Cecil Cook (Australia)

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

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

Professional and private life

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

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

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

Aboriginal policy

In the time when Cook worked as a Protector, the indigenous population was about 18,000 people in the Northern Territory, including 800 Half Castes ( mixed race ) and 3,000 Europeans. The only group that grew were the races. He therefore came to the conclusion that they " pose a threat to the white population " one. It therefore recommended that the half-breed children were separated from their parents and also by the relatives. The girls should work as domestic help over 14 years and the boys should be trained to farm workers and then work in cattle farms and get the same pay as whites, so that they differed from the Aborigines, who were given only food and accommodation. He refused the marriage of half-breeds and Aboriginal and once boasted that the 40 to 50 half-breed girl had married with whites. Conversely, he never argued that white women have to marry mixed race.

He was an advocate of the then widespread inhumane pseudo - science of eugenics and assumed that about four or five generations, the let grow out "blood" of the Aborigines. This policy is a document of the Government of the Northern Territory as a " breed out the color " ( German: " the black color to hatch " ) referred.

Cook assumed that it was not a question for the Aborigines to a Negroid race, but distant relatives of Caucasians or Aryans. According to the Australian political scientist Robert Manne believes he was the architect of Aboriginal policy in the Northern Territory.

According to the legislation then in force, a Chief Protector of Aborigines was the guardian of all Aboriginal and certain about their whereabouts, to deciding where to work them, whom and whether they were allowed to marry. A Protector could spend Aborigineskinder against the will of their families in boarding schools. This policy went into history as the Stolen Generation.

After 1937

1937 Cook held in the Australian Army Medical Corps to the rank of captain, on 11 August 1941, he was promoted to Major in 1944 to lieutenant colonel. He served in World War II in the southeast Asian region, especially in the field of medical hygiene. On March 22, 1946 was his dismissal from military service.

Subsequently he was employed in the public service, such as in Western Australia from March 1946 and in November the Commonwealth in Canbarra, and he was a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

He continued to address the matter of the Aborigines, 1964-1972 when he, the co-founding member of the Human Biology Advisory Committee of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. He stopped still sticking to its setting in regard to Aboriginal people.

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