F.B. Smith

Medical Inspection of State Schoolchildren in Australia, c. 1905–14

From about 1905 some medical practitioners pressed State governments to back official physical examinations of State school children. Their campaign embodied a broader project to identify and reduce incapacities undermining public hygiene and national efficiency. Some of the activists became inspectors in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. Evidence about their relations with children, teachers, parents, communities and local GPs seems to be meagre but worth pursuing. The campaign's immediate and longterm effects on child health apparently disappointed its proponents' hopes, but still might have helped many children and benefited national fitness. Later repercussions of boys being classed as 'fit' could prove deadly in the Great War.

During the early years of the Commonwealth of Australia some public intellectuals and journalists became openly apprehensive about the militarised world their new nation faced. The Russians were busy in Korea and Manchuria. Their enemies, the Japanese, had lately launched the world's biggest battleship and had already twice destroyed the Russian eastern fleet. France had consolidated in Indochina, New Caledonia and Tahiti. The Germans held New Guinea and the Solomons, within sailing distance of Australia. The Americans were ensconced in the Pacific region and were taking the Philippines. The Dutch held the East Indies; the Portuguese were even closer. It was credible that one or other might harm Australia and doubtful whether any of them could or would save us, even though Australians proudly viewed themselves as being the only truly white civilization in the region. British naval strength was deployed closer to the United Kingdom. 'Progressives' in Britain and in Australia were galvanised by revelations about national shortcomings and corruption in failing to overwhelm commandos of farmers and clerks in South Africa, followed by claims that social deficiencies in the United Kingdom had led to three in five recruits being rejected on physical grounds.¹

Anxious progressive thinkers throughout the British Empire and the United States were deeply influenced by the crude social Darwinism propagated by Herbert Spencer, the reigning guru of the age. He taught that the first duty of the organism individually and socially was self-preservation. He had coined the tautological catch-cry, 'the survival of the fittest': and fitness began with the young.² Victorian Labor man Robert Solly affirmed that we had to:

build up a race ... that would be able to hold its own and to improve the general quality of health ... We have a large continent with a very small population and must recognize that millions of people ... not so far away ... [look on] Australia with envious eyes.³

In Tasmania, Dr. J. S. C. Elkington was a leading advocate of the progressive cause. He was the son of a history professor who had been a public health activist. Dr. Elkington's qualifications included a London Diploma of Public Health, a course lately allied to studies in tropical medicine, which copied earlier German and French imperialist enterprises. He declared in 1905 that medical inspection of State schoolchildren would strengthen national efficiency, the maximisation of the energy contribution to national power of every unit in the social organism. Germany and Belgium had done it for a generation, Japan had introduced it in the 1890s. The British government had recently legislated for it. Elkington projected 'education' as, 'a biological process whereby ... discrete growing organisms are ... being fitted to their environment in order to render them more useful to that concrete organism, the State.'⁴ As Inspector John Harry of South Australia put it in 1912: 'modern ... education ... is "social",' aiding: 'the state ... in the great struggle of national existence and in securing the continuance and progress of the race.'⁵ Politicians, Labor men particularly, supported the campaign. One of its by-products would be more State money to ameliorate the condition of the poor. New South Wales and Queensland, with strong Labor parliamentary representation, produced the more generous schemes, but Tasmania and South Australia the more typical ones.⁶

Moreover, the State had a duty to effectuate self-preservation among its parts. The State rightly compelled and funded school attendance between ages six or seven and thirteen and the children had a reciprocal duty to learn. The State must maximise the conditions under which socially beneficial knowledge might be acquired. However, Dr. Elkington and Medical Inspector Hogg of Launceston declared that Tasmania's many makeshift, ill-lit, overcrowded, dirty, near bookless schools only impaired their enrolees' capabilities and turned them out unfit, unskilled and undisciplined. All molecules must in nature either grow or decay. 'Flesh and blood assets,' viewed as the components of the coming Australian race, too often had their defects unchecked and compounded, leaving them as hindrances to the attainment of that national efficiency which built national force.⁷ Private schools, although they added to national force, were exempt from State intrusion, official medical inspection and report. Some—few of them in Hobart, Elkington conceded—had 'advantages' and good 'hygiene', but the others, presumably mostly Catholic, were 'bad.'⁸

Parents could not be relied on to demand school improvements or have their children's defects treated. Germany used the police to enforce attendance and treatment from a State medical service when shortcomings were found. Tasmanians might hesitate to go so far: compulsory primary school attendance already constituted a revolutionary state intrusion into family life. Moreover, doctors and dentists were expensive, beginning at half a guinea a visit; and parents needed their offspring's labour.

The problem was the more urgent because the New South Wales Royal Commission on the Birthrate of 1903—the first of its kind in the world and another product of the Progressives' anxieties—found that the general birthrate had fallen among all classes, but especially among the professional ranks who were commonly expected to supply the officer class. Progressives believed that Australia, with a vast continent to defend, needed every family to produce healthy, alert obedient soldiers, mothers and workers. In fact, the lower birthrate actually increased the population by reducing the infant mortality rate, but E. T. Drake's statistical finding on this effect was ignored.⁹ The alarmists suppressed the Royal Commission evidence.¹⁰

Tasmania's first medical inspectors were appointed in 1907. Other states copied them within the decade. Only New South Wales and Queensland, both late into the scheme, ever provided the money and powers to inspectors to move to remedy the defects they substantiated. In one form or another, State medical inspection survived into the 1960s. Two women and one man were outstanding appointments. Dr. Gertrude Halley was among the first women medical graduates from Melbourne and a founder of the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women. She specialised in eye and ear ailments and had a gift for epidemiology. Her appointment as medical inspector in Tasmania was the first in Australia.¹¹ Her male counterpart was Dr. Gustave Hogg of Launceston, also an opthalmologist with wide public health interests. Dr. Mary Booth of Sydney was a graduate of the Edinburgh Medical College for Women. She had worked on the New South Wales Child Anthropomorphic Survey of 1900 and lectured on 'Hygiene' to girls' secondary schools. In 1910–12 she helped establish the first school medical service in Victoria. Like Halley, she promoted town planning and public parks as means to national efficiency, campaigned for votes for women and emerged as a passionate conscriptionist during the War.¹²

Elkington and Halley set the pattern for inspection. Cards, blue for boys, white for girls, were distributed to every State school in Tasmania. Teachers were required to enter the age and attendance record of every child; a duty less easy than it sounds because attendance rules varied.¹³ Actual attendance often shrank to about four days a week and there were long absences. About one third of South Australian children, for example, had intermittent school attendance during busy agricultural and family employment periods, gathering grape prunings in late winter-early spring and helping at wheat harvest time. Nonetheless, teachers were required to record an opinion on the child's 'mental capacity' ranging from 'E' for 'excellent' to 'Def' for 'defective,' list 'illnesses noticed,' note whether corporal punishment had been administered and why, state the results of a eye-test with the Snellen Chart (later replaced by a chart devised by Hogg and Halley), name the father's occupation and the mother's 'if any,' give height and weight details, note 'personal defects and peculiarities at admission,' any hearing, nasopharynx defects including enlarged tonsils, adenoids and mouth-breathing, indicate 'cleanliness' difficulties, including pediculosis (a girls' speciality), clothes and bodily uncleanliness (a boys' specialty) especially of their hands, armpits and bottoms, whether girls had undarned stockings and unmended underwear. Boys appear to have worn nothing under the usual serge trousers. Girls were reported as being twice as bodily unclean as boys at age thirteen. Teeth were also reported on, as were chest measurements. Dr. Booth's anthropomorphic survey had required eye colour: brown eyes were suspect, indicating possible Mediterranean antecedents or what was then generally seen as even less acceptable racial origin.

The cards had to be carefully completed and preserved; because the inspector could and would check. It could be eighteen months before the inspector got round to one's school, and even longer in South Australia. The system settled for possibly three inspections in a child's eight or so school years; although many parents sent under five-year-olds to school and removed them at eleven or twelve.¹⁴ Teachers' cards quoted as typical (I have been unable to trace any originals) run as follows:

A. B. Aged 11. Position in class low, improving very slowly: often complains of headache; not fond of work; very regular, well behaved; dull—Condition on examination. Eyesight 6/10 both eyes; probable astigmatism; history of severe headache & evident strain, hearing defective; history of mattery discharge & 'sore ears'; health appearance bad, thin & frail, flat chest, poor chest movement.

E. F. 11 11/12 Good mental capacity, regular attendance ... conditions found. Eyesight fair 6/10, lateral curvature of the spine; profuse discharge from both eyes and mastoid tenderness; treatment very urgently required.

C. D. 10 2/12 Medium in mental capacity, position low; no defects noted ... Filthily dirty & insufficiently & raggedly clad. Body & head verminous; enlarged tonsils; defective hearing, lateral curvature of the spine.

Halley, Booth and their colleagues were indefatigable in their national duty. Dr. Halley in fifteen months, in 1907–08, travelled nine thousand miles: by rail, steamer, jinker, wagon, on horseback and foot, and in early motor cars. She visited 120 town schools, 334 rural ones and the teacher training institution, inspecting altogether 5,912 children. On arrival at a school, without warning, the inspector ordered the windows open (teachers kept them closed because of the dust), inspected the sanitary arrangements, made sketch maps of the drainage and lighting, scrutinised the benches, summoned the children listed with defects, inspected them in a shelter shed if the school had one, otherwise in front of the class. The surrounding noise made the hearing tests difficult.¹⁵ If the inspector confirmed defects she or he wrote a sealed note to the parents advising them to see a doctor. Inspectors did not, officially, treat any case: under part of an implicit deal with the British Medical Association.¹⁶ Most parents had agreed to the inspection, although some over-age mentally slow offspring sent for minding were missing on inspection day lest they be excluded by the doctor, abetted by the teacher keen to maintain his or her numbers. Many parents ignored the inspector's note, partly at least because they could not afford the treatment. In towns in Tasmania and South Australia parents could seek a free treatment application to the local hospital or dentist, recompensed by government. But dental treatment was shunned. Local anaethesia, mainly injected cocaine, was chancy and dentistry remained an excruciating process.

The early findings reported by inspectors in South Australia and Tasmania confirmed the Progressives' worst predictions. They also allow us to draw some inferences that might reduce that great hole in histories of education—what happened in classrooms. Basically ninety percent of pupils in schools south of Adelaide in 1910 could not distinctly see writing on the blackboard. All sixty-two children at the northern South Australian schools of Leigh Creek, Hergott Springs, Oodnadatta had trachoma.¹⁷ Flies were found in every inspected school. Gauze screens could be obtained from the Education Department, but no local school board had asked for them. Flies were accepted as part of existence. The South Australian Director of Education remarked, in an encounter of middle class, labouring and 'struggling farmer' values, that South Australians, State school parents at least, 'had no feeling for local responsibilities.'¹⁸ Inspector Dennis thought much the same of New South Wales parents.¹⁹ State schools were a State affair: parents had no role in them, except to house the unmarried teacher, usually a lower middle class outsider and often considered hoitytoity. They mostly were trainees aged 15 or 16 to 20 and provisionals, more often males, aged twenty to forty. Like the railways or the post office teaching was a government job for men and unmarried women. Teachers were frequently on the move, up to four times a year, looking often for better accommodation or promotion to a larger town school.²⁰ Next to female post office telephonists, female teachers had the highest 'nervous breakdown' rate of all State employees.²¹

At Leigh Creek in 1912 Dr. Rogers found schools 'badly lighted,' subject to 'glare' and 'dust.' Of forty-one children, two had normal sight. Their teacher had never bothered to move children sitting facing the sun. They sat with their faces near to the tabletop, straining to see the blackboard.²² The South Australian children, like their Tasmanian counterparts, sat eight to ten on long backless benches of uniform height.²³ Uniform sized two-seat desks were gradually introduced during the 1920s. At no school did teachers rearrange the class, which averaged fifty and could be sixty-five; Thebarton in 1911 had 150 enrolments divided into two classes containing pupils at several grades; they were seated with bigger children at the rear, regardless of grade, except for the so-called dullards of all sizes who disrupted classes even worse if they sat at the front. At the back they and the other 'inattentives' could mainly be ignored.²⁴ Dr. Halley was instrumental in recruiting the pioneer psychologist, Stanley Porteus, to conduct intelligence tests, especially among the dullards, as preparatory to consigning the failures to 'special schools,' where they passed their lives out of public sight.²⁵

'Inattentive' was a common teacher adjective. Twenty-six per cent of Adelaide girls aged twelve to thirteen had defective vision in one or both eyes at twenty feet (about six metres) away. Their imperfect vision was judged by Dr. Halley in Tasmania as sufficient to impair their educational progress. Girls' vision everywhere was worse than boys' at twenty-three percent. Halley attributed the disparity in class four to girls being required at home to sew in poor light. They enrolled at under five to six with weak eyes, but their sight weakened as their responsibilities grew. Teachers were surprised; they had never noticed. The family remedy was to buy glasses from travelling hawkers. The spectacles were framed in soft metal to encompass a range of heads and noses; but the metal soon warped. The Tasmanian inspectors had trouble with the Snellen chart. It took them some time to realize that the children did not know the letters or that they guessed. Tasmanian children were taught to read by phonetics.²⁶ Halley and Hogg devised a fool-proof chart based on tumbled gapped circles showing mice at the entries. Altogether 22.8 percent of Tasmanian town beginners registered defective sight, including squint, conjunctivitis and dimness and at class five, aged around twelve to thirteen, thirty-five percent had poor vision. Country children were much better off at three percent for beginners and eleven percent for twelve to thirteen-year-olds. Totals for defective vision at leaving or early leaving at age thirteen fell by half, as many of the weak-sighted had already dropped out to face the world. No South Australian or Tasmanian teacher was recorded to have rearranged the class to place children with poor vision near the front; although they must have known who was poor sighted from the child's straining head and shoulders posture, given that they had marked it on the child's card.²⁷

Erect posture and chest development were important, especially in girls as future bearers of the race. The inspections revealed that their spines and chests were more laterally distorted than the boys'. The destruction wrought by the single size benches showed in the age distribution in South Australia in 1914: Junior girls had 3.3 percent of bent spines and forty-three percent by age thirteen to fourteen. The variation in children's heights in South Australia was up to eighteen inches [around forty-five centimetres] with an average of between eight and three inches. Yet the benches were uniform.²⁸ Many children daily carried heavy loads of pencil cases and rulers, copybooks, lunches and water. The schools had no designated place for this lumber. Inspectors, teachers and some parents were given to ordering slouchers to sit up straight. One regular corrective was the marching drill, required at the day's start and at lesson breaks. Through the decade, drill evolved into military exercises and gradually into rifle and cadet training, which in 1911 became compulsory for boys from age twelve. Four percent were exempted for unmistakable physical incapacity.²⁹ I have been unable to discover whether the school medical information was used in administering the compulsory scheme. The military instructors wanted the same type of recruit as the medicos did, fit, smart, prompt, obedient soldiers. Saluting the flag—the Union Jack—at schools became widespread towards the end of the Federation decade.³⁰

By 1909 over ten thousand Tasmanian children had been examined via the whisper test. German audiometers were available, but no Australian State used them because they 'were expensive.'³¹ Teachers had to whisper instead of using a watch because they had discovered that most children had never heard a watch ticking. The teacher and pupil stood back to back, starting at eighteen feet apart, while she whispered numbers which the pupil , holding a cloth pad to one ear, had to repeat. Of the ten thousand children, 952 or over nine percent were totally deaf including 142 with, 'purulent discharge from the ear.'³² Many children developed ear trouble after getting scarlet fever during one the regular epidemics, notably that of 1913. The majority had enlarged adenoids and tonsils and breathed through their mouths.³³ Teachers and inspectors disapproved of mouth breathing: gaping mouths generally accompanied foul breath, signalling stupidity and bad manners. Five percent of South Australian children in 1914 could not hear a whispered number at fifteen feet (about four metres). And 3.5 percent were 'very deaf.' Their teachers had noted their 'supposed carelessness' and 'inattentiveness in class,' but had not moved the struggling hearers nearer the front.³⁴

Not surprisingly, 'inattentives' generally were also mouth breathers with 'catarrh of the ears and nose.' Forty-six percent of South Australian children in 1914 had adenoids or enlarged tonsils, with eleven percent judged to have their educational progress impaired by them. These findings launched the great campaigns of the 1920s–30s to surgically remove tonsils, enlarged or not. It makes more sense if we recall that this was still the pre-antibiotic age. The South Australian inspectors and teachers enforced 'breathing exercises' to reinforce the benefits of a dry climate, in an implied riposte to their Tasmanian and Victorian counterparts.³⁵ In 1908 the Tasmanian town pupils had seventy-seven percent pharyngeal-laryngeal troubles and country pupils over fifty-eight percent. The beginners were the worst sufferers, suggesting parental fatalism and mouths had not improved at their time of leaving, as seventy-nine percent of the pupils considered 'Dull' or 'Defective' had discernible adenoids, tonsils or mouth breathing; their blocked Eustachian tubes and perforated eardrums rendered their hearing poor. Inescapably, they ingested the discharges, which in the opinion of Dr. Elkington caused 'stomach troubles.' Few children possessed handkerchiefs. Children wiped their noses and eyes with their hands. By 1913 Tasmanian teachers were being urged to demand shows of 'hands' and 'handkerchiefs.'³⁶ Yet the school towels, apparently an innovation in South Australia during the decade, were issued one per week and described by Dr. Halley as a 'disgrace' and 'most insanitary.'³⁷ Water was scarce everywhere in South Australia and not least in schools, whose tanks were small and rarely cleaned. The children's homes did not have bathrooms. Schools in Western Europe and some American cities had baths by 1914. Two Sydney schools had warm baths.³⁸ The 'grosser' dirt was worst among children with 'unskilled' fathers, but dirt occurred at all class levels. The cleanest State school pupils in Hobart, at the elite Teacher Training School, also had the best teeth. This was hardly a preparation for what inspectors were to encounter, even in Hobart, at the Trinity Hill school—wretched on every count in casually employed North Hobart. As in Sydney the children of 'skilled labouring and mercantile' fathers were found to be taller and heavier than those of 'unskilled labouring' men.³⁹

In the 1820s Surgeon Cunningham had observed that native born colonials lost their teeth 'early ... about puberty.'⁴⁰ Similar comments recurred through the nineteenth century. Dr. Muskett in 1893 lamented that Australians took 'little interest' in their teeth: yellowed, irregular, broken, carious teeth, crude plates and dentures had become so commonplace that they were not regarded as salient features of ill-looks among the middling and professional classes.⁴¹ Nonetheless, wedding photographs dating from the later nineteenth century to about 1960 invariably show the couple with their mouths firmly closed. In 1908–09 New South Wales medical inspectors found that, among four thousand children in junior classes, twenty-nine percent of city boys and thirty percent of country boys had 'faulty' milk teeth. City junior girls recorded thirty-five percent and country girls thirty-six percent. Country girls had the 'cleanest mouths,' city boys the dirtiest. At ages seven to fourteen, sixteen percent of city boys and nineteen percent of city girls had carious permanent teeth. Bad breath was common.⁴²

Queensland was notably advanced in providing travelling school dentists by 1912. It took months for them to get through the schools in a region. They also treated poor parents free on Saturdays. New South Wales began a similar scheme in 1913.⁴³ Comparisons revealed South Australia as best in the general school caries count at 83 percent; Tasmania came next at 95.5 percent; New South Wales 96 percent. They were not unusually bad: Hamburg had 96.5 percent, Baden Thuringia 99 percent and 'America,' probably meaning cities, 93 percent.⁴⁴ Children's teeth in northern South Australia were better than those in Adelaide and the coast. The northern children relied on meat and their generally poorer parents were further from shops selling sweets.

Dr. R. S. Rogers, who did the South Australian survey, guessed that fifty percent of the State children never brushed their teeth and the other half 'did it badly'; partly, probably, because their gums were tender. Moreover their straight, hard brushes could not be easily used on the backs of the teeth.⁴⁵ The standard brushing agents were rather noxious compounds such one based on powdered borax—a mouth disinfectant but nasty in the stomach if swallowed; iris root (normally used to clear bile from the stomach); powdered soap; oil of cloves, an antiseptic with a burning taste, and oil of wintergreen with a pungent taste usually taken for rheumatism, but it is also irritating to the gastric mucous membrane.⁴⁶ Before antibiotics, people of all classes liked to know that what they were taking had a tang that showed it must be effective among the disordered vital spirits in their flesh. Families with less money could settle for the traditional salt and soot. Yet the Japanese, always in the minds of the progressives as a potential threat to the nation, already had compulsory school toothbrush drill.⁴⁷

Moreover Dr. Rogers reported that European-ancestry consumers of over-refined foods were compressing and weakening their jawbones, compared with root-eating indigenous groups of the population, while the number of teeth remained constant, leading to crowded unclean European sets of teeth.⁴⁸ The crowded, carious white Australian mouth made chewing for efficient digestion more difficult. Dr. Halley found in 1913 that fourteen percent of the overall sixty-three percent of boys with two or more permanent teeth visibly decayed and a slightly lower percentage of girls in that category had upsets associated with 'nutrition and digestion ... that affected their educational progress.' Many children from careful homes had a full set of false teeth by age fifteen.⁴⁹ Australians were the largest reported consumers of sugar per head in the world, followed by the British.⁵⁰

The Standing Orders for Australian recruiters in 1914 provided that, 'loss of many teeth in a man of indifferent constitution would point to rejection, whilst a robust recruit who had lost an equal number might be accepted.' By 1918 over fifty percent of Australian volunteers had already been rejected on medical grounds.⁵¹ What was seen as the socially superior 'Force for the Pacific Islands' of some hundreds raised in 1914–15 underwent a professional dental examination during recruitment: between August and December 1915 they received 108 extractions, 160 fillings and fifty dressings for 'abscesses, etc.'⁵² Altogether, nearly sixteen thousand men, some of whom might have been seen by the New South Wales school inspectors from 1908, were in 1914–15 rejected on dental grounds. Yet when British Army Colonel Dudgeon saw Australians at Lemnos and Anzac he was shocked by their teeth and broken plates. Australians overseas between 1915 and 1919 underwent 1.2 million dental operations, the largest single cause of all hospital admissions.⁵³

Dr. Isabel Ormiston, a new Tasmanian inspector, noted in 1912 that the children were 'unduly nervous,' and their speech was poor. They dropped word endings and broke phrases. Many seemed 'entirely' to parrot 'older members of the family.' She had examined forty-nine cases of goitre and/or cleft palate and diagnosed cases of chorea [St. Vitus's Dance], epilepsy and 'hysteria.'⁵⁴ These and bad speech habits were not reportable conditions and so teachers ignored them. Acting Assistant Inspector Robinson, also new to the job in South Australia in 1911, encountered speech that was, 'low-pitched, hesitating, indistinct.' There was 'very little "free expression" ... the children have no confidence in themselves.' Dr. Rogers had noticed cases of stammering and that the other children mocked them.⁵⁵ Robinson thought the teachers showed a 'want of tact and sympathy.'⁵⁶ Many of them were, after all, only fifteen-years-old, on £2 (around the basic wage) and board per week. They all seemed 'desperate to move' somewhere else or out of the Education Department altogether. Older teachers were 'stuck ... [and] self-satisfied.'⁵⁷ Five days a week they emerged from frowzy lodgings to face indifferent, tired children in grubby, ill-lit, unventilated classrooms fetid with 'carbonic acid.' Their classrooms lacked clocks, wall charts, blackboards, T squares, peck and bushel measures, scales and weights, barometers and thermometers, boxes for sewing materials, an encyclopaedia, a map of Australia to show the required explorers' routes, an anatomical chart to back the required temperance lessons, a wheelbarrow for 'yard work,' a rain-gauge, a piano, amongst other curricular aids not supplied by the Education Department and rarely provided by parents who never visited the schools.⁵⁸ The reality shamed the ideal of alert, physically competent, well-trained social molecules that the system should be producing.

The problem was not peculiar to Australia. H. G. Wells' Mr. Polly of 1910, a product of an English State school, 'run bereft of books on severely economical lines,' with an untrained staff, was a man of unrealised talents, querulous, below par with bad teeth and indigestion, innately gifted with notions and words, but hobbled by a deficient vocabulary, loose slang and personal uncertainties, and a similarly ill-equipped wife. 'One seems to start in life,' Polly mused, 'expecting something. And it doesn't happen.'⁵⁹

But it did happen in 1914, as Drs Elkington, Hallett and Booth and their colleagues feared. However, with the exception of New Guinea, it all happened somewhere else, as the history curriculum in all schools around Australia would have led pupils and teachers to expect.

There is a terrible coda to this story. Many of the boys judged sound by their teachers must have gone on to become the one in three volunteers passed ready for service in 1914–18. That group supplied the sixty-six thousand Australians listed as dead or missing in foreign fields and the 113,000 returned men, eighty-five percent of whom disembarked classed 'unfit.' The latter, together with the women, the rejects, the 'shirkers,' the too old and too young comprised the grieving, anxious electorate of the 1920s and 30s in Australia and elsewhere and the mostly sterile politics it sustained. Such casualty statistics as we have for nations whose polities turned brutally evil in those years suggest a similar debilitating waste of their fittest and best: Russia, 8.4 million killed; Germany, 7.2 million; Austria, 7 million; France, 4.2 million; Italy, 2.2 million; leaving millions of others of their generation physically and mentally maimed, many of them once sorted as fit for fighting by their teachers and medical inspectors and recruitment officers.⁶⁰

Australian National University

Notes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the two anonymous referees of this paper for their acute, helpful and salutary comments.

^1.� J.S.C. Elkington, "Medical Examination of State School Children," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania 55 (1906): 20–21.

^2.�Ibid., 20; J.S.C. Elkington, "A Plea for the Australian Child Body," Report of the Twelfth Meeting AAAS, Brisbane (1909): 774–9.

^3.� Robert Solly, Victorian Parliamentary Debates 114, 20 September 1906 (1906): 1589–90.

^4.� Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives : Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1984), 99.

^5.�South Australian Parliamentary Papers [hereafter SAPP] 3, no. 44 (1913): 29–30.

^6.� Peter Board, "Royal Commission on Education, Qs.," SAPP (1912): 6164–74 (NSW); Commonwealth Yearbook, (1918): 1070–72 (Tasmania); Donald Hamilton Rankin, The History of the Development of Education in Western Australia, 1829–1923 (Perth: Carrolls Ltd., 1926), 139–41 (Queensland); "Report of Director of Education," SAPP 2, pt. 2 (1911): 20 (Victoria).

^7.� G.H. Hogg, "Report on Northern Tasmanian Inspections 1908," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania (1909): 14.

^8.� Elkington, Medical Examination, 23.

^9.� Australian Bureau of Statistics, Victorian Year Book (1905): 346.

^10.� Neville Hicks, "This Sin and Scandal" : Australia's Population Debate, 1891–1911 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978).

^11.�ADB 9 (1891–1939): 170.

^12.�Medical Journal of Australia 1 (1951): 11, 495, 813; Stefan Petrow, Sanatorium of the South? Public Health and Politics in Hobart and Launceston 1875–1914 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1995), 62, 76. ADB 7 (1891–1939): 345.

^13.� "Report of the Minister Controlling Education 1907," SAPP 3 (1908): 37.

^14.� R.S. Rogers, "Royal Commission on Education," SAPP 2 (1912): Q 5597; Elkington, Medical Examination, 21–2.

^15.� J.S.C. Elkington, "Report of the Medical Inspection of Schools," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania (1908): 10.

^16.�Ibid., 6.

^17.� "Director of Education Report," SAPP 2, pt. 2 (1911): 19.

^18.� "Assistant Medical Inspector Robinson," SAPP 3 (1913): 35.

^19.�Transactions of the Twelfth Meeting of AAAS (1909): 782–5.

^20.� Dr. Alfred Austin, "Royal Commission on Education," SAPP 2 (1912) Qs 5720–52.

^21.� V.J. Pavia, "Royal Commission on Education," SAPP 12 (1912): Q 4270; R.S. Rogers, Royal Commission, Qs 5605–8.

^22.�Royal Commission, Q 5549.

^23.�Ibid., Q 5643.

^24.� Parvia, Qs 4223–5; "Report, 1913" SAPP 3, (1914): 29.

^25.�SAAP 3 (1914): 37; SAPP 3 (1916): 37; J.S.C. Elkington, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute 29 (1908): 14; S.D. Porteus, ADB 11 (1891–1939): 261.

^26.� J.S.C. Elkington, "Report of the Medical Inspection of Schools," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania (1913): 8–10; Dr. Isabel Ormiston, "Report of the Medical Inspection of Schools," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania (1913): 26.

^27.� R.S. Rogers, "Third Progress Report : Royal Commission on Education," SAPP 2 (1912): Qs 4215, 5549.

^28.� Gertrude Halley, "Report on Adelaide district," SAPP 3 (1914): 36.

^29.� John Shirley (Inspector of Schools, Queensland), Report of Fifth Meeting of AAAS, Adelaide (1893): 652–5.

^30.� Dr. Allen Martin, "Report 1912," SAPP 3 (1913): 23–4; John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and "Boy Conscription," (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979), 69–80.

^31.� Gertrude Halley, "Medical Inspection of Schools, Tasmania," Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress (1909): 110.

^32.�Ibid., 109–10.

^33.� Isabel Ormiston, "Report 1912," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania (1913): 26.

^34.� Gertrude Halley, "Report December 1913," SAPP 3 (1914): 36.

^35.� Gertrude Halley, "Report 1914," SAPP 3 (1914): 36.

^36.� Ormiston, 26; Elkington, Medical Examination, 14.

^37.�SAPP 3, no. 14 (1914): 37.

^38.� Gertrude Halley, 'Report 1913', SAPP 3 (1914): 37.

^39.� Elkington, Medical Examination, 3–6; Robert Solly, Victorian Parliamentary Debates 124 (1911): 361–2.

^40.� Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales (Sydney: Angus & Robertson in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1966), 207.

^41.� Philip E. Muskett, The Art of Living in Australia (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1987 [c.1893]), 40.

^42.�Australian Medical Journal (20 April 1910): 225.

^43.� J.D. Story, "Third Progress Report," SAPP 2 (1912): Qs 5070–5.

^44.� Rogers, 55.

^45.�Ibid., Qs 5511, 5542–3.

^46.� Philip E. Muskett, The Illustrated Australian Medical Guide (Sydney: W. Brooks, 1909), 2:256–8; Prue McGoldrick, When the Whistle Blew (Morwell: Gippsland Printers, 1989), 125.

^47.� Rogers, Q 5548.

^48.�Ibid., Qs 5564–5.

^49.�SAPP 3 (1914): 36.

^50.� T.A. Coghlan, A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australia 1897–98 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1898), 354.

^51.� A.G. Butler, The Australian Army Medical Services in the War Of 1914–1918 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1943), 3:443, 883–9.

^52.� Butler, 1:785, n.10.

^53.� Butler, 3:447–8, 481–3.

^54.� "Report," Journals and Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania 69, (1913): 27.

^55.�SAPP 2 (1912): Qs 5552–4.

^56.�SAPP 3 (1912): 43.

^57.� "Royal Commission Report," SAPP 2 (1912): v–vi; Rogers, Q 4254; Elkington, Medical Examination, 17; Assistant-Inspector Nicolle, SAPP (1910): 32.

^58.� V.J. Parvia, "Third Report," SAPP 2 (1912): Q 4254.

^59.� H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly (London: Nelson, 1910), Ch. X.

^60.� Butler, 3:table 26, 886; table 27, 887; table 5, 866.

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