In 1910, two international expeditions arrived in Perth to undertake field work among the West Australian aborigines. The leaders of both called at my office with introductions. The first was the Cambridge University Expedition, consisting of Professor A. R. Radcliffe–Brown [Now Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.] and Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, both of Cambridge. The second was a party of Swedish scientists, led by a Mr. Laurell. This party was bound for Kimberley, and none of its members spoke English, depending mainly upon French as a medium of conversation.
Professor Radcliffe–Brown, on his introductory visit, informed me that he had finances for no longer than six months. Knowing that time to be inadequate for any research of value, I arranged an interview with the late Mr. S. P. Mackay, a well-known and wealthy pastoralist of Munda-bullangana Station, and asked him point-blank for ￡1,000, to make possible at least two years of field work for the Expedition. He immediately forwarded a cheque for the amount.
It was then suggested that I accompany the Expedition, and the Under–Secretary (Mr. North) obtained the Colonial Secretary’s consent. I was appointed a travelling protector, with a Special Commission to conduct inquiries into all native conditions and problems, such as employment on stations, guardianship and care of the indigent, distribution of rations, the half-caste question, the morality of native and half-caste women in towns and mining camps, and many other matters affecting their welfare from an administrative point of view. Sir Gerald Strickland, then Governor of West Australia, showed a deep personal interest in the expedition, and his wife, Lady Edeline, supplemented my equipment with a medicine chest.
Before we left Perth, news came that the civilized and semi-civilized circumcised groups of Lake Darlot had descended in a raid upon a native camp at Lancefield, near Laverton, killing eleven men, women and children. The groups had scattered, and the police had found none of the murderers, much to the consternation of the peaceable natives and white settlers in the district.
We booked our passages on the little coastal steamer Hobart, packed our equipment and supplies on board, and were so eager to be off that we embarked a few days early on a southern trip, and after an unpremeditated voyage to Bunbury, had to return on the vessel, and sail north with her to Geraldton, from which we went by rail to Sandstone. The party consisted of Professor Radcliffe–Brown, anthropologist, Mr. Grant Watson, biologist and photographer, myself as government attache, and Louis Ohlsen, a Swedish cook. A few miles from Sandstone, we pitched our tents among the natives gathered there, our travelling equipment consisting of a large fly for our dining and community room furnished with folding chairs and other luxuries, the men’s tent, Louis’s portable kitchen, and my quarters. We were surrounded by nearly, 100 natives from near-by districts, and there was obvious ill-feeling and friction among the groups. I spent the afternoon making new friends, greeting old ones, and, with their assistance, digging out some honey-ants, which I proffered to the Professor for supper. Grant Watson would have none of them.
It took some time to convince the natives that my companions were not policemen, of whom, for their own reasons, they lived in an unholy fear at the time. After some vain endeavours at explanation, I found it easier to introduce them as my two sons! Professor Radcliffe–Brown immediately interested himself in their string games, similar to cat’s cradle, and cross-sticks, and other small primitive handicrafts with which they occasionally pass the time.
After distributing generous rations and discussing family gossip, we were just beginning to make a little headway in questioning them regarding genealogies and customs when, to our surprise, a police raid was made upon the camps at dawn, and six of the natives arrested as the Laverton murderers. Several shots were fired by the police, and some of the fugitives tried to hide in our tents, but no one was hurt.
On the principle that “one nigger is as black as another”, the constables had arrested one Meenya, whom I knew did not belong to Darlot, and who had only just arrived from his own country. I saw Meenya in prison, quite naked, as he had been arrested while sleeping. After establishing his identity, I took him back to the camp, where his relatives cried with joy. The other five men, Gooll-gooil, Jooloor, Dhoolanjarri, Yoolbari, and Dandain, remained in custody.
After the raid, our natives scattered, but returned to tell me that there was another policeman coming with a “big mob.” This proved to be Constable Grey, appointed to inspect natives for symptoms of disease and to gather in half-castes from the camps. The natives were afraid to approach him until I explained that he was a doctor coming to look at us all. When I went myself into the tent, they followed with confidence.
With Professor Radcliffe–Brown’s assistance, Grey made his examinations, collected a few old men and women, and drove them away in his cart to join the unfortunates waiting in Sandstone. I shall never forget the anguish and despair on those aged faces. The poor decrepit creatures were leaving their own country for a destination unknown, a fate they could not understand, and their woe was pitiful. The diseased and the young half-castes were housed in different sections of the gaol in Sandstone, and the grief of the aboriginal mothers at this enforced parting with their children was pitiful to see.
So turbulent and so distressed was now the condition of all camps in the vicinity that it was useless for us to remain longer. Professor Radcliffe–Brown, Grant Watson and Louis the cook sailed for Carnarvon. I returned to Perth with my reports and notes. The Laverton murderers were travelling in custody on the same train, and my special commission entitled me to question them in private For some hours I sat alone with the chained prisoners in the railway carriage, and learned the reason of the raid.
They explained that the Lancefield and Laverton camps had transgressed the bounds of every native law, that they were living in incestuous depravity with sisters and immature children to such an extent that the usual marriage exchanges were not possible. So the Lake Darlot tribes, unable to procure wives, took the law into their own hands, and planned to kill the men and seize the women. They had descended on the camp at dawn, and in the battle of flying spears some women and children were accidentally killed. I reported the circumstances to headquarters, and there was no trial. The natives were detained only until the departure of the next train. I later sailed north to rejoin the expedition at Dorre and Bernier Islands.
Dorre and Bernier Islands: there is not, in all my sad sojourn among the last sad people of the primitive Australian race, a memory one-half so tragic or so harrowing, or a name that conjures up such a deplorable picture of misery and horror unalleviated, as these two grim and barren islands of the West Australian coast that for a period, mercifully brief, were the tombs of the living dead.
In accordance with its policy of safeguarding the aborigines, the West Australian Government, in 1904, had authorized Dr. Roth, a Queensland anthropologist, to inquire into native conditions. After intensive study of the problem, Dr. Roth made the suggestion, among others, that all diseased natives from the whole of the north-west should he isolated for treatment. The Government immediately adopted the suggestion, the unhappiest decision ever arrived at by a humane administration, a ghastly failure in the attempt to arrest the ravages of disease, and an infliction of physical and mental torture that it could not perhaps have been expected to foresee.
At the cost of many thousands of pounds, the authorities established an isolation hospital on two islands bordering Shark Bay, some thirty miles from Carnarvon. These islands-Dorre and Bernier-have never been inhabited before or since. A medical officer and staff were installed in permanent residence, and two or three little cutters plied backwards and forwards carrying medical and food supplies. Diseased natives were gathered in, by policemen and other appointed officers, over an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles. Regardless of tribe and custom and country and relationship, they were herded together-the women on Dorre and the men on Bernier. Many had never seen the sea before, and lived and died in terror of it.
When I arrived at Carnarvon, I found the town inundated by the Gascoyne River in flood, and lost no time in arranging my passage to the islands. There was no regular communication, but two cutters, the Shark and the Venus, were at my disposal, and one of them would sail whenever the skipper, an old sea-dog named Henrietta, felt inclined. In due course, with my baggage and provender, I boarded the Shark and crossed to Bernier, where the expedition had already established itself in a cove of the lee shore. I selected a neighbouring cove, and there Louis set up my camp.
Dorre and Bernier, with a smaller island, Koks, shelter Shark Bay from the Indian Ocean. Barren and forbidding, a horror of flies in summer-time, their western shores are undermined by the sea into steep overhanging cliffs, which sweep down in terraces of sand to the calmer waters of the bay, covered by sparse scrub with never a tree worthy of the name. A narrow race of water runs between them with sweeping tides and tremendous tide-rips tumultuous in wild weather.
On Dorre, where the women were segregated, was a well equipped hospital with doctor’s residence, laboratory, nurses’ quarters and dispensary. A skilled bacteriologist was in charge. His staff consisted of dispenser, matron and two nurses. In his own cutter the doctor periodically crossed the strait to attend the men on Bernier, but sometimes when he was needed most a storm or heavy swell made it impossible for him to come.
When I landed on Bernier Island in November 1910, there were only fifteen men left alive there, but I counted thirtyeight graves. The doctor’s assistant and the orderly staff occupied a wooden building on a rise, the hospital was a tent, and the sick were housed in three-sided huts of canvas, each with a half-roof of corrugated iron. The natives on both islands preferred the open bush to all the hospital care and comfort.
Deaths were frequent-appallingly frequent, sometimes three in a day-for most of these natives were obviously in the last stages of venereal disease and tuberculosis. Nothing could save them, and they had been transported, some of them thousands of miles, to strange and unnatural surroundings and solitude. They were afraid of the hospital, its ceaseless probing............