Book Launch "going to the gums ... the Lazaret on Peel Island"
24 February 2009
His Worship the Mayor, Councillor Allan Sutherland, Moreton Bay Regional Council,
Councillors of the Moreton Bay Regional Council and of Redland City Council,
Mr Peter Hubbert, President, Friends of Peel Island Association,
Uncle Peter Bird,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I thank Uncle Peter Bird for his Welcome to Country, and in the spirit of reconciliation and mutual respect we wish to see observed always and given full and genuine expression in our State and throughout our country, I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the Land on which we are meeting, the Turrbal people, and the Goenpul people - within whose homeland estate Peel Island lies and those who used to visit the Island for food and for shelter.
I wish to acknowledge particularly the Minjeribah Mulgulpin Elders who, I understand, provided support for the Friends of Peel Island Association's dedicated work in researching and writing "going to the gums...".
I am aware that many of the Elders have stories of family members who provided service and help over many years to the people placed in quarantine and those who were isolated on Peel Island because of illness. It is fitting that on this occasion we recall that service and their commitment with gratitude; just as it fitting that we recall, with sorrow, the hardship and suffering of many of those who lived on the island, separated from their families on the mainland and the suffering also of those families, especially those whose loved ones lost their fight to live while on the Island.
Thank you for the invitation to me to join you today for the opening of this exhibition and launch of this very special book. It is a pleasure for me to be with you and to have the opportunity to visit the Redcliffe Museum which has played such a significant role in fostering interest and raising awareness of the fascinating history of Redcliffe and of Moreton Bay. I have a keen interest in history and now as Governor of the State and especially in my role as Patron of the Queensland Museum Foundation and of the National Trust of Queensland, I welcome warmly any and every opportunity to visit our many museums, large and small, to meet those who share my passion and to give my support to the organisations, institutions and groups which are working actively and with such dedication to explore and illuminate our history and to preserve our heritage. In this year of Queensland's sesquicentenary, this obviously assumes an even greater significance and importance for all of us.
I will confess that when the invitation arrived in the post from your Mayor, Allan Sutherland, in September last year, I was surprised to learn that there was a lazaret on Peel Island. I knew about the Moreton Bay settlement, the first European settlement at Redcliffe, and the role of the penal islands, like St Helena, but had no knowledge of the existence of the lazaret.
It was not my first experience with such a place. As Australia's consul-general to Hong Kong and Macau, in the mid-1980's, I visited a sheltered location in the South China Sea, off Macau where Hansen's disease sufferers were isolated. I remember it as a sad, but serene place ... one of segregation - yes, but also a centre that was curiously peaceful - where people evidently felt sheltered and could, in one sense, move about freely, in their own special, restricted community without fear of being stared at or reviled for their appearance - for their disabilities and disfigurement. There was a camaraderie - a bond - among the afflicted - and a sense of respect accorded to them by visitors and their carers. There was a dignity about their situation and their separation.
Of course, the times were more enlightened and medical knowledge and treatment of Hansen's disease far more advanced than in colonial Australia a century earlier - as I discovered when I began to read.
Surprised and intrigued about this little known aspect of our history here on the Bay (at least to me), I determined to learn more about it. The Library helped me track down "Peel Island: Paradise or Prison" by Peter Ludlow, which I read in snatches on planes, in hotels and in the car, travelling to and from various official engagements, and of course I was able to read the book we are here to launch today. I also learned more about the redoubtable men and women of the Friends of Peel Island Association, and their commitment, over a long period, to preserving the physical and intangible heritage of Peel Island and their dedication to ensuring the broader community gains a better understanding of this difficult part of our shared history.
I thank the Friends of Peel Island Association for that commitment and dedication, both their broad efforts to protect the island and their very specific efforts to produce this book and exhibition.
When I accepted the position of Governor last year, one of my principal goals was to use the position - through my patronage and through speaking and meeting communities across the length and breadth of our State - to promote a deeper and richer engagement with our unique history and heritage. The work of the Friends of Peel Island in documenting the island's history, and in creatively using artwork, poetry and calligraphy to help us to interpret - and perhaps to help us to confront - the full history and significance of the Lazaret is to be welcomed by all of us. Its significance goes well beyond the story of this particular location. It tells us much about our past: about our values and attitudes, that were rooted in ignorance, prejudice and fear.
The movement to isolate patients afflicted with leprosy, which we now know as Hansen's disease, has a long and unlovely history in Western civilization. The first lazaret was established by Venice in 1403 on Santa Maria di Nazareth, an island in the Venetian lagoon, and the concept spread throughout the old and new worlds. Notwithstanding its relatively low contagion rate - at least compared to other scourges like tuberculosis, plague, syphilis and the like - a special horror of the symptoms of the disease marked out the sufferers for a different kind of life - isolated from the rest of the community. That we here in Queensland in Australia - the newest of the New World countries at the time - should adopt this ancient practice seems disappointing to us now - but these were colonial times, when attitudes, like people, were transported from the old world and thus the old fears prevailed: that is, to shun, stigmatise and - ultimately - segregate, the victims of diseases that people feared but did not understand.
Difficult as this history is to confront, it is compounded for the modern viewer by the differential treatment accorded to patients depending on their race. That this happened within living memory - and that it happened to family members of some of the people here today - is even more painful to contemplate.
With such a difficult subject matter, I think this exhibition and book, with its layers of text, photographs, drawings and poetry, is very well and most sensitively conceived: it offers multiple windows to a subject that might otherwise be too hard to view all of a piece, and reminds us that those who lived on Peel Island were much more than victims of a disease or their custodians: they were living, breathing human beings, with their own virtues and foibles - just like us, in fact, which I think is the most powerful conclusion to which this book and exhibition leads. There is also, shining through the text, a characteristic which I like to think finds particular expression in Queensland: of a certain kind of pragmatic optimism in the face of dire circumstances. There is the story of Noel (Laddie) Agnew, diagnosed at only eight years of age, and transferred from Stradbroke Island to Peel, who identified and compiled a comprehensive list of 76 species of birds on the island, before his early death. Or the patient named Alex who recounted the tale of patients hoarding the weekly bottle of Pilsener until dance time, or the stories of gardens faithfully tended. The stories of the lazaret speak eloquently about resilience in our national character - a characteristic and a quality that has been much remarked on and praised in recent days and weeks as Australians have dealt with the devastating bushfires in Victoria and floods in our own State and in NSW. So, too, do the stories illuminate the characters of those who, notwithstanding the cruel hand dealt them by fate, did their best to get on with life in the beautiful surrounds of their island prison.
I congratulate the Editors of the book - Rhonda Bryce, Tracy Ryan and Gabrielle van Willigen, and the illustrators, Ruth Venner and Rosemary Opala (now sadly deceased). Rosemary's quiet observation, "I sort of fell in love with the place" I found very revealing, both about her and about the location where she worked.
I congratulate and thank also all of those in the Friends of Peel Island Association who worked to create this book and to bring to vivid life the reality, the stories, and the people it presents, extending our knowledge of the development of our State - and also of ourselves, as we confront the truths of the past; and in the process, I would like to think, increasing our resolve to create a more compassionate and just society in the future, where discrimination and prejudice against those who are different or vulnerable finds no place.
This book deserves its place in the narrative of Queensland's history, and it is with great pleasure that I now launch officially "going to the gums .. the Lazaret on Peel Island."