Cecil Cook

Cecil Evelyn Aufrere (Mick) Cook (* 1897 in Bexhill , Sussex , Great Britain ; † July 4, 1985 in Wahroonga , Sydney , New South Wales , Australia ) was a general practitioner, Protector of Aborigines , military doctor and medical officer .

He is considered to be the architect of the racist Aboriginal policy in the Northern Territory when he was Protector of Aborigines there from 1927 .

Professional and personal life

Cecil Cook was the son of physician James Whiteford Murray Cook and his wife Emily, nee Puckle. James Cook immigrated to Australia in 1898; his wife and two sons followed him two years later.

Cook grew up in Barcaldine , Queensland , and went to school there until 1914. In 1914 he began studying medicine at the University of Sydney . After graduating, he worked for his father and at various hospitals. He then went to 1923 for training at the London School of Tropical Medicine . Due to his training in tropical medicine Cook examined the health of the indigenous peoples in the tropical areas of Australia from 1924 to 1925. On March 4, 1924, he married Jessie Winifred Miller (1978) and in 1925 he was employed in the public service.

In March 1927 he became medical officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory . He installed hospitals in Katherine (1931), Tennant Creek (1936) and Alice Springs (1939) and outside Darwin (1931) for lepers . 1936 became the founding board of the Northern Territory Medical Board . He also took care of the high mortality rate of Aboriginal children.

Aboriginal politics

During the time Cook was working as a Protector, the indigenous population of the Northern Territory was about 18,000, including 800 halfcastes (mixed race) and 3,000 Europeans. The only population group that grew was the mixed race. He therefore concluded that they “pose a threat to the white population”. He therefore recommended that the mixed race children should be separated from their parents and also from relatives. The girls were supposed to work as domestic help from the age of 14 and the boys were to be trained to be farm workers and then to work in cattle farms and receive the same wages as the whites, so that they were different from the Aborigines, who received only food and accommodation. He refused to marry mixed race and Aboriginal people and once boasted that the 40 to 50 mixed breed girls married to whites. Conversely, he never argued that white women should marry mixed race.

He was an advocate of the inhuman pseudo-science of eugenics , which was widespread at the time and assumed that the "blood" of the Aborigines could be bred out over four or five generations. This policy is described in a document of the government of the Northern Territory as “breed the color out” (German: “breed the black color out”).

Cook assumed that the Aborigines were not a " negroid race ", but rather distant relatives of the inhabitants of western Eurasia, called "Caucasians" or "Aryans" according to the now outdated racial theories . According to the Australian political scientist Robert Manne , he was the architect of Aboriginal politics in the Northern Territory.

According to the legislation in force at the time, a Chief Protector of Aborigines was the guardian of all Aborigines and determined their whereabouts, pending the decision on where to work, whom and whether they were allowed to marry. A Protector was able to put Aboriginal children in nursing homes against the wishes of their families. This policy went down in history as the Stolen Generation .

After 1937

In 1937 Cook held the rank of captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps , on August 11, 1941 he was promoted to major and in 1944 to lieutenant colonel . He served in Southeast Asia during World War II , mainly in the field of medical hygiene. On March 22, 1946, he was released from military service.

He was then employed in the public service, so in Western Australia from March 1946 and in November with the Commonwealth in Canberra, and he was a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

He continued to deal with Aboriginal affairs from 1964 to 1972 when he was a member of the Human Biology Advisory Committee of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies , which he co-founded. He continued to stick to his attitude towards the Aborigines.

Cook lived in Sydney and later on Burleigh Heads in Queensland . He died on July 4, 1985 in Wahroonga , Sydney, where he was also buried.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Tim Rowse: Cook, Cecil Evelyn Aufrere (Mick) (1897–1985). at: adb.anu.edu.au in English, accessed on March 28, 2012
2. ^ Cecil Cook's arranged marriages in the Northern Territory. ( Memento of the original from June 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on: stohlengenerations.info in English, accessed on March 28, 2012.  
3. ^ ^{A b} Albrecht Hagemann: Brief history of Australia. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-51101-5 , p. 102 f. Online on google books
4. ↑ Cecil Cook and the policy of absorption. at: naa.gov.au in English, accessed March 28, 2012.