DAVID PRICE The Shameful Isles. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

David Price’s history of Western Australia’s lock hospitals and the ‘treatments’ meted out to Aboriginal people is shocking and important.

There are large areas of our nation’s history that non-Indigenous Australians prefer not to think about, regarding them as merely ‘things that happened in the past’. David Price’s The Shameful Isles: The true story of north-west Australia’s fatal experiment with medical apartheid confronts this past.

It is a deeply disturbing book that delves into difficult issues associated with the colonisation of Australia. It deals with white men taking advantage (which may or may not be a euphemism for rape and sexual slavery) of Indigenous women and girls and the response of authorities to a medical issue associated with such interactions.

Price’s focus is on the treatment of Aboriginal people in the north-west of Australia in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. His account is based on an extensive examination of contemporary newspaper sources, parliamentary debates and government reports.

Western Australia was proclaimed a colony of the British in 1829. Settlers arrived, acquired land and had ‘skirmishes’ with the original inhabitants. Early in the history of the colony there were reports of First Nations people having their lives upended and of ‘the introduction of diseases and the taking of females’.

There was a shortage of manpower in the new colony to do the work required by government and settlers. In 1850, male convicts were transported to Western Australia to rectify this problem, a practice that continued until 1868. This exacerbated the imbalance of the sexes among the white population.

The ratio rises quickly to 100 white men for every 51 white women. The discrepancy is even greater in country areas where it is sometimes as low as 14 white females to 100 white males.

The arrival of white male convicts led to a moral panic, a fear of white women being raped and an outbreak of homosexuality. Officially, the cohabitation of convicts and ticket-of-leave men with Indigenous women, particularly in rural areas, was seen ‘as a useful, if short-term, safeguard against the risks of rampant sodomy among colonial men and the sexual assault of colonial women’.

The two major manifestations of this cohabitation were children and venereal disease. Price examines how the emergence of mixed race children led to the stolen generations and the theory that ‘breeding out’ would bring an end to ‘the Aboriginal question’. Price’s major concern, however, is with issues surrounding venereal disease, and the measures taken to contain and eradicate it.

In 1905, the Western Australian government passed legislation to segregate Aboriginal people and relocate them to designated reserves. It was believed that the best way to tackle the problem of venereal disease was to round up Aboriginal sufferers and isolate them from the rest of the community in lock hospitals. Two uninhabited islands – Bernier and Dorre, approximately 50 kilometres west of Carnarvon on the Western Australian coast – were chosen as ideal sites. Initially, women were housed on Bernier island, men on Dorre. In 1910, following improvements in facilities on Dorre, the two sexes switched islands. The overwhelming majority of inmates were women.

Price examines the logistical problems of travelling to these islands and the building and development of facilities. Ships that sailed up and down the coast of Western Australia didn’t like carrying ‘diseased’ Aboriginal people or risking their interaction with whites. Both islands were windswept, subject to violent storms and had limited, scrubby vegetation. Buildings were provided for white staff while the Aboriginal inmates were mainly required to make do with humpies and lesser types of accommodation.

Aboriginal people who were deemed to have venereal disease were forcibly transferred to the islands. So-called Protectors or Travelling Protectors of Aborigines, who Price describes as ‘people hunters’, travelled through north-west Western Australia looking for patients. These were men who had no medical training. When they came across Aboriginal people they would forcibly restrain them and make inspections. In the case of women, this would involve the use of both fingers and eyes. Suitable candidates were then put in irons to ensure they did not escape as more round-ups were made as they travelled to Carnarvon to be shipped to the islands.

The lock hospitals on Bernier and Dorre islands operated from 1908 to 1919. During that period more than 630 patients were imprisoned, with over 150 buried in unmarked graves. The girls and women ranged in age from ten to ‘very old’, with the majority in their teens. The women inmates brought their babies and children. A number of men sought escape by walking into the sea and committing suicide.

One of the worst aspects of these isolated institutions was that two doctors conducted medical experiments on inmates without their permission. The doctors saw a chance to establish their reputations by discovering a cure for venereal disease. To this end they administered drugs to the most private parts of inmates, in a process that was nothing short of torture. In 1911 and 1912, 48 inmates died following these interventions. After two years of failed experiments, and witnessing the devastation that resulted, the doctors moved on.

Venereal disease became a major problem among the white population with the return of soldiers from World War I. It is estimated that 60,000 Australian military personnel contracted venereal disease during World War I. It was not until the discovery of penicillin in the mid-1940s that the disease came under control.

In 1915, with the return of the first batch of soldiers from the war, Western Australia passed legislation requiring the compulsory reporting and treatment of venereal disease for whites. There would be no forced inspections, invasions of one’s person or confinement in lock hospitals for the white population.

The lock hospitals were closed in 1919. Authorities, especially with a war on, found it difficult to attract doctors to the island to do the work required. Also, the ‘people hunters’ were having less success in finding patients. Those Aboriginal people who returned from the islands reported what a terrible time they had had, so when a community got wind of a ‘Protector’ approaching, they made sure to evade them.

Price sees the lock hospitals as laying the groundwork for the treatment of First Nations peoples across Australia in subsequent decades.

The significance of the island hospitals was their physical embodiment of race-based social policy that justified the forced segregation, relocation, transportation and medication of Western Australia’s First Nations peoples. For at least the next sixty years, the key lessons of the lock hospital approach would be replicated in a highly integrated array of modes of segregation … Christian missions and boarding institutions … government settlements … Most significantly, all of these extensions of … the lock hospital experiment were couched euphemistically in the language of care and protection. Despite the evidence of intergenerational human tragedy inflicted through such legalised disempowerment and dislocation, the policies and practices continued to be perversely paraded as morally laudable contributions to Aboriginal health and welfare.

David Price’s The Shameful Isles: The true story of north-west Australia’s fatal experiment with medical apartheid is an important book that deals with difficult –  and shameful – issues associated with the way white Australia has treated its First Nations peoples.

David Price The Shameful Isles: The true story of north-west Australia’s fatal experiment with medical apartheid Fremantle Press 2025 PB 288pp $35.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

You can buy The Shameful Isles from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian history, Bernier and Dorre islands, David | Price, First Nations Australians, lock hospitals, medical apartheid, moral panics, Western Australian history