Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites is a heritage-listed former leper colony at Fantome Island, one of the Palm Island group in the Aboriginal Shire of Palm Island, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1926 to 1945 by Queensland Government. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 8 June 2012.
History Fantome Island, located north of Townsville approximately off the coast of Queensland near Ingham and north-west of Palm Island in the Great Palm group of islands, was the site of a lock hospital between 1928 and 1945 and a lazaret (or leprosarium) between 1939 and 1973. Both facilities were used for the isolation of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander patients or inmates. The archaeological remnants on the island are representative of the responses of former Queensland governments to the public health issues of sexually transmitted infections (STIs, previously known as venereal diseases, or VD) and Hansen's disease (leprosy) as they affected Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander people. The island has a long history as a site of segregation and as an example of the working of the Aboriginal Protection Acts.
In February 1925 the Home Secretary's Department proposed a lock hospital on Fantome Island in conjunction with the (Great) Palm Island Aboriginal reserve. The traditional owners of Fantome Island (also known as Emulli) are the Manbarra people, while those removed from elsewhere in Queensland to Palm and Fantome islands are known as the Bwgcolman people. Fantome Island was declared a Reserve for the use of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the State (R.297, or Reserve 3771) in the Queensland Government Gazette of 17 October 1925. The trustees were the Under Secretary of the Home Department (WJ Gall) and the Chief Protector of Aboriginals (JW Bleakley). Prior to this Fantome had been held as Occupation License 297 and there was a small area of cleared land at its northern end. Apart from a well, fires had destroyed any other infrastructure and the island was unoccupied by 1925.
A lock hospital enforced isolation to prevent the spread of STIs. In 1868 the Queensland Government enacted the Prevention of Contagious Diseases Act 1868, which enforced the compulsory examination of prostitutes for STIs and their housing in the Brisbane lock hospital at Herston until "cured". Failure to submit to these requirements was a jailable offence.
During the first decade of the 20th century a number of developments in the diagnosis and treatment of STIs occurred. In 1905 the cause of syphilis (Treponema pallidum) was identified. In the following year the Wassermann test for identification of the syphilis infection was created. From 1909 the Wassermann test was used at Queensland's public health laboratories, while the first effective treatment (Salvarsan) was developed in 1910.
These steps coincided with an increase in the incidence of syphilis and gonorrhoea in Australia, and with increased public awareness of this rise. New health legislation - the Health Act (Consolidated) 1911 - required compulsory notification of cases to the Commissioner of Public Health; prohibited treatment by unqualified persons; provided free treatment, irrespective of condition or gender; distributed advice leaflets; and enabled compulsory examination, and segregation where necessary, of persons of either gender known or suspected to be suffering from STIs and liable to convey them to others.
The idea of creating island lock hospitals for Aboriginal people with STIs arose in the first decade of the 20th century. During 1908 the first island lock hospital for Australian Aboriginal people was established in Western Australia on the islands of Dorre and Bernier. In Queensland, Aboriginal STI patients were initially sent to Aboriginal reserves, including Barambah, and White Cliffs on Fraser Island, but planning for the establishment of an island-based lock hospital in Queensland for Aboriginal people commenced in 1914. The Chief Protector of Aboriginals' Office proposed constructing such a facility due to the belief that isolation was the best method of managing STIs in Aboriginal people. Initially, a facility was planned for Fitzroy Island near Cairns, but World War I disrupted this scheme and it never went ahead.
This concept of isolation and control of Aboriginal people was already accepted as Queensland's method of dealing with the Aboriginal population. In 1895 Archibald Meston provided the Queensland Government with a plan for the welfare and protection of the colony's Aboriginal people. Meston contended the reason earlier reserves operated by missionaries and others had been unsuccessful all over Australia was poor management. Further, the locations of such places were ill-suited for agriculture (to allow adequate food production) and had not adequately isolated Aboriginal people in a way that prevented their exposure to vices and diseases brought by contact with European people. Meston ultimately recommended the establishment of three reserves to serve southern, central and northern Queensland; the appointment of a Chief Protector (Meston later became one of two regional Protectors, under a Protector for all districts); and stronger government control.
Meston's proposals, and their influence in shaping subsequent legislation and its administration, marked a significant change both in Queensland and Australia in government control over Aboriginal people. Meston's recommendations were brought to fruition in the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, the provisions of which gave the government substantial control over many aspects of the lives of Aboriginal people and extended its authority to establish reserves, to which they were forcibly removed.
Superintendents were in charge of these places (a title also given to those in charge of missions), and were responsible to the Chief Protector of Aboriginals. The realities of "living under the Act" were to profoundly impact upon the lives of Queensland's Aboriginal people.
Settlements at Durundur (near Woodford, c.1897), Whitula (near Windorah) in western Queensland (briefly in operation in response to the 1902 drought) and Fraser Island (1897) were beset by a range of problems and did not last, with the latter experiencing a very high death rate among inmates. From 1905 the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement (from 1934 called Cherbourg) in the South Burnett, first established in 1901, came under complete government control and operation. The Taroom Aboriginal Settlement was established in 1911.
By segregating Aboriginal people from the rest of the community, the removals process was highly effective in fulfilling the government's objectives of increased control and regulation of the state's Aboriginal people, enforced on settlements through a range of administrative and disciplinary measures. While humanitarian concerns were used as a justification for removal by advocates of the reserve system, Aboriginal people were forcibly removed for a wider range of reasons including illness; lack of employability or refusal to work; old age; as punishment; and after a jail sentence had been served.
Aboriginal people were removed to Fantome Island under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, unlike European STI patients who were detained on the mainland under health legislation. This was despite the fact that none of the three main STIs - gonorrhoea, syphilis and the less common ulcerative granuloma - could be easily diagnosed by the methods available at the time. Bacteriological testing was not applied to non-European suspected STI cases; clinical diagnosis was deemed sufficient. The tropical disease of yaws, which caused skin lesions and produced a positive Wasserman reaction, could also be mistaken for syphilis. Not only were some people sent to lock hospitals unnecessarily, those that were actually infected had little chance of a cure until antibiotic therapy became available in the 1940s. Penicillin was introduced for the treatment of gonorrhoea in 1943 but was only generally available from 1944.
The Protection of Aboriginals and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Amendment Act 1934 extended the provisions of the 1897 Act and the powers of the Chief Protector. It enabled compulsory medical examinations, and also allowed for "uncontrollable" Aboriginal people or "half-castes" (the definition of this term was changed to include South Sea Islander people) to be sent to an institution. The latter enabled the incarceration of people at the Fantome Island lock hospital for non-medical reasons.
With policies of isolation and control for both STI patients and Aboriginal people already established in Queensland by the 1920s, the construction of a lock hospital on Fantome Island proceeded. By June 1927 there were three Aboriginal settlements in Queensland under direct Home Department supervision: Barambah, Woorabinda (replacing Taroom during 1927), and Palm Island, plus 11 mission stations. The Palm Island settlement had opened in 1918 after a cyclone destroyed the Hull River settlement (established 1914) on the mainland. The primary reason for the government's decision to establish a lock hospital at Fantome Island was its close proximity to Palm Island. This allowed the medical officer on Palm Island to also treat the Fantome Island inmates.
A water reservoir was completed behind (west of) the lock hospital site, which was located at the narrow, central portion of Fantome Island, facing Curacoa Channel, by November 1926. However, a cyclone in February 1927 caused serious damage, delaying the completion of the hospital's other buildings by Palm Island workers.
The lock hospital was completed and equipped by December 1927 and the first patients arrived in early 1928. Frank Hambleton Julian, who lacked medical training, was the wardsman. Dr CR Maitland Pattison was the visiting medical superintendent, and buildings included male and female wards, irrigation chambers, laundries, "native officials" cottages, wardsman's quarters, a store and kitchens. A vegetable garden was cultivated to supplement food supplies and provide "some light occupation for the convalescents". The sea also provided additions to the diet, including fish, crabs, oysters and turtles.
An influx of patients resulted in the approval of extensions and additions to the lock hospital in 1931, and two cases of suspected Hansen's disease were also tested and found to be positive. During 1932 a number of cases of STI and Hansen's disease contacts were sent to Fantome Island for observation after Dr Raphael West Cilento, the Federal Director of the Division of Tropical Hygiene for Queensland, had inspected coastal camps between Townsville and Cairns and on the Atherton Tablelands. In 1934 Cilento became Director-General of Health and Medical Services within Queensland's Department of Health and Home Affairs (DHHA); a position he held until 1946. He was knighted in 1935 and later wrote Queensland's official centennial history "Triumph in the Tropics".
During 1932 the number of patients in the lock hospital increased from 73 to 156, with 128 men, women and children admitted, four births, four escapes and 17 discharged. However, the year had a high death rate amongst patients - 28 people, representing 13.65% of the total population under treatment.