and bacteriology transformed the practice of medicine by revealing universalistic 'natural histories' of diseases and their causative agents, but that this approach should be tempered by attention to the particular individual, cultural and institutional circumstances of disease occurrence. Diseases have a past, a present and a future of their own, and when considered within the context of human social history, are seen to be a po~erful motivate force in human affairs. My approach involves examining the history of diseases, health and healing among the indigenous peoples using models of causation, some of which are biomedical, some are anthropological and others are demographic and epidemiological. Ther~ are differences between such models. The biomedical model is 'universalistic' and 'scientific', based on general principles subject to proof or denial through empirical research. In the same way, the demographic and epidemiological models are also universalistic. The anthropological model, however, is 'particularistic' in that each situation is unique and is explained by its history and internal dynamics, not by reference to general principles. The combination of the biomedical, demographic and epidemiological methods with those of social history allows an otherwise silent indigenous population to be brought into the historical narrative from which they would otherwise have been excluded. In Western Australia, contrary to previous thinking, the total number of Aborigines increased during the study period. In particular, the number of females and older males increased under the influence of protection laws. The increases contradict the popular belief that the indigenous populations were still in decline. However, the spread of disease and the (iv) growing population worsened the already poor personal and public hygiene practices, creating the mistaken impression that the indigenous populations were declining. Indeed, diseases such as leprosy, respiratory and sexually transmitted diseases had by the 1930s reached epidemic proportions, which suggested that the indigenous people were a dying race. The indigenous populations already contained some pathogenic infections prior to contact with Europeans. The Aborigines had developed a means, however rudimentary, of predicting how sick people reacted to an illness and of determining what the disease might be that healers treated. But following European contact, other diseases came from contact not only with Europeans but also with Asians, who introduced leprosy into mining camps and Kanakas, who introduced leprosy into the cane plantations and tuberculosis into the Cape York regions. Protection policies intensified the effects of the diseases. In Queensland, the government applied its protection policies with increasing vigour over the period, resulting in most Aborigines living on government ·relief depots, missions and reserves by the 1930s. Demographic analysis reveals that Queensland consistently overestimated its indigenous populations. Death, disease, health and heating among indigenous groups, therefore, came to have social and political dimensions which few, if any, people recognised at the time. In hindsight, however, we can appreciate that the assumption behind health programs was that the indigenous populations should be the passive, but grateful, recipients of welfare rather than historic actors in their own right. The consequences in terms of disease dynamics were profound.