Cecil Cook and the Remote Aborigines

Peter Ryan’s contribution in Quadrant, May 2013, “Aboriginal Questions”, is typically interesting and astute. He refers to Nicolas Rothwell’s suggestion (Australian, March 23) that the education and other standards of remote region Aborigines should be reported separately from all other Aborigines. Different policies, Rothwell suggests, are needed for remote-region Aborigines, whose standards are falling, whereas the majority of other Aborigines are doing much better.

Ryan refers to the observations of West Aust­ralian Aborigines by Paul Hasluck in the 1930s. When appointed Minister for Territories in 1951, Hasluck became responsible for the Commonwealth’s role to improve Aboriginal welfare in the Northern Territory.

Many policy proposals to improve Aboriginal health and welfare were prepared in the 1930s but most were not implemented because of the Commonwealth government’s limited funds and other, more pressing priorities. Arguably, these 1930s proposals are still relevant to tackle problems as yet unsolved.

From 1911 until the late 1930s, the Aboriginal Ordinance (NT) was regarded as the Commonwealth government’s Aboriginal policy. Under the Ordinance, Aborigines and “half-castes” (as mixed-blood Aborigines were then called) were wards of the state, who were to be protected against “immorality, injustice, imposition and fraud”.

In 1899 the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, Dr F. Goldsmith, described the “Half-caste Problem” as a rapidly increasing number of mixed-blood children who were being neglected in the Aboriginal camps. The government’s response some years later was to use a section of the Aboriginal Ordinance that gave the Chief Protector the discretion to take into his care and custody any child he considered needed special protection.

From 1927 the Commonwealth’s administration of Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory was directed by the Medical Service—the Aborigine’s health was regarded as vitally important in any scheme for his protection and welfare. The Chief Medical Officer for North Australia, appointed in February 1927, was Dr Cecil Cook; he was also the Chief Health Officer, Quarantine Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines.

In the Northern Territory, half-caste children were accommodated and cared for in half-caste homes in Darwin and Alice Springs. In Darwin they were educated until the age of fourteen and then trained in various duties that enabled them to be employed. These “protection” activities were facets of the “solution” to the problems half-caste faced, and they were successful. In many cases, those who graduated from the Darwin half-caste home were accepted members of the white community.

Other elements of Cook’s half-caste policy were the Aboriginal Medical Benefits Fund (1932–33) with the contributions paid by employers; and the Half-caste Housing Scheme (1934) under which eight houses were built in Darwin for half-caste families who paid the deposit from their savings and the balance by mortgage instalments from their wages. Six more were built a few years later.

Dr Cook wrote policy proposals for Aboriginal health and welfare in every year from 1927 until 1938. J.A. Carrodus, the Chief Clerk of the Department of Territories, considered that the Aboriginal Ordinance was the government’s policy. In contrast, Cook wrote in 1935 of “the failure of the Commonwealth to evolve a definite and progressive policy directed towards the ultimate orientation of the aboriginal within the civilised community”. Cook also suggested that “some such policy should be adopted and publicly announced with a view to its gradual development over a period of years”. That is, the policy wouldn’t be a prescription to solve the current problems but would describe an objective the government would work towards, modifying its approach from time to time as progress was made and circumstances changed.

Dr Cook gave a high priority to personal hygiene, sanitation, diet and nutrition as the foundation of health and the prevention of disease. He recognised that small tribal groups of Aborigines who moved camp at regular intervals were very healthy. However, when the group size increased and they stayed longer in one location, then their personal and general health was quickly exposed to communicable diseases made prevalent by poor sanitation and polluted water. These settlements were inherently unhealthy because traditionally, Aborigines had never lived in a settled community.

A newly appointed minister (Thomas Paterson), visited the Territory in 1935. Wanting to make the most of this opportunity, Cook described different approaches to achieving his suggested policy objective, based on the circumstances and needs of three different groups.

First, he considered the Aborigines who had given up their tribal life and drifted to the towns, living in camps on the fringes. The objective for them was to change from being dependent on hand-outs to being accommodated in a purpose-built settlement and educated in the ways of community living. This involved understanding the obligations each had to the community for their personal hygiene, communal sanitation and the care of property. The men should be trained for employment in a service industry, creating new jobs that didn’t compete with the white employment market. Cook wanted families to live in a house with a garden in which they grew vegetables to eat. He also saw the settlement becoming a business that grew vegetables for the wider community.

For the children of these people, Dr Cook suggested their education should be the equivalent of white children at the leaving age of fourteen. Particular attention should be devoted to their understanding of the importance of time and the value of money, the obligations inherent in employment, understanding the principles of hygiene and personal cleanliness, developing the community sense for the individual and his family and the potential for using the soil as a source of food.

The second group was of those Aborigines who had left their tribal land and were living on pastoral properties. The young men from this group were usually employed on the property and in 1930 Cook had introduced employment regulations that made employers responsible for the care of their employees’ dependants. He now proposed that large numbers of small reserves should be established around tribal ceremonial centres where such groups could go during seasons of unemployment. To make up for the diminishing supply of native food on the reserve, this group could be trained and encouraged in growing vegetables and maintaining herds of goats and cattle. Eventually this group might move to the towns and become part of the established settlement of the first group.

Aborigines still living a tribal life were the third group. While their life was sustainable they should continue with it. The Commonwealth had permitted missions to set up in remote, tribal regions for the purpose of introducing tribal Aborigines to white society. Cook suggested that the government should hold the missions to be more accountable for their activities to achieve this goal, which he considered they neglected.

The minister considered all these policy proposals and decided to support the building of a new Aboriginal settlement at Bagot in Darwin to replace the Kahlin compound. A “definite and progressive policy” with a specific long-term objective was not “adopted and publicly announced”. Ryan refers to “two unfortunate creations of government”, and in Dr Cook’s view there was an equally unfortunate third—the separation of the Northern Territory Health and Welfare branches in February 1939. This was a major part of the “New Deal” policy announced by the new minister (McEwen). He had accepted the view of two leading anthropologists (Thomson and Elkin) that the leader of the welfare branch should be a trained anthropologist. In many respects the new policy included what Cook had proposed to Paterson but Cook’s view was that unless the Native Affairs branch had a broad understanding of health, both personal and social, Aborigines would not “fare well”.

The war disrupted health services and native welfare for a decade. Cook spent five years in the Australian Army Medical Corps (1941–45) and four years as Commissioner of Public Health in Western Australia (1946–49), before he joined the Commonwealth Department of Health in 1950. A year later, Hasluck became Minister for Territories. One of Cook’s constant endeavours for the next decade was to improve the co-operation and co-ordination of health and native affairs activities in Canberra and Darwin.

Cook made a major survey in 1950 of Aboriginal settlements and missions in Northern Australia and reported extensively on the problems he observed and the actions that were needed to overcome them. In essence, they were the same problems he had observed in the 1930s. In 1951 he was instrumental in the establishment of the Native Welfare Council. Until his retirement in 1962, he promoted and was involved in the training of settlement superintendents, patrol officers, missionaries and natives in the fundamentals of hygiene and the prevention of communicable tropical diseases. His aim in training natives as hygiene inspectors was for them to be vernacular instructors of their fellow natives in the principles and practices of personal and community hygiene.

Hasluck’s aim, and Cook’s, was for Aborigines to become accepted members of the whole community. His becoming Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1963 ended Hasluck’s determined efforts over twelve years, which included dismantling the legislation that made Aborigines wards of the state. Cook’s efforts over twenty-five years were frustrated by the failure of ministers to accept, and administration to implement, the proposals he submitted.

Cook anticipated this failure by suggesting that the policy needed to be developed over a period of years—he mentioned fifty years in other writing. Such a period is well beyond the political cycle; in fact, it assumes the political cycle is not involved, that only a consistent, bipartisan approach would solve such deeply entrenched problems. If Cook was naive in favouring such an approach, he was realistic in proposing it as the only one that would work.

In 1937, Cook had suggested that Australia was moving away from “protection” as a policy for Aborigines. Even so, he suggested that a system of laissez-faire—an absence of governmental interference—wasn’t an option either. He retired in 1962 but in 1971 spoke publicly on the need to have different policies that evolved over time for differently positioned Aboriginal groups. Instead, the new government elected in 1972 introduced a policy of laissez-faire—in other words, self-determination. Old questions and problems remained. New problems emerged.

The “unfortunate creations of government”, to use Ryan’s term, have caused the failure to tackle Aboriginal problems effectively.