The adventures of Maurice & Mattie Yonge in North Queensland

In the late 1920s a young English couple kept a photographic record of their travels throughout North Queensland. The photographs now represent a unique snapshot of what are now well-established Far North Queensland tourist destinations. Maurice Yonge, a marine biologist from Cambridge, and his wife Mattie Yonge, a medical doctor, were in North Queensland as part of a scientific expedition to discover the mysteries of the Great Barrier Reef. They spent 13 months living at Low Isles, and during their stay they had the opportunity to do a few short excursions and see the sights of North Queensland.

Group outing on the Atherton Tablelands, January 1929. Maurice Yonge is roughly centre of photo with a pith helmet in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. Photo: National Library of Australia

Maurice and Mattie Yonge, seated on a garden bench at 'Fairyland', Kuranda, 1929. Photo: National Library of Australia

View towards the Queen's Hotel, Mossman, 1929. Photo: National Library of Australia

View of the main Street, Herberton, c.1929. Photo: National Library of Australia

View of Cooktown, c. 1928. Photo: National Library of Australia

Horse riding in Yungaburra. Maurice Yonge is pictured on the right, 1929. Photo: National Library of Australia


On one of their short sojourns, the Yonges swam at Lake Barrine, dined at the Lake Eacham Hotel in Yungaburra, breakfasted at Herberton, lunched at Ravenshoe, visited Millaa Millaa Falls and Malanda Falls, visited various places around Yungaburra on horseback, and took the train to Barron Falls. They covered quite a lot of ground in just a few days!

Mattie Yonge with arms stretched out across the base of a tree to indicate the size of the trunk, probably Atherton Tablelands, 1929. Photo: National Library of Australia

If you'd like to read more about Maurice and Mattie Yonge and the Great Barrier Reef Expedition, check out the eBook I was lead author on for JCU Library's Special Collections - https://jcu.pressbooks.pub/yonge/ (this links to the eBook! Once there, scroll down and click the button "Read Book" )

Dr Jean White - Australia's first female flying doctor

In 1937, a Victorian doctor named Jean White became the first female flying doctor in Australia (and probably the world) when she joined the Australian Inland Mission in Queensland. Stationed at Croydon, in North Queensland, Dr. White was appointed to assist Dr.  G. W. F. Alberry, whose base was 220 miles away, at Cloncurry. Together, the two doctors provided medical care to an area larger than New South Wales.

Dr. Jean White, flying doctor at Normanton; Mrs Simpson, Dr. Simpson's (photographer) wife; Rev. Fred McKay, A.I.M. Patrol Padre; Dr. Gordon Alberry, flying doctor at Cloncurry; Rev. John Flynn, founder and A.I.M. superintendent; Mrs. Jean Flynn, his wife and former secretary - picnicking at Cloncurry, 1937. Photo: State Library of Queensland.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from the University of Melbourne in 1929, Dr White worked at various hospitals, including the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Adelaide Children's Hospital, Crown Street Women's Hospital (Sydney), and the Caulfield Convalescent Hospital, before taking up her appointment in the North. She told a reporter from the Cairns newspaper, the Northern Herald, that she loved the life.

“I have my own plane, a Fox Moth, piloted by Plot C. Swaffield. It has folding seats, so that a stretcher can be accommodated comfortably if a patient requires moving to hospital or to Cloncurry for X-ray treatment. “Both Dr. Alberry’s and my plane carry mails between Cloncurry, Normanton and Karumba, but arrangements are carefully made so that at least one plane is always in readiness for emergency calls.” At Karumba the planes land on a salt pan in dry weather, but in the rainy season the mails are dropped. Should both planes be in use when an urgent call comes an extra plane may be summoned from Longreach, but such an emergency is very rare, Dr. White explained.^[1] 

Dr Jean White, flying doctor. Photo: The Daily Telegraph, 1 February 1939.

But Dr White, who was only in her early thirties, would have been something of a novelty to the people of the Gulf country. She was the only woman in the flying medical service, and her arrival in the remote North was a surprise to many.

“Some of them were amazed at the idea of being attended to by a woman. Others seemed to prefer it,” Dr White said. 

Most of Dr White's patients were accident cases from outlying station properties, but there was also a lot of maternity work, and luckily she was well qualified in the area of women's and children's health. Problems arose in Normanton though, where there was a high rate of venereal disease. Male patients didn't want to be examined by a "sheila", and wanted her replaced.^[2] But Dr White soon worked her way into the hearts of the gulf community, and after a series of mercy missions, her approaching plane became a welcome sight to those in need. 

The biggest difficulty the flying doctors faced was getting to patients during the wet season. Very few of the landing grounds were able to stand up to heavy rain without becoming boggy. With the help of the Defence Department, improvements were steadily made, and many homesteads soon had "a reasonably good landing ground" within a distance of five miles.

Flight safety was a high priority, which meant that the Qantas plane Dr White was assigned was overhauled every 25 flying hours. Flying at night was prohibited, but Dr. White and her pilot were often at the aerodrome before dawn ready to make a start as soon as the instruments were visible.

“Usually we prefer to follow the coast or a river as far as possible,” she said, “but at times we have to detour to avoid storms. The pilot points out storm clouds to me, and I quite enjoy our dodging them.” 

Clipping from The Telegraph, 31 January 1939.

Dr White goes missing

In January 1939, Dr White and her pilot went missing for several days when their plane overturned upon landing on a boggy claypan about 17 miles north of the Mitchell River Mission Station. The pilot had diverted around bad weather, but ran low on fuel, forcing him to make an emergency landing. The Telegraph reported on the search:

An intensive aerial search is being conducted today over a wide area for Dr. Jean White, flying doctor of the Australian Inland Mission, and Pilot D. Tennent, who have not been seen since they left Delta Station on Friday in a Fox Moth plane bound for the Mitchell River Mission Station. A Dragonfly and a Fox Moth are concentrating on the district from Normanton to Mitchell River. The flying boat on the route from Darwin to Townsville has been advised to keep a sharp vigil when over the locality, this afternoon. If the search today fails, a DH86 which flew from Brisbane to Mount Isa will join the aerial searchers tomorrow and possibly an R.A.A.F. machine. In the absence of news from the flyers, it is considered certain that they have landed at a place from which they have been unable to take-off again, and that they have been prevented by water crossings from reaching a cattle station. “We feel quite confident that they are down and cannot communicate with anybody,” said a Qantas Empire Airways official to-day. As all the company’s planes carried emergency rations, the flyers would have enough food for several days.^[3]

Four days later they were located - alive and well - and food supplies were dropped to the pair who then had to wait for rescuers to get to them on foot. Dr White and her pilot's biggest challenge while they waited to be found was the constant battle with sandflies and mosquitoes. In desperation, they searched the plane and found a parcel containing two mosquito nets. Dr White told one of her rescuers that because mosquitoes in that area carried malaria, she feared that they would be killed by the mosquitoes (if they had been exposed to them for 48 hours without the nets). Dr White was ordered to rest at the Mission Station for four weeks.

A photo of Dr White's upturned plane can be seen at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-296180864/view
(This image is still in copyright, so has not been included in this blog)
  

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^[1] The Northern Herald (Cairns), 28 May 1938
^[2] Rudolph, Ivan, John Flynn: of flying doctors and frontier faith, Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 2012
^[3] The Telegraph, 31 January 1939

Townsville Soldiers' Rest Room - a "home-like refuge"

On 10 May 1916, a meeting was held at the Town Hall in Townsville to establish a "Soldier's Rest Room League". The object of the League was to set up a dedicated place where soldiers (either leaving or returning) could spend the day in comfort while waiting for transport to their destinations. Only 9 men attended the meeting, but it must have been an important issue for the women of the city, because 50 women attended the meeting. Discussion centred around a suitable venue for the proposed rest room, and the need to appeal to the public for donations of crockery, chairs, literature etc.

The Townsville Soldiers' Rest Room is pictured on the left of this photograph.
This photo dates to around 1918. 
Photo: James Cook University Library North Queensland Photographic Collection, 
NQID 2201.

Within a few days, the executive of the Soldiers' Rest Room League had secured the rooms at one time occupied by the YMCA, above the offices of the gasworks, at the corner of Flinders and Stanley Streets. The rooms were described as "commodious, cool and central". It was anticipated that ladies from the Red Cross would provide afternoon and morning tea for the soliders, all at no cost. And all soldiers, from all centres, were welcome to visit.

On 30 May 1916, the Townsville Daily Bulletin reported on the unofficial opening of the new Soldiers' Rest Room:

"On Monday the soldiers’ rest rooms on Stanley-street were unofficially opened. The rooms took on a military character as soon as they were opened, one young soldier who had been given a card of invitation on landing from the Bingera following the secretary up the stairs as she opened up in the morning. Others followed until by 11 o’clock eleven men, mostly from Cairns and the west, were present, and all through the day others came and went. Morning and afternoon tea was dispensed and the men filled in the time reading, playing games, writing letters, and talking. It was noticed that the men who took walks about the town soon returned and evidently looked upon the room as what it was, a home-like refuge from the streets. The appreciation shown was very keen. One of the visitors, only 19 now, had served at Gallipoli and been invalided home for good with a bullet wound behind his ear and enteric fever. His three brothers are still in the firing line and he was anxious to return, but was refused by the medical authorities. He spent the whole stay at the rooms and left by train for the west at night, and had the room not been open would have had to walk the streets all day. The rooms, which are very suitable for the purpose, include a large reading room, writing room, room for soldiers to leave their luggage for the day, a large bathroom, games room, broad verandah, and kitchen, etc., for the workers. The ladies’ committee, Mesdames W. E. Blackwell, H. Schmidt, G. F. Williams, Ranwell, Christian and Miss Goss, were in attendance for the day, and, other ladies will be in attendance during the week. As the rooms will be opened all the week, including Sunday, from 7 o’clock in the morning until 10 o’clock at night, it will need a lot of helpers to prevent it becoming a tax on the few, so it is hoped that ladies who can give a day or part of a day will send their names in to the secretary, Mrs Christian, or any member of the committee. Those doing so are requested to state what day and hours will suit them. Each lady is expected to bring in a cake and some scones or sandwiches. In all 32 men were present at the rooms through the day."

Soldiers obviously found the facility useful, as more than 100 attended the Soldiers' Rest Room in its first week of operation. According to one of the League's executive members:

"It means a good deal to many of them who are entire strangers to know that they have such a place to go where they can spend the day in comfort instead of having to wander idly about the town". 

Mabo and the Native Title Act

This month (May 2018) marks ten years since James Cook University officially named its Townsville campus library the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library, to honour the connection between the university and the man whose determination ultimately altered the foundation of land law in Australia. So I thought I'd post an article I wrote a couple of years ago about Mabo and the Native Title Act, which explains what the now infamous legal battle was all about, and also why the Mabo name will forever be linked with James Cook University.

WARNING: this article contains names, images or voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In 1898 a team of scientists sponsored by the University of Cambridge arrived in the Torres Strait with the aim of conducting an extensive anthropological study of its peoples. Almost one hundred years later, this study of native peoples would become an important source of information in a legal case seeking to prove continuity of traditional land ownership that led to the landmark Native Title Act.

The seven-month expedition, which was led by Alfred Cort Haddon, a distinguished natural scientist, focused on the islands of Mer and Mabuiag, and included scholars from the fields of linguistics, medicine and psychology. Data collected included physical descriptions of Islanders and local genealogies, along with information on local customs, languages, art, music, medicine, house construction and land tenure.

The expedition resulted in the publication, between 1901 and 1935, of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. As a complete body of work, the Reports documented in minute detail the life of the Torres Strait Islander people from around the time of the legal annexation of the Torres Strait Islands to Australia in 1879. Importantly, the genealogies recorded by W.H.R. Rivers that were published in Volume Six of the Reports, were used as evidence in the now infamous Mabo land rights case.

The man whose name would become synonymous with Native Title - Eddie Koiki Mabo - was born on Mer (Murray) Island, in the Torres Strait, in 1936. He came to the mainland in 1957 and worked in various industries but it was during the years 1967 to 1975, when he worked as a groundsman and gardener at James Cook University, that he began studying Haddon’s six-volume report on the Torres Strait, in the university library during his lunch breaks. 

At James Cook University Eddie Mabo met and formed friendships with academic staff including Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos, who explained to him that he did not own the land on Murray Island where he had grown up; the Queensland government did.  Mabo was reportedly shocked to discover this, and the revelation set off a chain of events that ultimately altered the foundation of land law in Australia.

After delivering a speech at a land rights conference at James Cook University in 1981, where he spoke about land ownership and land inheritance on Murray Island, Mabo was encouraged to mount a legal challenge over land rights. 

In 1982, Eddie Mabo and four other Torres Strait Islanders - Sam Passi, David Passi, Celuia Mapo Salee and James Rice – began their fight for ownership of lands on several islands in the Torres Strait, including Murray Island. The case that became known as “Mabo No. 1” was heard by Justice Martin Moynihan in the Queensland Supreme Court. 

Things did not go altogether smoothly for Eddie Mabo in “Mabo No. 1”, with Justice Moynihan criticising Mabo’s testimony and questioning his credibility. In particular, Justice Moynihan found it difficult to believe that Eddie Mabo could remember in such detail, conversations with his grandfather from boyhood, and wondered how much of Mabo’s knowledge of Murray Island traditions had come from the Cambridge Reports, or indeed from other material that had been published about the Torres Strait, such as Ion Idriess’s novel, Drums of Mer, published in 1933.

In a paper written for the Australian National University in 1993, Jeremy Beckett, an anthropologist who was called as an expert witness in the Mabo case, and who had conducted field work in the Torres Strait Islands between 1958 and 1961, wrote that he visited Murray Island with Eddie Mabo in 1977 and was surprised by his knowledge of the island.

“I was surprised that someone who had left Mer around the age of fifteen and had scarcely been back until his forties knew as much as he did.” 

“Some of it may indeed have come from the Cambridge Reports or from Idriess's novel. But much of it did not. He had, for example, an extensive knowledge of plants, including those used for various dance ornaments and implements, which was not to be found in print. Nor could he have got from books, the vivid, detailed mind picture of the land which he presented to the court.”

Beckett also believed that the genealogy Mabo recounted went back further than could be found in the Cambridge Reports.

By the time the case reached the High Court of Australia, at its core was the question of whether the Murray Islanders (Meriam people) had a system of land ownership that predated the arrival of Europeans, and if they did, whether that system still existed. It was not enough to prove that the plaintiffs and their descendants had been in continuous occupation of the islands, but that a system of governance of ownership had existed “from time immemorial” and had been maintained into the present day.

L-R: Dave Passi, Eddie Mabo, Bryan Keon-Cohen, James Rice, outside the Queensland Supreme Court, 1989.
Photo: Courtesy of National Film and Sound Archive.

Although three of the plaintiffs (including Eddie Mabo) did notlive to see the outcome of their ten year battle, in June 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of Mabo in Mabo and Others v. State of Queensland (No. 2) (1992), resulting in the Native Title Act 1993.

In recognising the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait, the High Court also held that native title existed for all indigenous people in Australia prior to James Cook’s expedition in 1770, and prior to the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales in 1788. 

The Native Title Act destroyed the 200 year-old doctrine of terra nullius (meaning land belonging to no-one) by which Australia had been colonised.

This article is copyright Trisha Fielding, 2016.

Sources & Further Reading:

• Burke, Paul, Law's Anthropology: from ethnography to expert testimony in native title, Australian National University EPress, Canberra, 2011.
• Herle, Anita and Rouse, Sandra, (eds.) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: centenary essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
• Sanders, W., (ed.), Mabo and Native Title: Origins and Institutional Implications, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra, Research Monograph No. 7, 1994.
• Loos, Noel, Edward Koiki Mabo: his life and struggle for land rights, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2013.
• Haddon, Alfred C., Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1901-1935.
• Museum of Australian Democracy: https://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-33.html
• For 1981 speech made at JCU, see http://www.mabonativetitle.com/info/doc4.htm
• Mabo - The Native Title Revolution (website):  http://www.mabonativetitle.com/theman_34.shtml