Abstract
A CABLE from Adelaide in The Times of April 26 announces the composition of a Federal Board of Inquiry, which has been set up to investigate the treatment of the Australian aborigines. The Board will consist of three members, Prof. J. B. Cleland, professor of pathology in the University of Adelaide, Mr. White, acting Federal Chief Protector of Aborigines, and the Rev. J. H. Sexton, secretary of the Aborigines Friends Association of South Australia. The responsibility of the Federal Government of the Australian Commonwealth is limited to the aborigines of the Northern Territories, including the Arunta of the Alice Springs area, famous in the annals of anthropology as the tribes among whom the late Sir Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen made their epoch-making investigations. Although a liberal policy has been pursued by the Federal Government in the protection of these aborigines, especially in the matter of endeavouring to ensure that they should have free access to their hunting grounds and to the springs and water-holes, allegations have been made recently that the aborigines are being forced off the land necessary to their livelihood. Attention has also been directed in a recent report of a Commission in West Australia, to which we hope to refer later, to the inadequacy of the arrangements for dealing with leprosy among aborigines. This is a Federal responsibility, a leprosarium being provided at Darwin, at which cases from the various States are received. The accommodation, it is stated, is inadequate, causing serious delay in evacuating cases from their point of origin, while, notwithstanding an agitation which has been proceeding for ten years, no steps have been taken towards a systematic examination of the aboriginal populations for the disease.
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Aborigines and Australia. Nature 135, 757 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135757b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135757b0