DEATH ISLANDS
“ … the folk left behind sent up a death cry…”
His mind terrified, the old Aboriginal man sat dejectedly on a Bernier Island sandhill peering over the Indian Ocean towards his unseen tribal country.
His diseased body was party fly-blown. From cracked lips came a song of death, at first murmuring, then rising to a wavering, shrill dirge.
Afterwards, unseen by others, he shuffled down to the beach and waded into the sea, the spirit of him reaching out for the comfort of his own land and people.
In the shark-infested waters, his body was never found …
In recent times a group of Carnarvon Aboriginal people paid their first organised visit to the death islands, Bernier and Dorre, 30 miles west of the Gascoyne coast, in West Australia, where an estimated 400 of their ancestors lie buried in anonymous graves.
The two islands, lying adjacent to each other in the Indian Ocean’s loneliness, were, in the early years of the 1900s, the site of a “Lock Hospital” experiment for the experimental treatment and imprisonment of North West Aboriginals afflicted with venereal disease.
A Carnarvon district medical officer, Dr. Hickenbotham, was the first to alert authorities to the existence of a potential VD epidemic in the region and, in 1906, advocated an isolated reserve be established for experimental treatment of the contagious ailment.
Hickenbotham noted in 1908 “interesting discrepencies … (of) syphilitic lesions (in) white stockmen and the disease in Aboriginal women with whom they co-habited.”
Fear of contamination among Europeans prompted the government into action and the Bernier-Dorre prison-hospitals were started post haste, especially when Dr. Hickenbotham revealed that most of his North West colleagues were refusing to treat diseased Aborigines, particularly at Onslow.
A Constable Gray initially conducted an expedition into the Gascoyne country in 1910-1911 to collect together diseased Aboriginal men, women and children. He collected 96 people from such places as Bangemall and Sandstone. Gray’s requisition order mentions “20 long chains, 20 single cuffs, 20 handcuffs.”
A visiting British author, E. L. Grant Wilson, on observing Gray’s tactics, later described him as “a man unqualified except by ruthlessness … and helped by one or two kindred spirits (who) … raided native camps and by brute force ‘examined’ the natives (who) were seized upon (and) marched through the bush …”
Conversely, Carnarvon’s first newspaper, “The Northern Times,” on January 4, 1911, published the following report: “ … Constable Gray left the Junction police paddock with a contingent of 80 natives, old and young. One could not help noticing the number of comely young girls destined for a prolonged stay on the Islands … His (Constable Gray) praiseworthy work should meet with notice from the authorities …”
The police at that time usually collected sick people from the outlying station properties as a normal part of their duties., a chore hampered by some pastoralists who were reluctant to release their Aboriginal workers (and paramours) to the police for fear of losing an unpaid labour and love source.
Constable Gray, however, was persistent; he collected bush Aborigines and station folk alike, as he was paid per head on his return. If any escaped or died en route, he quickly replenished numbers along the way, the rumour says, whether diseased or not.
A contractor, G. Olivey, succeeded Gray by traversing the Pilbara region in search of other affected people. When he failed to apprehend the anticipated numbers, he was awarded the modern equivalent of a $100 bonus for his frustrated effort.
The majority of Aborigines taken into custody came from the Ashburton and De Grey Rivers: many others were taken from Roebourne and the Gascoyne.
Between June 30, 1909, and December 30, 1917, 635 admissions were recorded with the lock-hospital scheme, together with 116 female and 46 male deaths, these being described as a “conservative estimate.”
Juvenile admission numbers were not kept.
Elderly Aboriginal folk currently living in the Gascoyne region of West Australia still relates stories inherited through the oral history tradition of the tribes, emotional accounts of police executions of men, women and children who were deemed too ill to travel. According to such memories, the tribal people were literally “rounded up” and brought back en masse to a police depot on a Gascoyne pastoral property. There physical examinations were made for symptoms of disease. Those considerated too disabled to undertake the long journey in neck chains to the Carnarvon coast were surreptitiously disposed of by police bullets, it is alleged, the bodies being interred in a lime pit communal grave immediately behind the rough stone barracks.
Today, the building has been restored as a macabre “tourist attraction”, but the depression in the ground to its rear, still dusted on the grassless surface with a powdery white substance, is unrecorded as the last resting place of an unknown number of murdered Aboriginal victims.
“My grand mother and grand father were taken away with the policemens,” said Alice Walgar. “They were chained to the waggons. None of them Yammatji (Aborigines) knew where they were going. They thought they were going to get killed. Our old people used to wonder what happened to them. They never came back.”
As the sick people sorrowfully walked away, Alice explained, their chains clinking dismally, the folk left behind sent up a death cry to ease the spirits of their loved ones who they believed were taking life’s final journey.
Death statistics among Aboriginal patients on the islands are difficult to accurately determine due to the laxity of hospital staff in keeping records. No official admission statistics were recorded for the first 18 months. Neither was there kept an accurate record of island burials. In 1917, a chief protector of Aborigines criticised hospital staff, claiming their “files were impossible to find.”
Nevertheless, at least one researcher claims to have sighted documented verification of the burials of at least 400 Aboriginal inmates who were buried on both islands. By comparison, there were only 162 documented burials.
Eccentric Irish journalist, Daisy (“Kabbarli”) Bates, visited Bernier Island in 1910 where she observed “broken and helpless pieces of humanity who lay still all day and looked out across the vast expanse of sand dunes under which they were destined to be buried … Their bodies were very often rotten with sores, suppurating and fly-blown, and many died before they reached the … hospital … Through unaccustomed frequent hot baths, their withered, sensitive skins … became like tissue paper and parted horribly from the flesh …”
A white nurse mentioned in her journal “sewing bodies into bags and blankets,” as well as her abhorence of the “blood-curdling dirge” of Aboriginal women wailing when deaths occurred.
A resident doctor recorded one death as being caused by “heart failure due to nostalgia,” so severe was the trauma suffered by some Aboriginals in being forcibly removed from their tribal country and close human relationships.
The VD then affecting the tribal people was at first believed to be syphilis. It was, in reality, a disease of undetermined origin, now called Granuloma Inquinale or Lympho Granuloma Venereum. Male victims required circumcision. Female treatment was more complicated, sometimes incurring an intravenously injected drug, Salvarsan, together with genital surgery.
Hospitalisation was compulsory. Aborigines who refused to submit to examination or treatment committed an offence against the Aborigines Act.
Ironically, hospital patients of both sexes were compelled to “cart timber … (gather) 500 loads of coral, sand and limestone … (erect) fences … baking … collect wood and water … (and) care for the animals,” which proved a great financial saving to a government reluctant to spend much money on the island’s inhabitants.
Medical care was accompanied by regular discipline. The sexes were confined to two islands (all women, to prevent re-infection, were transferred to Dorre Island in 1910), and the staff acted as labour supervisors, if required. Patients were also “disciplined” in an unspecified manner by the white overseers. Escapees were called “absconders” and were pursued by the police.
The origin and distribution of the VD was popularly blamed on Asiatics. This claim lost its impetus when diseased people were identified at inland mining centres and pastoral properties beyond the range of Asian contact.
Chief Protector Gale, based at Carnarvon, claimed that the disease appeared in epidemic proportions after the discovery of payable gold in various centres around West Australia, this being an admission that the ailment was not introduced by Asians, but one that was generated by Europeans and transmitted by them via Aboriginal women.
In 1912 a minor scandal erupted in the affairs of the island’s white staff that resulted in a commission of inquiry. A Dr. Robert Pritchard complained about “rumours circulating in Carnarvon” accusing him of “having an immoral relationship with nursing staff on the island.”
The resultant inquiry exonerated Pritchard. But the government were embarrassed by the incident, as it publicly exposed the incompetence of the island’s administration.
Consequently, towards the end of the experiment, when the last doctor left the islands in 1916, official interest in the patients waned into indifference.
Thereafter, no doctor was stationed on the island, patients being visited from Carnarvon by a district medical officer every month or two.
When the hospitals were moved to the mainland in 1919, Bernier-Dorre Islands still had 50 patients. As late as 1924, Dr. Cecil Cook, on an inspection tour throughout North West areas, noted “granuloma (as being) prevalent throughout the north from Carnarvon to Wyndham … (but not sufficient) to warrant isolation.”
A year later (1925), Aborigines affected by VD were commonly being treated as prisoner throughout North West areas.
In December, 1986, the Department of Aboriginal Sites in the West Australian Museum notified the Carnarvon Aboriginal community that Bernier and Dorre Islands had been officially registered with the numbers P5789 and P5790. The Assistant to the Registrar informed the Aboriginal community that the two islands were fully protected under the Aboriginal Heritage Act by an A-Class status; they were also listed on the Registrar of National Estate and were additionally protected by the Australian Heritage Commission.
Hello,
HMAS Sydney researcher.
Is there a location catalouge for the Native burials on Bernier and Dorre Islands ?
Kind Regards.
David Angwin.
— David Angwin · 10 February 2008 · #
Not to my knowledge. But there is, I understand, an old black-and-white photograph in the Battye Library archives, in Perth, West Australia, showing a series of white crosses in the sand hills of Bernier or Dorre Island, in recognisable terrain, should you ever venture that way.
— The Boss · 15 February 2008 · #