Hi CSteele,

That's interesting, I thought Ramahyuck had been closed for forty years or so by then, that the population had been encouraged to move to Coranderrk, and from there to the other Missions. That's appalling though, so many deaths.

In those days, I get the idea that people didn't have much immunity to these strange diseases - some of them, consumption, etc - had no cure for another fifty years: George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence both died of TB, or consumption, many years later. In the nineteenth century in SA, people could die within a month from consumption. Over this way, measles was a major killer, right into the nineteen-forties. We don't realise how recent cures have been for major diseases like those, polio, septicemia etc.

Can you put those documents on pdf ?

Regards,

Joe

Joe,
No he wasn't boasting.
It was around 1970,and he even billed the Fed govt for cartage and storage. As far as the sick (and dying) was concerned he contacted the Flying Doctor and left them camped around the home paddock.
Brian Bowman was his name and he hated the natives.
All he cared about was getting back the one million pound (a lot of money back then) that his father lost on the Adelaide race tracks and retiring to the banks of the Murray River with a few goats for company.
Brian was your perfect B@stard.
No general muster on his property because he used to send his stockmen up to two hundred miles stealing clean-skin calves.
A general muster might find stolen calves joining with their mothers.
There were always native bodies to be buried in unmarked graves on the property after "payday".
If TB or malnutrition didn't kill them the metho would.

Yeah. Goom. I've heard of shop-keepers having it in their fridges. It could make you blind or paralysed, if it didn't kill you outright. But it was cheap and legal, and if you mixed it with cordial, it was supposed to be quite pleasant.

In the Protector's letters, he refers quite often to people who have become paralysed in the legs - I wonder if they had been on something like metho. In SA, Aboriginal people got free medical attention and medicines - yeah, that surprised me too.

At the moment, I've got the full 1840-1912 letters on that web-site, as well as the Protectors Annual reports up to the 1930s - nearly a hundred years of records. I was checking out the State Library records as well, and there's a mountain of material there too, 60 cm of correspondence from Poonindie Mission, for example. So if anybody wants to set up a scam, they should do their homework first.

Probably the same in every major state library.

'Bowman' was a big name amongst pastoralists down here, around the Lakes and at Crystal Brook and in the Flinders, with a fair reputation. That bloke might have been the runt of the litter. Sounds like a bit of a runt.

Cheers :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Dear Joe,

The document I gave you a link to is actually on a PDF. You can save it to your computer quite easily. Let me know if you have any problems.

That there was a high mortality rate at that time is a given but there were also large families so births were still outstripping deaths by a long shot. Not so in these missions it would appear.

You are right about TB being prevalent during the period but it is also a good indicator of overall health. Only 5-10% of people who test positive to the disease end up exhibiting its active form. This is far higher among those who have their immune systems compromised through malnutrition or poor living conditions. A modern day example are AIDS sufferers of whom “About 5–10% of those without HIV, infected with tuberculosis, develop active disease during their lifetimes. In contrast, 30% of those coinfected with HIV develop active disease.” Wikipedia

Just look at the shocking figures for Lake Condah for the same year. Of a mission population of around 65 there were no births but the following deaths.

Harriet Turner – 15 years – Tubercular peritonitis
Mabel McLeod – 19 years – Phthsis pulmonatis
Mary Gorrie - 80 years – Senile decay
Thomas E Watson – 5 years - Acute phthisis
Flora Turner – 12 years - Phthsis pulmonatis
Johnson Mobourn 18 years - Phthsis pulmonatis

All past those vulnerable early years and all but one under 20.

No wonder “a spirit of dissatisfaction was raised among the blacks here”. To lose 10% of ones community in a single year must have been horrendous. The accompanying depression and despair would have been significant.

Thank you for opening my eyes to this. I had no idea things were so terrible for the Aborigines held on missions in Victoria. I had intended to visit Lake Condah on my last stay at Bridgewater but unfortunately did not get there.

“For thousands of years, Gunditjmara people engineered and constructed an extensive aquaculture system along the Mt Eccles/Tyrendarra Lava flow and wetlands .”
http://www.budjbim.com/

Hi CSteele,

'Phthisis' was another name for consumption, or tuberculosis.

Regardless of how well-nourished people may be, if they haven't built up a certain level of immunity to a disease, then they can die very quickly from it. Measles up in the north-west of SA back in the late thirties, for example - something like 100 died from one epidemic alone, something the missionaries and teachers certainly weren't happy about.

I think anthropologists these days are starting to realise, over the last thirty or so years, that - when they go into an area where people haven't been exposed to white people much, they are carrying all manner of viruses etc., from which they have inherited or built up immunity, but the people who they wish to 'study' have not. Lo and behold, the people start getting sick.

As well, the 'remedies' that the people employed were not necessarily beneficial - to wade out into the Lake when you had a fever, for example.

Aboriginal people were, and are, as intelligent as anybody else, but their perceptions and notions of 'science' and magic and technology, in pre-European times, may have hampered their understanding of what to do, as our own has and still may do. Cf. the Broad Street pump and cholera in London, and the notion of 'vapours' a hundred years ago.

I was just looking at some of the 20 cm of microfiche in our State Library on the community of Poonindie, near Port Lincoln, and the level of sickness - and death - was appalling, to our eyes. But it was common for families to have ten children and lose five.

After all, think about it: the world's population doubled from 0 AD to 1600 AD, with no birth control methods, in other words, at a tiny rate overall, big families yet no real growth each generation, touch and go whether the population was going to grow or shrink over a lot of that time. i.e. very high infant mortality rates.

Thanks, C. Steele,

Joe

[continued]

One can see that in some of the Aboriginal genealogies - either people having no children, or some having great numbers of kids with half of them dying very young, right up to the 1950s.

Joe