Cecil Evelyn Aufrere (Mick) Cook (23 September 1897 – 4 July 1985) was an Australian physician and medical administrator, who specialised in tropical diseases and public health. He was appointed as Chief Medical Officer and Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory in 1927. He established much of the infrastructure of the public health system there, including four hospitals, a tuberculosis clinic, a nursing school and the Nurses’ Board of North Australia. He started the Northern Territory Aerial Medical Service together with Dr Clyde Fenton, and he was founding chairman of the Northern Territory Medical Board.
Cook served in the Army Medical Service from 1940 to 1945 where he increased the level of hygiene within the troops through education. He became the Commissioner of Public Health in Western Australia in 1946 and then joined the National Health and Medical Research Committee in Canberra in 1950 where he was able to contribute to public health.
He was controversial for his attempts to "uplift the morality" of Aboriginal people by "breeding out the colour". For later writers he has "come to personify ideologies, policies and practices of government that seem at best misguided and at worst cruel and racist".
Early life and education
Cook was born on 23 September 1897 in Bexhill, Sussex, England. His mother was Emily (née Puckle), and he had an older brother, Errol Aufrere, who was born in 1895. His father, James Whiteford Murray Cook, moved to Australia soon after Cecil was born after being advised to relocate to a warmer climate due to a serious ear infection, and the family followed in 1900 to live in Barcaldine, Queensland. Dr James Cook became the Lodge doctor in Barcaldine and he was medical superintendent of the Victoria Hospital, positions he held for thirty years. He was very well regarded, credited with bringing Victoria Hospital "into a new era of respectability and service to the public".Hoch, Isabel. 2008 cited in
Cook attended the Barcaldine State (primary) school for 1906-8 and was then a boarder at The Southport School, where he was the dux in 1914 and received first honours in languages, Latin and English. Cook was permanently blinded in his left eye at age 17 after an accident whilst playing with an air rifle slug. He studied medicine at the University of Sydney, living at St Andrew's College, and he graduated with MB, Ch.M. in 1920. Later he conducted a national survey of leprosy as the Wandsworth scholar (1923–25), being awarded a Doctor of Medicine in 1929, and Doctor of Public Health in 1931.
Medical practice and further studies
Cook served his residency at Brisbane General Hospital. He briefly practised at Barcaldine with his father in 1919 to help deal with an epidemic of pneumonic influenza, then he worked in hospitals at Mount Morgan and Longreach before starting as a general practitioner in Hughenden. In 1921, Cook became the medical superintendent at Hugenden District Hospital and in 1922 the acting medical superintendent at Longreach District Hospital. He worked as a ship's medical officer to pay his way to London, where he attended the London School of Tropical Medicine, graduating with a Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1923, and winning a Wandsworth scholarship.
Cook joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1925. He worked at the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville.
Leprosy survey
As part of his MD studies, Cook conducted a major epidemiological study of leprosy in Australia. He began his study at Sydney's Prince Henry Hospital and researched leprosy and granuloma venereum over three years.
He published this report as his MD thesis The Epidemiology of Leprosy in Australia in 1927. The newly established Federal Health Council subsequently adopted leprosy as one of its concerns.
Northern Australia Appointment
He was appointed the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Health Officer, Chief Protector of Aborigines and Quarantine Officer for North Australia (then separate from Central Australia, later the Northern Territory) on 1 March 1927. For the first six months he was the only medical practitioner in the state, and after that he focused on establishing a public health system. From 1929 to 1939, he established general hospitals at Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, a hospital outside Darwin to treat leprosy, a training school for nurses, a tuberculosis clinic and a medical benefit fund. He also commenced infant welfare services and founded the Nurses’ Board of North Australia in this time. In 1934 he joined forces with Dr Clyde Fenton to launch the Northern Territory Aerial Medical Service under the umbrella of the Australian Aerial Medical Service, which later became the (Royal) Flying Doctor Service.
In 1930, he took leave to study anthropology and public health in Sydney.
"Half-caste" assimilation
Cecil Cook worked to assimilate "half-castes", an old term used to describe a child who had an Aboriginal parent, usually the mother, and a white parent, and Aboriginals into "white society" through marriage licenses and employment opportunities. As Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cook was involved in marital affairs concerning "half-caste" women. With support from the North Australian Workers' Union, he was able to prohibit their request for marriage if he deemed it necessary. Cook advocated for marriages between "half-caste" women and white men under his policy of “breeding out colour” and the assimilation of Aborigines into white society. He believed by the fifth or sixth generations "half-caste" children would not display any Aboriginal characteristics. During his time as Protector, 69 of these marriages took place. Cook also had the ability to deny full citizenship to "half-castes" when they turned 21.
Cook wrote to the Head Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1933 about the idea of sterilising "half-castes". He wrote mentally defective "half-caste" children were an economic burden, and he could not see them being able to marry a white man and therefore their children would be costly to the government. Cook went on further to ask the Crown Law Officer if he had the power to give consent for a "half-caste's" sterilisation. Ultimately, Cook's request was denied.
Supporting Aboriginals
Cecil Cook worked with pastoralists to improve the working conditions for Aboriginal employees. In 1930 Aboriginal employees were given additional rations for relatives who were residents on pastoral properties and money was transferred into personal trust accounts. Cook helped to set up an Aboriginal Medical Benefit Fund, which ran from 1932 to 1933, whereby the employers of Aborigines would contribute funds.
In his role as Chief Protector, Cook extended his duties to the criminal justice system. In a 1934 tribal spearing case an aboriginal man, Tucker, was sentenced to the death penalty but was let free of his charges after Cook fought for the case to be taken to the high court.
Cook supported Aboriginals having the right to the ownership of their land. He suggested that mining companies at Tennant Creek in 1934 should pay royalties to the Warumungu people. This did not take place, but the miners were banned from entering settled areas.
The Bagot Aboriginal Reserve and the Kahlin Compound
Cecil Cook continued to advocate for the assimilation of "half-castes" and Aborigines into white society. In 1935 he requested the government erect residential areas for Aboriginals in a policy proposal that urged the government to integrate "half-caste" and Aboriginal society. The first institute, the Bagot Aboriginal Reserve, was established in 1938 and was populated by Aboriginals from the Kahlin Compound. These areas were designed to help non tribal Aborigines assimilate into society by having proper accommodation, education, sanitation and trained skills for employment opportunities.
Cook integrated 400 "half-castes", predominantly females, into the Kahlin Compound and other "half-caste" homes whilst he was Chief Protector of Aborigines. He advocated for the standard of education to be increased to the same quality found in the public schools in Northern Australia and he began to train some girls at the Kahlin Compound in nursing. Through his assimilation policy, Cook found employments for the female "half-caste" residents in private homes, as trainee nurses and in the Compound and other similar homes where they worked before becoming married. For male "half-castes" he found 25 apprenticeships in the pastoral industry.
Film censorship
In 1929, the Australian Government began to censor films shown to Aborigines. Cook publicly supported Chief Censor Walter Cresswell O'Reilly of the Commonwealth Censorship Board. Cook had already restricted Aboriginal access to the cinemas to two nights a week and banned attending the circus altogether. In addition to their restricted access, Cook further organised for a permit and identification system for Aborigines and "half-castes" to present when attending the cinema.
He successfully asked O’Rielly to increase the censorship to include films that displayed violence between a white person and a person of colour. Whilst he agreed with many of the banned films listed by the Commonwealth Censor, Cook disapproved of films such as 'White Shadows in the South Seas' by Cosmopolitan Pictures, which was censored due to it displaying a relationship between a white man and a coloured girl. There were also films that were not banned such as the 1929 ‘The Pagan’ depicting a heroic coloured man throwing a white villain overboard, which Cook believed should have been censored.
Before the end of his role as Chief Protector Cook had begun plans for a cinema that featured only censored films near the Kahlin Compound but this was never completed.