[“A Word for the Blacks”, Sunday Times (Perth, WA), Sunday 22 September 1918, page 5]

A WORD FOR THE BLACKS

By One Who Knows Them

Nurse H. P. Lenihan writes:—

“Unfortunately your correspondent who cited Bernier Island as an island where white people deteriorate has been misinformed. Having lived 10 years with the West Australian aborigines, two years of which I spent on Bernier Island and one year on Dorrie Island, I am in a position to speak from experience. It takes people of different temperaments to make up a world. Certainly there were some very strange individuals (white people) on both islands, but as they were long past their youth their characters were well formed, and no communication whatever with the blacks would have changed them.

“For people whose tastes do not wholly incline towards amusements the life is delightful—for people who love music or reading, or the thousand and one ways of mental and physical recreation besides their medical work, the days and hours and months flee. And let me say en passant that the general idea is that the blacks are a very disagreeable and unclean people to nurse. Not during my ten years’ experience of them did any duties ever consist in doing anything like the disagreeable work which white nurses are usually called on to do, for there were young, highly intelligent black girls who helped both in the operating theatre and in the staff quarters, girls who, before coming to the islands lived as wild blacks.

“I have lived with both civilised and uncivilised aborigines. The latter I like best. In a thousand ways they would teach many lessons to white people. Night after night I have sat in their leafy mias talking with them by the light of their camp fires or by the light of the moon, and I found them a delightful people. Nor was I the least afraid when lost for 18 hours some months since in East Kimberley, out all night with the dingoes. It would have seemed to me heaven had a black come along and shown me the way out I was far more frightened of the dingoes and white ants than the West Australian aboriginals.

“Again may I say that it takes a lot of different temperaments to make up a world, but to those who love music and reading and their daily work not even lifelong communication with blacks will make them deteriorate. On the contrary, the simple lives of these delightful people will teach them many lessons.

AB notes:

For once, Harriet seems to be ‘putting the boot in’...

“Certainly there were some very strange individuals (white people) on both islands, but as they were long past their youth their characters were well formed, and no communication whatever with the blacks would have changed them.”

She is probably referring to a well-publicised clash between two staff members.