This article examines the type of medical care provided at Ernabella Mission in far north-west South Australia during the late-1930s and 1940s. It pays particular attention to the mission’s policy of discouraging the wearing of clothes by Aborigines in the interests of their health, and contrasts this with the mission’s more conventional (less hybrid) medical work.
In 1938 the News in Adelaide ran a series of articles on the recently-opened Ernabella Mission in far north-west South Australia following a visit there by Phyllis Duguid, wife of the mission’s founder, Dr Charles Duguid (1886–1984).[1] Under the headline ‘Natives Allowed to Remain Naked: Fine Freedom at Ernabella,’ the News reported that:
Ernabella Mission did not even encourage Aborigines to wear clothes … Round the station the natives wore no clothes at all, in fact, in the interests of their health they were discouraged from doing so. Only girls working in the house were asked to dress. Strangely, the Aborigines, who had begun to appreciate the white man’s superiority, wanted clothes.[2]
In a subsequent booklet, An Impression of Ernabella, published by the Presbyterian Board of Missions, Phyllis Duguid was anxious to stress that the mission did not prevent Aborigines from adopting clothes. ‘Freedom … is the very essence of the spirit of the mission,’ she claimed. Rather, since ‘most of the natives were quite unclothed’ to begin with, the mission simply encouraged them to remain as they were.[3] As for the ‘house girls,’ their coverings were strictly temporary. Phyllis explained: ‘The girls helping in the house wear dresses but go back to the native camp at night—the idea being not to give [them] any sense of promotion to the house,’ for it was only at the house that clothing was worn.[4] Given that Aborigines were ‘apt to regard [clothing] as a sign of development,’ Phyllis hoped that they would eventually adopt the same ‘free and healthy form of dress’ as the mission superintendent—’khaki shorts with open-necked shirt.’ In the meantime, however, it was vital that they remain unclothed in the ‘interests of their health.'[5]
Ernabella was not an ‘ordinary’ mission.[6] At the time of its establishment in 1937, Ernabella ‘Medical Mission’ was hailed as ‘the greatest anthropological, cultural and industrial venture’ ever proposed in the interests of Aborigines, and it is still regarded as ‘possibly the greatest tribute to missionary endeavour’ ever undertaken in Australia.[7] Scholarly accounts of the mission’s significance have tended to focus on its ‘culturally sensitive approach’ rather than its medical work.[8] John Harris, for instance, highlighted Ernabella’s respect for ‘Aboriginal language and culture’ in his study of Christian missions, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity (1990); while Richard Broome saluted its policy of minimal interference in tribal custom in his Aboriginal Australians (2001). Ernabella’s policies of minimal interference included teaching children in their own language; encouraging parents to hunt in the traditional manner rather than become dependent on the mission for food; not confining children in dormitories; and not making children (or their parents) wear clothes.[9] Considered ‘benign’ by Broome, ‘outstanding’ by Harris, and ‘revolutionary’ by others, these polices set Ernabella apart from other missions—none more so than its policy of keeping Aborigines unclothed. Yet apart from the statement of fact by Broome and others that Aborigines at Ernabella were not compelled to wear clothes, the policy has not received much scholarly attention;[10] nor has Ernabella’s medical work been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry.[11] This article represents a first attempt to bring together these two related themes: nakedness and health.
Nakedness, health, and savagery
The health-giving effects of nudism had been championed by devotees of the practice since at least the 1920s. Although it remained a minority pursuit, nudism became increasingly popular in Germany, Britain, North America, New Zealand, and Australia during the inter-war period. This was reflected in the proliferation of nudist clubs, camps, and magazines, as Caroline Daley has shown.[12] Nudists claimed that nudism was, first and foremost, about health and racial fitness. By enabling the sun’s rays to reach all parts of the body, the health-giving effects of fresh air and physical activity were greatly increased. The key was sunlight. Whether naked or partially clothed, sunlight was thought to have profound regenerative and curative properties: a sun-therapy clinic in the Swiss Alps was touted to have cured tuberculosis, rickets, and infantile paralysis. In Australia and New Zealand, organizations such as the Sunshine Health Club and Sunlight League were formed during the 1930s to promote the virtues of ‘sunlight and fresh air as a means to health.’ People were encouraged to spend time in the sun and to tan. While there was some distaste at the prospect of white people becoming darker skinned—like savages—tanning enthusiasts pointed out that native peoples had, in fact, ‘been far healthier before being colonised, “civilised” and forced to cover their bodies with western style clothing.'[13]
Anthropologist George Pitt-Rivers catalogued the ‘evil consequences of the adoption of European clothing by native races’ in his The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races, published in 1927. Speaking of New Zealand and the Pacific region, Pitt-Rivers argued that
[w]hen cotton clothing, singlets, and trousers, [are] adopted in place of the simple native loincloth of bark cloth, or the fibre or grass skirts of native manufacture, or in place of no clothing at all, these badges of ‘civilisation’ are habitually worn day in and day out, wet and dry, until they rot to pieces. European clothes are the most effective promoters of skin disease, and of influenza, colds, coughs, and the pulmonary ailments that afflict races first brought into contact with civilisation.[14]
According to Pitt-Rivers, those most responsible for ‘enforcing this evil custom’ were missionaries. Missionaries inculcated ‘decency’ and ‘modesty’ among their flock by creating a sense of ‘shame’ at the ‘sinfulness of the flesh.’ They made clothing a condition of entry into their churches, and taught their adherents that ‘no-one can be a Christian who does not wear shirt and trousers.'[15]
Most missions viewed the wearing of clothes by native races as a sign of their success at Christian instruction, or of progress from savagery to civilisation.[16] Gordon Sayre has shown how nakedness signified ‘a negation of civilisation’—savagery and the ‘absence of culture’—in French and English colonial literature about Native Americans.[17] In the Australian context, nakedness likewise signified Aborigines’ primitiveness: they were not just naked, they were ‘naked savages’ and their nakedness was viewed as an affront to common decency. Especially in places where Aborigines were likely to come into contact with whites, such as missions and small townships, there were repeated calls for them to be ‘sufficiently clothed to prevent indecent exposure’ and to protect the sensibilities of white women and children.[18]
The wearing of clothes by Aborigines signalled a change in their status. As the late-nineteenth century Moravian missionary, the Reverend Nicholas Hey, recalled: ‘[G]radually the naked savages were not only seen clothed and in their right mind, listening to the gospel of peace, but they also endeavoured to shape their lives according to the principle’ of God.[19] Yet the change in status occasioned by the wearing of clothes was not always positive. When the type of clothing worn consisted of rags cast off by white people (as was often the case), the result, according to Charles Duguid and other anthropologically-inclined observers, was the creation of ‘very inferior and degraded editions of white people.'[20]
Duguid was proud of the fact that at Ernabella Mission ‘only the few native men and women who [were] working at the homestead [had] even the simplest clothing, while those who only [visited] occasionally [were] encouraged to remain tribal’ (meaning naked).[21] As far as Duguid was concerned, clothing and ‘detribalization’—or the end of tribal life—went hand in hand. Moreover, when Aborigines, unused to such coverings, neglected to change or wash their clothes, they became dirty and a potential health risk, especially for a people already undernourished as a consequence of dispossession and hence more susceptible to infection and disease.[22] For these reasons—tribal integrity and health—Ernabella Mission discouraged the wearing of clothes by Aborigines.
No ‘ordinary’ mission
Nestled in the foothills of the picturesque Musgrave Ranges, Ernabella Mission was established by the Presbyterian Church in 1937 following several years of intense campaigning by Duguid. A Scottish-born medical doctor, Duguid became the first lay moderator of the South Australian Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in March 1935. In his inaugural moderator’s address, Duguid called on the Church to found a new type of mission—he described it as a ‘Christian Anthropological Mission’—in the vicinity of the Musgrave Ranges near the border of the Central Aborigines Reserve.[23] His proposal reflected contemporary shifts in thinking about the nature and purpose of missionary work, purporting that anthropologists and missionaries—or science and religion—should work together for the preservation and ‘uplift’ of the Aborigines.[24] A visit to the Musgraves in June 1935 left Duguid even more convinced of the worthiness of his scheme, reconceptualised as a ‘Medical Mission’—a title more in keeping with his own area of expertise, but still maintaining the critical nexus between science and religion. Duguid was alarmed at the number and type of white men in the remote area, one of whom ‘boasted he would give every lubra he came across gonorrhea.'[25] In the end, it was as a ‘Buffer Mission’ that Ernabella was established: its purpose, to provide a buffer zone, or ‘haven of refuge,’ between the Aborigines of the Central Aborigines Reserve and the encroaching white civilisation.[26]
Duguid planned that the mission would have three main functions: to provide firstly a ‘spiritual prop—non-credal—to fill the gap created by us’; secondly, ‘education and training for the changed conditions created by our coming’; and, thirdly, ‘medical care for [Aborigines’] own peculiar ills, and those acquired through contact with us.'[27] In devising Ernabella’s operating principles, Duguid insisted that it was ‘worse than useless to attempt to civilise and Christianise Aborigines in one fell swoop.’ Rather, he professed, ‘Jesus must be lived among them before they can understand what Jesus is and the best of their own culture must be retained.'[28] Towards this end, Duguid determined that
the white people of the Mission must be of the finest Christian type, must learn the language of the native, must live their lives rather than preach their gospel, [and] that any change must come from an urge within the native and not be a compulsion from us to them.[29]
In practice, this meant encouraging the Aborigines to continue their nomadic, hunter-gatherer way of life, while not interfering in the observance of sacred ceremonies and rites and not breaking up families. It also meant not making Aborigines wear clothes.
The extent to which Ernabella actually operated along these lines was commented on by a visitor to the mission, Mr E.R. Edwards, in a letter to the editor of the Advertiser (Adelaide) in 1939:
Before Ernabella [was established] the natives were dressed in filthy rags and treated as useless … [Now] the old clothes are practically gone [and] the natives are treated as human beings—as a race with its own rights and culture … Corroborees and sacred ceremonies are encouraged, and the black man is holding his own. Ernabella is regarded by them as a sanctuary where sympathy and understanding are to be had, and where, if they wish, they can obtain work and training; but they are always urged to live their own life in the bush and regard themselves as a people.[30]
In terms of daily living, religious instruction, work practices, and education, Ernabella was a ‘hybrid’ mission, blending indigenous and European cultural practices. When it came to medical care, however, the mission was much less interested in what Aboriginal culture had to offer. Duguid, for example, described the methods of the Aborigines’ ‘own medicine men [as] being of the crudest.'[31] He was determined, as far as possible, to ensure that the Aborigines at Ernabella received the best, ‘most scientific and up-to-date’ medical care available.[32]
The closest Ernabella Mission came to employing Aboriginal health practices was over the question of clothing (or lack thereof) which was not, strictly speaking, an Aboriginal health practice. Rather, nakedness was an indigenous cultural norm that was viewed by Duguid and others as ‘healthy,’ both in terms of body and mind. It also fitted with the mission’s wider goal of respecting Aboriginal culture. Thus, while it might be possible to view Ernabella’s policy on clothing as a kind of hybrid health system, in the sense that it was not standard western medical or missionary practice, and especially if the definition of health is widened to include emotional and mental health, it is important not to over-emphasise its significance. The ‘no clothing’ rule was only one aspect of Ernabella Mission’s broader medical effort, the bulk of which was not hybrid but imposed. As will be discussed, Ernabella sought to improve the health of the Aborigines of the Central Aborigines Reserve in three main ways: through the provision of medical care at the mission; through a travelling medical missionary patrol; and through research into ills peculiar to Aborigines.
Ernabella ‘Medical Mission’
Ernabella Mission’s most important task, its raison d’être, was to ‘save the Aborigines from extinction.’ As Duguid put it: ‘If we fail, they die.'[33] Although noticeably in decline, the previously-dominant theory of inevitable extinction still held sway with missionaries, anthropologists, government authorities, and other interested observers, who argued that if something were not done to save Aborigines of full descent they would die out. Aborigines of mixed-descent, or ‘half-castes’ as they were known, were classed in a different category; their numbers being on the rise, they posed a different, though no less difficult, problem.[34]
Ernabella was a mission for Aborigines of full descent, not ‘half-castes.’ Duguid made this clear when he promised that ‘native women [would] cease to give birth to half-castes’ once the mission was established.[35] ‘Half-castes’ threatened the ‘racial purity’ of the ‘full-bloods.’ More than that, they threatened the very existence of such Aborigines, their lighter skin colour and physical appearance serving as a constant reminder that racial mixing was hastening the extinction of the ‘full-bloods.’ Such a precept was in fact the basis of policy in Western Australia and the Northern Territory where the aim was to ‘breed out the colour’ of the Aborigines through controlled miscegenation or racial absorption. At Ernabella, by contrast, Duguid hoped to preserve Aborigines’ ‘racial purity.'[36] Accordingly, he was delighted to report that ‘no half-castes [had] been born’ at Ernabella by 1939; but this was probably more a reflection of Aboriginal mothers’ skill at hiding their light-skinned children, than of the mission’s ability to keep ‘undesirable’ white men away.[37]
As well as ‘breeding half-castes,’ white men spread disease.[38] Disease had long been regarded as one of the principal causes, if not the principal cause, of the ‘dying out’ of the Aborigines.[39] However, whereas during the nineteenth century it was believed that, along with disease and other physical causes, a ‘deeper and more mysterious’ force was at work, the early-twentieth century saw divine providence—or the hand of God—gradually give way to modern science as an explanation. Newer ideas centred on the ‘predictable biological consequences of personal contact between the immunologically competent and the immunologically naïve,’ as Warwick Anderson has explained. Although contact with Europeans was still considered potentially fatal to Aborigines, rather than the result of some ‘mystical process,’ by the 1930s it was generally understood that Aborigines reacted to ‘the new diseases they encountered … in much the same way as anyone born of a previously isolated population.'[40] Thus, Duguid observed that while the ‘health of the Aboriginal in his native haunts, where he has been almost untouched by civilisation, is excellent …, where he has had to compete with cattle and [the] white man it is very bad.'[41] Duguid described the ‘health of the natives in the northern parts of South Australia [as] serious’; ‘[s]curvy, … influenza, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases [being] among those to which the native has fallen a prey.'[42] Keeping Aborigines ‘away from the townships and as far as possible from contact with white men’ was their ‘only hope’ in the short term, but the long term demanded a different solution.[43]
Duguid’s preferred solution was a ‘Medical Mission’ located ‘somewhere in the vicinity of the Musgrave Ranges’ and run by medical practitioners (a doctor and two trained nurses). ‘There will be no need for a padre’ at Australia’s first and ‘only purely Medical Mission’ to the Aborigines, Duguid confidently declared in 1935; but representatives of the Presbyterian Church disagreed.[44] After visiting the site of Duguid’s proposed mission, the Reverend J.R.B. Love, a missionary of long experience, concluded that ‘the task of the head of Ernabella Mission is not one for a doctor, but for a clerical missionary.’ Reinforcing Love’s view, Dr Lewis J. Balfour maintained that ‘unless the presence of the mission [drew] many sick natives from the surrounding districts … there would not be enough work for a medical man.'[45] As a consequence of Love and Balfour’s reports, the Presbyterian Church appointed a clerical missionary, the Reverend Harry Taylor, as the first superintendent at Ernabella.
Without a doctor as head of the mission, it could not be called a ‘Medical Mission,’ yet Duguid was determined that medical work should remain Ernabella’s main focus. In planning for the mission, he argued that medical attention was ‘urgently’ needed in the Musgraves, both to ‘preserve’ Aborigines ‘from the ravages of disease and epidemic that were rapidly lessening their numbers,’ and because the ‘love and care [shown] in serious sickness brings a trust that almost nothing else can win.'[46] Duguid was convinced that medical work would help the missionaries to win Aborigines’ confidence as well as cure their ills. Not one to be easily dissuaded, he donated £100 per year towards the mission’s medical work, thereby ensuring that Ernabella’s ‘chief phase was medical’—despite the absence of a doctor, or even a qualified nurse, at the mission during its early years.[47]
Ernabella’s first superintendent had sufficient medical training to allow him to diagnose and treat common ailments such as burns, eye disorders, colds, influenza, pneumonia, and yaws—a contagious skin disease that was taking a heavy toll on the local Aborigines. Yaws was easily cured by a series of injections, usually over three weeks.[48] The greater challenge was to convince the Aborigines to come to the mission for treatment and to stay for its duration. Before Ernabella was established, Duguid ‘was constantly told [that] tribal Aborigines would have nothing to do with the white man’s medicine’: they ‘will never go to a white man for medical treatment’ as they ‘prefer their [own] “witch doctor”.'[49] But Duguid had ‘faith in the native’—faith in the ability to appreciate the difference between the two forms of healing.[50] The yaws cases proved him right, for after the first sufferers were cured—once the unsightly skin lesions had healed and the patients’ general health had improved—’fresh cases came in from hundreds of miles around.'[51] The same was true for sufferers of other ailments as well. A Presbyterian Board of Missions pamphlet stated in 1940 that the Aborigines ‘knew that there were friends at Ernabella who could and would help them, and they came in of their own accord and reported their sickness so that they could get healing.'[52]
In keeping with Duguid’s views on ‘scientific and up-to-date’ medical care, the Aborigines at Ernabella had their ‘burns treated with a tannic acid preparation as in Adelaide, their yaws with arsenic injections, and pneumonias with M & B 693.’ In an emergency, the missionary in charge could ‘speak over the air by pedal wireless with a medical man at Alice Springs,’ the nearest large town.[53] Through the provision of the best medical care available, the missionaries at Ernabella were gradually able to win the Aborigines’ confidence, which in turn encouraged more Aborigines to attend the mission’s clinics, thus improving the general health and well-being of the local Aboriginal population.[54] The daily routine at the mission included treating the sick who presented themselves at the mission homestead each morning, and attending to the sick at the native camp. During the mission’s first two years of operation, the smallest number of Aborigines treated in a day was five, and the largest was thirty. By 1940, the mission was treating between 150 and 200 cases each month: mainly cuts, bruises, colds, sore eyes, spear wounds, and burns.[55]
In addition to treating Aborigines at the mission, annual medical patrols were conducted into the Central Aborigines Reserve. As far as Duguid was concerned, this was probably ‘the most important part of the [mission’s] work.'[56] The purpose of the medical patrol was three-fold: first, to provide medical care for ‘tribal’ Aborigines in their own environment; secondly, to gather statistical information on the numbers and physical condition of Aborigines in the reserve; thirdly, to answer ‘the curiosity of the unspoilt natives’ and to show them ‘how much better off they [were] in their own country—free to roam at will—than sitting down at a cattle station in rags.'[57]
Duguid participated in the 1939 medical patrol, which co-operated with a special patrol organised by the federal government to determine why ‘so many tribal Aborigines’ were leaving the security of the Central Aborigines Reserve and ‘coming in to the station country’ west of Alice Springs. Duguid and Taylor were joined by T.G.H. Strehlow, deputy chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, and Pastor F.W. Albrecht, superintendent of Hermannsburg Mission. Led by a native guide, the party crossed the Petermann Ranges at five points and journeyed as far as the border of Western Australia before turning back. In an area previously populated by hundreds of Aborigines (in 1936 it was estimated that 500 Aborigines lived in the Petermann Ranges) the medical patrol found 26 Aborigines only—’five men, eight women, one old woman and twelve children.’ A three-year drought had forced the people to move away in search of food and water and many had died of starvation. Duguid was horrified: ‘These people died not of disease,’ he stressed in his subsequent report, ‘but of starvation in Australia.'[58]
With the spectre of total racial extinction still looming, the situation in the Petermann Ranges left Duguid even more convinced of the need for proper medical care and health measures for ‘tribal’ Aborigines. Having witnessed first-hand the devastation caused by drought, Duguid believed that a large part of the problem was chronic sub-nutrition. He stated, ‘Whatever it was in the past it must never be forgotten that today it is only in good seasons that the bush natives in the Interior get enough to eat, and never at any time do they get enough fat.'[59] In fact, there was ‘practically no fat in the diet of the Aborigines of the centre’ and this, Duguid suggested, was one of the reasons why Aborigines died so readily when confronted with introduced diseases: not ‘altogether due to lack of immunity … but because we have allowed [them] to come into contact with these diseases in a state of chronic sub- or mal-nutrition.'[60]
In 1941 and 1942, in formal submissions to the federal government, Duguid renewed his call for a ‘medical man’ at Ernabella Mission. Previously Duguid had wanted a doctor as head of the mission. Now he wanted ‘a scientifically-trained medical man to conduct research into special diseases of the natives’: yaws, granuloma, and what Duguid called ‘deficiency diseases’—which included ‘boomerang leg’ and blindness. His grand idea was to transform Ernabella Mission into a centre for medical research that would investigate ‘the whole question of the dietetic requirements of the native’; but his plea for funding fell on deaf ears. There was simply no money available, especially in war time, for such an ambitious scheme.[61]
‘No work, no tucker’
Given Ernabella’s obvious focus on Aboriginal health, and Duguid’s growing interest in diet and nutrition, it came as something of a shock to learn that the mission was ‘underfeeding its natives.’ ‘No work, no tucker’ was the ‘rule at Ernabella.’ Its policy was to feed only workers, children, the aged, infirm, and sick—the idea being to encourage Aborigines to continue hunting and gathering and not become dependent on the mission for food.[62]
The allegations of underfeeding came from two members of the South Australian Aborigines Protection Board (APB), Constance Ternent Cooke and Alice Harvey Johnston, who inspected Ernabella on behalf of the APB in 1943.[63] Finding the mission in the grip of an influenza epidemic that had resulted in at least eleven deaths, and affected over three hundred Aborigines as well as the white staff, Cooke named underfeeding as the first, and most serious, of Ernabella’s many problems. She reported that
[t]he workers and their families receive for breakfast plain porridge and a hunk of damper; for lunch damper and tea with sugar; for the night meal a stew made of goat meat and vegetables, damper and tea with sugar … The old and infirm, or ‘pensioners’ as they are called at Ernabella, do not fare even as well as this. With few exceptions, they receive one meal only, at night. This consists of a hunk of damper and tea with sugar.[64]
Nor was there much opportunity, Cooke observed, for Aborigines to boost their meagre rations with provisions from the store. Although some Aborigines had money, and others the means to barter, ‘the store [did] not contain enough to supply [them] with … the ordinary amenities of life.’ In addition to being underfed and deficient in provisions, Cooke suspected that the Aboriginal workers at Ernabella were also being underpaid.[65]
It was a damning report. However, once the business of blame—accusation, counter-accusation, and denial—had been worked through, Cooke’s report prompted much-needed discussion about Ernabella’s role in the context of the changing nature of its contact with Aborigines. After rations and remuneration, one of the key points of discussion concerned the mission’s policy on clothing.
The ‘no clothing rule’
Rather than being a first-contact mission for ‘tribal’ Aborigines, who came and went as they pleased, Ernabella was becoming a more settled community, and the members of that community had certain needs and desires. What they desired most, according to the Reverend J.R.B. Love, superintendent at Ernabella from 1941–5, was ‘white man’s clothing and white man’s food.'[66] In his first annual report, Love commented favourably on the Aborigines’ ‘request for clothes,’ only to be informed by the APB that ‘the wearing of clothing by the natives should, in the interests of health, be discouraged.'[67] When Cooke inspected Ernabella on behalf of the APB in 1943, she ‘noticed how much the native people seem[ed] to feel the cold’ and it ‘distressed [her] to see the sick people lying naked on the ground.’ Although a member of the APB, Cooke seemed unaware of the Board’s policy on the wearing of clothes. It was Love who informed her that ‘the Board [had] condemned the practice of natives wearing clothes.’ He also told her that it was a policy doomed to fail: ‘rags were in evidence long before the mission [and] nothing will prevent the younger women and girls from wearing clothes, even if they are made out of scraps.'[68] The reality was that Aborigines could, and did, obtain clothes from their relatives who were employed on the cattle stations east of the mission. Rather than have ‘so many wearing rags,’ Love argued that it was far better to provide them with a ‘minimum of decent clothing … and encourage them to use soap, and wash.'[69] After the war, this became the policy at Ernabella. When Duguid visited in 1946, he observed that ‘most of the natives had some clothing, a shirt and trousers or a dress.'[70]
Children were a different matter, however. At the same time as Love was petitioning for clothes to be sent to the mission, he assured the authorities that he and his staff could, and would, ‘keep the children unclothed.'[71] Since the opening of the school at Ernabella in 1940, it had been policy that the ‘boys and girls attend in their natural state.'[72] For Aboriginal children of full descent, ‘natural’ meant ‘naked’: it described an ideal, and idealised, pre-contact condition. Numerous photographs of naked Aboriginal children sitting cross-legged at the Ernabella school, behind makeshift desks and at play, were circulated by the Presbyterian Church during the 1940s and 1950s. Which shows Duguid carrying an Aboriginal child on his back, demonstrates how normalised nakedness was at Ernabella for Aborigines of full descent. By contrast, the ‘natural state’ for ‘half-castes’ was clothed. While there were very few ‘half-caste’ children at the mission (most having been sent south to institutions such as Colebrook Home), those who remained were forced to wear clothes to the school.[73]
Only the ‘full-blood tribal’ children at Ernabella were kept unclothed. On the first day of classes, 1 March 1940, ‘fifteen naked, brown, Aboriginal children of the Pitjantjatjara tribe came from the mountains … to the school of the Ernabella Mission.'[74] Thereafter, each school day followed the same routine. Duguid enthused:
They begin the day with a plunge in a pool and a romp for 20 minutes to dry off. You should see their shining brown bodies, white teeth and laughing eyes. These school children are the happiest you could meet.[75]
More than a decade later, little had changed. Duguid reported in 1954 that the children still attended ‘school in their natural state and they [were] healthier and happier without clothes.'[76] But were they really healthier? According to Duguid, it was ‘far better’ for Aboriginal children (of full descent) to remain naked because ‘they [were] constantly on the move and clothes would impede their beautifully-free movements, cause them to sweat heavily and to catch cold.'[77] In line with current thinking on the health benefits of sunlight, Duguid believed that the ‘actinic quality’ of sunlight would give them a kind of ‘prophylactic protection against disease and illness.’ The first teacher at the mission, Ronald Trudinger, heartily agreed. In an interview in 1995, Trudinger claimed that many of his former pupils were ‘still alive today and healthy’ because of Ernabella’s no clothing policy: ‘Dr Duguid’s dictum that we must keep the children naked, so they got the benefit of the sunlight, which would be a prophylactic against disease was proved beyond all doubt to be the right thing.'[78]
Yet remaining unclothed did not prevent the children from getting sick. Children were among the number struck down by influenza during Cooke’s visit in 1943. Two years later, in 1945, another official visitor to Ernabella, J.B. Cleland, reported that ‘nearly every native was more or less affected’ by scabies. The lesions occurred ‘between the clefts of the fingers, around the wrists and hands, sometimes around the ankles and, particularly in the case of the unclothed young persons up to the age of about 14 years, on the buttocks.’ Although not life threatening, ‘scratching had led to extensive and [infected] sores’ and ‘rendered walking difficult in a number of cases.’ Especially since the children were unclothed, Cleland did not know why the buttocks ‘should be particularly affected.’ Clothing was obviously not to blame for the spread of the condition, he observed, but nor could lack of clothing be said to have prevented the children from becoming infected.[79]
Three years later, in 1948, Ernabella Mission suffered its most devastating epidemic: measles complicated by broncho-pneumonia. Because of the region’s low population density and distance from urban centres, measles had never become endemic in Central Australia. This meant that the Aboriginal population had no natural immunity, no way of fighting the disease.[80]
The 1948 measles epidemic killed at least a quarter of the Aboriginal population of Ernabella. Possibly as many as fifty people at the mission, and many hundreds more in the surrounding region, died during the epidemic. Survivors watched in horror as ‘the bodies [were] carted away in wheelbarrows, sometimes two and three at a time.'[81] A nurse at the mission, Sister Melba Turner, recalled two to three hundred patients lying in rows on the ground at the height of the epidemic. ‘No nursing as such was possible,’ she explained, ‘only the administering of the necessary drugs and fluids, as well as treatment to eyes, ears and coughs.’ Duguid arrived mid-way through the epidemic and stayed for a week, treating the sickest patients and helping out wherever possible. As the epidemic worsened, Aborigines became increasingly suspicious of the white man’s medicine. According to Sister Turner, ‘every dose of the [life-saving] drug had to be crushed up as they would spit it out after we had gone, if taken in tablet form.’ Some Aboriginal mothers ‘hid their babies under blankets, until so ill that it was almost impossible to do anything.’ They were afraid that the missionaries ‘would stick needles into their children, or would force medicine down their throats.’ Others turned to their own ‘medicine man’ for help, only to find that he too was stricken with the disease.[82]
Conclusion
The 1948 measles epidemic devastated Ernabella Mission. It was followed, in 1956, by a second outbreak that killed twenty-seven infants born since the first epidemic. In the following year, the ‘no clothing rule’ for the children at Ernabella School was finally lifted.[83] It seems that not wearing clothes had not protected the children from illness; they still caught colds, scabies and measles. According to Trudinger, only one school child died during the 1948 measles epidemic, but accounts vary.[84 Perhaps the no clothing policy enabled some to withstand disease better than others; perhaps more would have died otherwise; perhaps they would have succumbed to other diseases or illnesses were it not for the ‘no clothing rule.’ It is difficult to know. Likewise, it is difficult to judge the impact of Ernabella’s more conventional medical work. According to Duguid, this was the factor that most accounted for Ernabella’s success at winning Aborigines’ confidence during the early years.[85] This was probably true and yet, as the reaction of some Aborigines during the 1948 measles epidemic showed, faith in the missionaries’ healing abilities was not unwavering. In times of crisis, they still turned to their own ‘medicine man.’
This article points to the need for more research on the medical side of mission work in Australia. Future investigations might focus on the tensions that existed between Ernabella’s ‘no work, no tucker’ and ‘no clothing’ rules. The medical and social justifications for these policies could be explored in light of the policies of other missions, and the broader shifts in Aboriginal health and welfare policy generally.
Although promoted as being in the interests of health, probably the most positive aspect of the ‘no clothing rule’ at Ernabella was the dignity it bestowed on Aborigines’ nakedness. Rather than being viewed as a sign of savagery, nakedness at Ernabella was seen as ‘natural,’ normal, even ‘beautiful.'[86] For those Aborigines who chose to remain unclothed, the policy reinforced a sense of self-worth and pride in their own culture and way of life. But for those Aborigines who wanted to dress, the policy was stifling. It resulted in the absurd situation whereby some children removed their clothes to attend the mission school and then donned them immediately afterwards.[87] In the end, it seems that what made Ernabella a kind of hybrid mission (the mission authorities’ unusual degree of respect for Aboriginal culture) was also what stalled its evolution as the nature of its contact with Aborigines changed. The mission authorities were so concerned to preserve what they saw as ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ Aboriginal culture, and to incorporate this into the life of the mission, that they failed to see the culture was changing, and that part of that change was reflected in the Aborigines’ own desire for ‘white man’s clothing.’
University of Otago
Notes
1. For more information on Charles and Phyllis Duguid see Sitarani Kerin, “Doctor Do-Good? Charles Duguid and Aboriginal Politics, 1930s–1960s” (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2004). See also, Charles Duguid, Doctor and the Aborigines (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973); Duguid, No Dying Race (Adelaide: Rigby, 1963).
2. “Natives Allowed to Remain Naked,” News (Adelaide), 6 August 1938, Duguid Papers MS 5068 (hereafter Duguid Papers), Series 3, National Library of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NLA).
3. Phyllis Duguid, An Impression of Ernabella (Melbourne: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1938).
4. Phyllis Duguid, Travel diary, 1938, Duguid Papers, Series 1, NLA.
5. Phyllis Duguid, An Impression of Ernabella (emphasis added).
6. Letter, Charles Duguid to Professor Gilbert Murray, 26 November 1938, Duguid Papers, Series 10, NLA.
7. “Plans for Native Mission Work,” News (Adelaide), 10 February 1937, Duguid Papers, Series 3, NLA; “Medical Mission for Aborigines,” Advertiser, 2 April 1937, Duguid Papers, Series 3, NLA; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians, 3rd edition, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 121.
8. John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity (Sydney: Albatross Books, 1990), 820, 883. See also Broome, 121–2; Robert Scrimgeour, Some Scots Were Here (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House, 1986), 193; William Edwards and B.A. Clarke, ‘From Missions to Aboriginal Churches: The Uniting Church in Australia and Aboriginal Missions,’ in Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, edited by Tony Swain and Deborah Bird Rose (Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1983), 193; Winifred Hilliard, The People in Between: The Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella (Adelaide: Rigby, 1963).
9. Harris, 883; Broome, 121–2.
10. I understand that Peggy Brock, professor of indigenous history at Edith Cowan University, is currently writing on this issue. Hilliard has also written about the ‘no clothing rule’ at Ernabella; however this is mainly from personal experience. See Hilliard, 157.
11. The history of Aboriginal health (in general) has received very little academic attention. Notable works include: Gordon Briscoe, Counting, Health and Identity: A History of Aboriginal Health and Demography in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900–1940 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2003); David Thomas, Reading Doctors’ Writing: Race, Politics and Power in Indigenous Health Research, 1870–1969 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2003); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). See also Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
12. Caroline Daley, Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body 1900–1960 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 159–92.
13. Ibid., 132–5, 168–77.
14. George Pitt-Rivers, The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races [1927] (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 58.
15. Ibid., 58–60.
16. Roxan Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 19.
17. Gordon M. Sayer, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 144. See also Wheeler, 19.
18. Henry Reynolds, With the White People (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990), 142–3. This view was clearly expressed by a critic of Ernabella Mission, G.F. Davis, who couldn’t understand how ‘nice [white] women’ could ‘stand big naked blackfellows around the house’ (Letter, G.F. Davis to ‘Dear Sir,’ 25 April 1940, Duguid Papers, Series 1, NLA).
19. As quoted in Harris, 492.
20. Duguid, “The Natives on the Edge of Our Civilisation,” in his Aboriginal Broadcasts and an Address (Adelaide: Reliance Printing Company, 1946), 7, 10. See also Pitt-Rivers, 58–60.
21. Duguid, “The Natives on the Edge,” 8.
22. See Pitt-Rivers, 58–60; Reuben Schrader, “Fighting City Hall: Challenges to Colonial Discourses before the Annexation of New Zealand” (Honours Thesis, University of Otago, 2005), 29–30, 60.
23. Charles Duguid, “Moderator’s Address,” Presbyterian Banner, April 1935, 9–10.
24. Of the many influences on Duguid’s thinking, perhaps the most important was A.P. Elkin, professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney. The leading social anthropologist in Australia, Elkin believed that Aborigines offered ‘a great opportunity for religious missions’ provided that the policy was ‘not so much to save individual souls, as to preserve societies, especially during periods of cultural clash and transition.’ See A.P. Elkin, Missionary Policy for Primitive Peoples (Sydney: St John’s College Press, 1934). For a fuller discussion of the influences on Duguid’s thinking see Kerin, 21–48.
25. Phyllis Duguid, Travel diary, 1935, Duguid Papers, Series 2, NLA.
26. Letter, Charles Duguid to Professor Gilbert Murray, 26 November 1938, Duguid Papers, Series 10, NLA; Charles Duguid, “The Australian Aborigines-(II),” Australian Intercollegian, 1 July 1940, 88; Charles Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines of Australia (Adelaide: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1941), 9.
27. Duguid never lived at the mission, but instead resided over a thousand miles away with his family in Adelaide. However, in shaping Ernabella’s early policy—’a policy almost unique among missions’—he earned wide acclaim as a ‘visionary’ reformer. Letter, Charles Duguid to editor, Christian Science Monitor, Boston, 9 May 1949, Duguid Papers, Series 1, NLA.
28. Charles Duguid, “The Australian Aborigines,” Aborigines’ Protector 1, no. 3 (1936): 16–17.
29. Duguid to Murray, 26 November 1938.
30. E.R. Edwards, “Letter to the Editor,” Advertiser, 6 December 1939, Duguid Papers, Series 3, NLA. Edwards was not an unbiased observer. He was honorary secretary of the Aborigines Protection League, an Adelaide-based organisation that was presided over by Charles Duguid. And yet, if only a fraction of what Edwards claimed about Ernabella were true it would still have been a remarkable mission.
31. Duguid, “The Australian Aborigines,” (1936) 17.
32. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines of Australia, 10.
33. Charles Duguid, Ernabella: The Medical Patrol, 1939 (Melbourne: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1939), 14.
34. See McGregor, Imagined Destinies.
35. Letter, Charles Duguid to H.S. Hudd, Commissioner for Public Works, 14 August 1936, Duguid Papers, Series 1, NLA.
36. Letter, Charles Duguid to W.H. Kitson, Chief Secretary Western Australia, 19 September 1938, Duguid Papers, Series 11, NLA. See also McGregor, 178; “Aboriginal Welfare—Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Held at Canberra, 21 to 23 April, 1937” (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937).
37. Letter, Charles Duguid to Sir Charles McCann, Agent General, 19 May 1939, Duguid Papers, Series 10, NLA.
38. Letter, Charles Duguid to H.C. Matthew (secretary, Board of Missions), 19 July 1935, Duguid Papers, Series 10, NLA.
39. McGregor, 14–15. See also Briscoe.
40. Anderson, 210–11.
41. Duguid, “Moderator’s Address,” 9.
42. Ibid.; “Medical Mission for Aborigines,” Advertiser, 4 June 1935, Duguid Papers, Series 3, NLA.
43. Duguid, “Moderator’s Address,” 9.
44. “Medical Mission for Aborigines,” 4 June 1935.
45. Ernabella (Melbourne: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1937), 5–12, 19.
46. “Medical Mission for Aborigines,” 4 June 1935; Duguid to Matthew, 19 July 1935; Duguid, “Moderator’s Address,” 9; Duguid, “The Australian Aborigines” (1936), 14, 17.
47. Letter, Charles Duguid to Senator H.S. Foll (minister for the Interior), 29 May 1939, Duguid Papers, Series 10, NLA.
48. Charles Duguid, “The Aborigines: From Stone Age to Twentieth Century in Sixteen Years,” Link 1 October 1954, 58; Charles Duguid, “The Health of the Aborigines,” Link 1 October 1953, 61.
49. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 10; Duguid, Ernabella: The Medical Patrol, 8; Duguid, “White Doctor: Chapter 1,” Evening News (Scotland) 27 December 1954, 5.
50. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 10.
51. Duguid, “The Health of the Aborigines,” 61.
52. Ernabella, 1940 (Melbourne: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1940), 9.
53. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 10.
54. Duguid to Foll, 29 May 1939.
55. Duguid, Ernabella: The Medical Patrol, 7; Ernabella, 1940, 9.
56. Duguid, “The Australian Aborigines,” (1936), 17.
57. Ibid; Duguid, Ernabella: The Medical Patrol, 5.
58. Duguid, “A Camel Patrol Through the Petermann Ranges”, in his The Aborigines of Australia: Broadcasts and an Address (Adelaide: Reliance Printing Company, 1946), 25–9; Duguid, Ernabella: The Medical Patrol, 9–12; Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 11. See also Barbara Henson, A Straight-out Man: F.W. Albrecht and Central Australian Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 131; Charles Duguid, “Ernabella Patrol”, 1939, Report, GRG 52/1/1939/52, State Records of South Australia, Adelaide (hereafter SRSA) (emphasis added).
59. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 15.
60. Letters, Charles Duguid to E.W.P. Chinnery, 1 August 1941 and Charles Duguid to J.S. Collings, 5 January 1942, Duguid Papers, Series 1, NLA.
61. Duguid, The Future of the Aborigines, 15; Duguid to Chinnery, 1 August 1941 and Duguid to Collings, 5 January 1942.
62. Duguid to Chinnery, 1 August 1941.
63. Constance Ternent Cooke, “Impressions of a Visit to Ernabella”, 1943, Cooke Papers, GRG 52/32/81, SRSA.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. J.R.B. Love, “The Future of Ernabella”, Ernabella Newsletter, December 1944, 1.
67. It is likely that such instructions came directly from Duguid who, in addition to being chairman of the Ernabella Mission Committee, was also a founding member of the APB. See Love, “Ernabella Annual Report”, 19 January 1942; and Letter, W.R. Penhall (secretary APB) to Love, 26 February 1942, GRG 52/1/41/22, SRSA.
68. Cooke, “Impressions of a Visit to Ernabella”.
69. Love, “The Future of Ernabella”, 3.
70. Charles Duguid, Ernabella Revisited (Melbourne: Presbyterian Board of Missions, 1946), 11.
71. Love, “The Future of Ernabella”, 3.
72. Duguid, “The Natives on the Edge”, 8.
73. Professor Peggy Brock, personal communication, December 2004.
74. Charles Duguid, “Let’s Learn About Schools—Ernabella”, in his The Aborigines of Australia: Broadcasts and an Address (Adelaide: Reliance Printing Company, 1946), 12.
75. Duguid, “The Natives on the Edge”, 8.
76. Duguid, “The Aborigines: From Stone Age to Twentieth Century in Sixteen Years”, Link, 1 October 1954, 58.
77. Duguid, Ernabella Revisited, 10–11.
78. Transcript of interview with Ronald Trudinger, 9 and 16 August 1995, item nos S1510 and S1513, Ara Irititja Archive, Adelaide.
79. J.B. Cleland, “Report on a visit to Ernabella”, 9 October 1945, GRG 52/1/1945/11A, SRSA.
80. Heather Goodall, “‘The Whole Truth and Nothing But …’: Some Interactions of Western Law, Aboriginal History and Community Memory”, in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Special Issue, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 35), edited by Bain Attwood (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992), 112–15.
81. Ibid.
82. Sister Melba Turner, “A First Hand Account of the Measles Epidemic”, in Hilliard, 230–6. See also Duguid, Doctor and the Aborigines, 153–7.
83. Hilliard, 141, 157.
84. Accounts of the total number of deaths from measles (all age groups) varies from twenty-three to more than ninety. See Hilliard, 140; Turner, 234; Transcript of interview with Ronald Trudinger, 1995.
85. Duguid, “The Aborigines: From Stone Age”, 58.
86. See P. Duguid, travel diary, 1938.
87. Letter, Charles Duguid to Penhall, 5 June 1946, GRG 52/11946/15, SRSA.
By Rani Kerin