Queensland's Black Leper Colony
Keywords:
North Queensland Aboriginal people, leprosy, leper colony, Leprosy Act of 1892, Public Health Act of 1937Abstract
An increase in the incidence of leprosy among North Queensland Aboriginal people in the late 1930s gave rise to fears that the disease might spread and threaten the white population. This concern resulted in an uninhabited offshore island being selected as a leper colony that was exclusively for blacks: it became a place to which Indigenous people suffering from leprosy were forcibly transported, isolated and treated. Queensland's right to take such action was enshrined in law by the Leprosy Act of 1892 and subsequently by the Public Health Act of 1937 which, while repealing the Leprosy Act, retained the main elements of the earlier legislation.
References
Cook, C.E., The Epidemiology of Leprosy in Australia (Canberra: Australian Government Printer, 1927), 4.
Cook, C.E., ‘The Natives in Relation to the Public Health’, Medical Journal of Australia, 30 April 1939: 569–70.
Cilento, R., ‘A Brief Review of Leprosy in Australia’, in Report of Federal Health Council 1934, Appendix III.
Rogers, L., ‘When Will Australia Adopt Modem Prophylactic Measures Against Leprosy?’ Medical Journal of Australia, 18 October 1930.
Report of Director-General of Health (hereafter DG Health) for 1926, in Queensland Parliamentary Papers (hereafter QPP), 1927.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Queensland hospitals refused to admit sick Aboriginal people under any circumstances, with the result that Aboriginal patients were often housed in sheds attached to hospitals, or as a last resort in police lockups. See ‘Reports of Northern Protector of Aborigines’ in Queensland Votes and Proceedings and Queensland Parliamentary Papers, 1898–1905.
Cilento, R., ‘Leprosy in Australia and its Dependencies’, International Journal of Leprosy 5 (1937): 50.
Maguire, J., ‘Catholic Missions to the Aborigines in North Queensland’, in Lectures on North Queensland History No. 4 (Townsville: James Cook University of North Queensland), 65.
It is possible that this rise reflected increased reporting and searches for Aboriginal people showing signs of the disease by Health Department officials and police.
The choice of Fantome Island was hardly surprising because in the 1920s Cilento had used this location for the site of a lock hospital for Aboriginal people found to be suffering from sexually transmitted infections.
Saunders, S., A Suitable Island Site: Leprosy in the Northern Territory and the Channel Island Leprosarium 1880–1955 (Darwin: Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 1989), 27.
Maguire, ‘Catholic Missions’, 168.
Cited in Maguire, J., Prologue: A History of the Catholic Church as Seen from Townsville 1963–1968 (Toowoomba: Church Archivists’ Society, 1990), 45.
DG Health reports do not record the name of this order.
See Reports of the DG Health post-1941 until 1960 in QPP.
Report of DG Health in QPP, 1941.
Report of DG Health in QPP, 1947.
Report of DG Health in QPP, 1958.
Report of DG Health in QPP, 1959.
Interview of Mary Bees by the author. Mary Bees was the daughter of a deceased Aboriginal patient in Fantome Island leprosarium.
