Sent home to die
Late on a May evening in 1951, a four-year-old Aboriginal boy from Point Pearce Station on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula was diagnosed with tetanus. Dr Wallman ordered the boy be sent immediately to the Wallaroo Hospital, 70 kilometres away, despite the fact there were closer hospitals at Maitland, where he lived and practised, and Moonta.
When Dr Clayton, the medical officer in charge of the Wallaroo Hospital, found out the boy was en route to his hospital, he decided to leave his post to set up a road block on the Moonta–Maitland Road in order to turn him away.
Yes. A road block.
How are we to make sense of this?
Point Pearce Station was a government-run institution; a small pastoral property established in the 1860s as a way of segregating Aboriginal people from the white colonists. By the 1950s, the station, her history of Aboriginal health in this state, Judith Raftery argues:
