STATE LIBRARY OF J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 561/31

Full transcript of an interview with

CHARLES DUGUID

On 1 April 1973

By Janet Robertson

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 561/31 CHARLES DUGUID

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, MORTLOCK LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIANA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 561/31

Interview of Dr Charles Duguid by Janet Robertson, recorded in for broadcast on ABC Radio 5CL on 1st April 1973 as part of the series ‘Now in retirement’.

(Poor recording quality: speech is muffled)

TAPE 1 SIDE A

The biggest impact made on me at the university was not the class work, but the fact that in our final year we had to do maternity work in the slums. For the first time, I think, in my life, although I’d seen poverty, I had never seen  I never realised that human nature could sink to such depths in poverty and squalor as I saw in the slums of . I was sent to see an Irish itinerant woman. She was in a single room house with a washhouse at the back. The delivery was quite easy. Next day, when I went to see her, the bed was there and the baby but not the mother. So I walked round to the back of the house and there she was washing up the things in the washtub. I said, ‘Mrs O’Reilly, you know very well you should be resting in bed.’ In a very Irish voice, she said, ‘Doctor, you needn’t worry – I only took the room for two nights and when the wash is dry I’ll be back on the road.’ I went back the next day and she was back on the road.

By the time you finished your medical degrees you took a position within the university, didn’t you?

I was invited by the pioneer surgeon, Sir William McEwin [?], to be his house surgeon. I went on from that to be his hospital university assistant until 1911.

Well, you were pretty well established in the university, then. What made you resign and come to Australia?

Well, that’s very interesting. I had been pretty strenuous at school, and then I had to do that double course of Arts and Medicine in quick time. I was tired, and I got the offer of a round trip to Australia in 1911  I took it  as ship’s surgeon bringing Lord Denman and his wife and staff to Australia as Governor-General Elect, and I met on board the Australian lass that became my wife. But I could see quite well that the opportunities in Australia were far greater than at home. The challenge here

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was infinitely greater than at home, and one had a better opportunity of starting without sinking a fortune in getting a start. That’s why I came.

You must have seen tremendous changes in medical practice. What then would you say, briefly, are the main ones?

Well, that’s interesting, because, looking back on things, take the medical side, take the question of drugs. When we started in the beginning of the century, drugs were not refined. They were what we call primitive or crude drugs, such as digitalis and opium. The active principle of the drugs had not been discovered by then, and the question of the very famous drugs that control specific diseases  what they call specific drugs  didn’t come to light till ’22. That was insulin. That was the first of our specific drugs, for the control of diabetes. Now, antibiotics weren’t known about then. Penicillin and the sulphur drugs didn’t come to light till the 1940s. It may seem remarkable that we had to wait, but there you are. But since then there has been a flood of anti-specific drugs. Today, tuberculosis has been largely controlled by these drugs, and sufferers from mental illness have very definitely been able to continue in their daily job without having to go into a hospital, mental hospital. That is all of terrific importance. I think another big change was when nations insisted on public health. At the same time, they were able to convince people of the efficacy of a special injection that would prevent the diseases going further  I’m thinking of diphtheria and things like that – these things were all wiped out. Now, killer childhood infectious diseases used to be commonplace; today they’re very rare.

What about, then, surgical practice. Is there 

Ah!

 as much change in that?

Yes, well, in the surgical practice I suppose there’s been terrific change. When I was  graduated, nobody would have ever dreamt in their wildest dreams of open heart surgery, let alone kidney and cardiac transplants. I would say one of the biggest developments in surgery in recent years  in the last twenty-five years, possibly  is the fact that the general surgeon has been replaced very largely  not entirely, but

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very largely  by the specialist surgeon who does very intensive study in limited fields. That has come to stay. Anaesthetics are linked with surgery, and the development in the art of anaesthesia has been colossal. In the old days in , you put a person to sleep with chloroform in an open mask; in England, ether in a closed circuit. Today, you’ll find  without going into the actual theatre  you have an injection into your vein and you’re asleep before you know. I would like to mention a thing that I consider of tremendous importance, and that’s the question of general practitioners. I have no doubt in my mind that the intelligent, well-trained, conscientious general practitioner is the one member of the medical profession that can never be done without, and it’s about time some people began to realise that.

Do you see any signs of that happening, that they will be more encouraged, perhaps, than they are now?

Well, for the sake of the public, I hope so.

And during your long life you’ve had contacts and you’ve made friendships with a great variety of people, not only medical friends. Can you talk about some of them? Because you knew Gilbert Murray, didn’t you?

Gilbert Murray, I was proud to say, I certainly – I regard him as one of my greatest friends. He was chairman to me in 1937, when I spoke at the Royal Empire Society on Aborigines of Australia and their future. Gilbert Murray had an abiding interest for the depressed people across the world  and I don’t think you had to be coloured to be included in his love to all. It went beyond that. I think it’s worth mentioning that, as you probably know, Gilbert Murray was Australian, born in Australia, New South Wales, and he became a very great classical scholar, first at Glasgow and then down at Oxford. He was more than that; he was a great administrator. He was the President and Chairman of the old League of Nations, later the United Nations. That’s an astounding thing for a classical scholar, a man of tremendous ability. And, by the way, Gilbert Murray never was knighted. He had too much of importance otherwise. Gladstone, you see, never was knighted  whether he refused it or not, I don’t know, but Queen didn’t like him.

You also knew Harry Lawlor, didn’t you?

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Knew Harry Lawlor quite well in the end. And it was a wonderful night [?] for my first wife and I sitting in the Theatre, crowded to the roof, and before he’d finished his first song the whole people had become one happy family, an exhibition of the personality of the man. I was to meet him quite often after that. The last time was in 1936, when he came off the train, east-west train, very unhappy, and I found out why. On the ship he had heard that King Edward VIII had abdicated. He had a personal affection for King Edward VIII and he was tremendously depressed. The chief of the Caledonian Society had a car at the station to take him round the city and show him the sights, but he wouldn’t leave the station and, turning to me, he said, ‘What I need’s a cup of tea!’ So we walked down the platform and had a cup of tea in the refreshment room.

(laughs) You did mention it, for the first time, when you were talking about Gilbert Murray, and that was your interest in Aborigines. What led you to become involved with them?

What led me to become so involved? There were three factors, really. The first one was the massacre  the last massacre, happily  of tribal Aborigines, quite defenceless, a good many miles west of in 1928. A policeman admitted having killed fourteen on one occasion, seventeen on the other, and he’d with him two station men  I have all the names of the policeman and the station men  they were all armed, but they, the station people, made no comment. It was an index of the feeling in the , and perhaps in Australia at the time, that, although admittedly thirty-one were murdered, no-one was taken and tried for murder in the Supreme Court. Instead of that, a police inquiry exonerated Murray as acting within his rights. That shook me to my marrow. Then  that was ’28. In 1930 a lady missionary from Goulburn Island off the northern coast of consulted me. It was quite evident at once that she was suffering from leprosy. I treated her for three and a half years, and she told me of the appalling things that had happened to women who were with her, how they were raped by men who came along and went, and how they dealt with their husbands who tried to rescue them. I didn’t believe it and I said to her, I said, ‘These things couldn’t happen this late in the day, much less in a Christian country.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you go up and see for yourself?’ Well, in 1934 I did. And it was the inhuman  I would almost say un-

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Christian  attitude of everybody, Alice Springs in 1934, with the exception of the doctor and the lady in charge of the ‘half-caste’ home. It was that, finally, that made me come into the open. I was so disgusted with what I found at Alice Springs in ’34, where the contact between the two races was quite definite and where we were in the station country. Patrick Allbraith [?], one of my closest friends, asked me at the end of that month at Alice Springs, he said, ‘What do you feel about things in the North?’ I said, ‘I’m ashamed, utterly.’ He said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ I said, ‘Next year I’m going to the country beyond the cattle stations. I want to see the Aboriginal nomads.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, there’s no need for you to come onto the Territory. You’d better go up to the Musgrave Ranges in your own state – nobody knows quite what’s happening there.’ That trip ended in the Ernabella Mission. Then, in ’35, we went across the great reserve in the centre to the Western Australian border, and ’39 we went up past the Musgraves, across the roughest country possible onto the Petermann Ranges, and both those trips we did on camels. Allbraith and I got to know one another thoroughly. When you’re travelling for weeks on end in desert country, you may call it, you get to know a man inside and out.

What sort of things did you talk about?

I don’t know that we talked much at all. It was more of a jocular type. He had the habit of always reading on a camel, and I always  I told him it was a good thing we had the ‘full-bloods’ from the Hermansberg went with us, otherwise we might never have got home.

You mentioned Ernabella just then. How much were you involved in that, and how did its foundation come about?

At the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges there was a house there, and we made that our centre. And I got in touch with a ‘half-caste’ lad I’m still in touch with, Gilpin [?], and he took me into the Ranges and I got to know the people pretty well, or as well as one could. Here was I, a fairly well-dressed individual, they were all naked nomads, men, women and children  and yet their dignity you could not miss. They were quite happy and they were tolerably well fed  it was good conditions at that time, the food  and it was a perfect joy to keep in touch with them, but the

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station country was coming nearer and I could see another place where they’d been wrecked, and I came home from that trip determined as far as I could to try and retain the tribal area in which they were so that they could grow up in their own way as long as they wished. I got in touch with Herbert Hudd [?], later ‘Sir’, in Adelaide. He gave me a  he listened very carefully to me and he said, ‘Look, this is too important for a verbal communication. Put it in writing.’ I did that, and two months later he said that Cabinet wanted me to outline the scheme I had in mind to save these people. Well, I did that, and the element of it was freedom  that they should be allowed to do what they liked. I made it clear there was to be no repression; they should be able to continue in their natural ways with their corroborees, their matters of marriage and all the rest of it, and that no interference should take place; that every person appointed to a mission which I suggested should be experts in the field, and then, when they had mastered things, that they should pass on their experience to the Aborigines. I also made it clear that, to maintain the culture of the people, that for the first three years all teaching in the schools should be in their native tongue, their mother tongue. And after that, English should be taught as a foreign language. These were the basic  there were other elements, but these were the basic ones, and I think it’s been a pronounced success ever since. (break in recording) Last time I was at Ernabella I was eighty-five, and I’ve never had such kindness shown me  not stupid kindness, but just real kindness. The children, their children, that time in ’69, they called me ‘Chamu’ [phonetic] if I passsed. That is the for a grandfather, so the kids tumbled to it.

Doctor Duguid, how would you like best to be remembered: as a Scotsman, a doctor, an advocate of Aboriginal rights or as a husband, father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather?

Well, I don’t think anybody would mistake me for anything other than a Scotsman, but I much prefer to be remembered as a husband, father, grandfather and great- grandfather.

END OF TAPE: END OF INTERVIEW.

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