Lorraine 'Lori' Harloe's "White Man in Tropical Australia: Anton Breinl and the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine"

This year James Cook University celebrates its proud legacy in historical research, writing and publishing through the Studies in North Queensland History Collection. In partnership with the JCU College of Arts, Society and Education (CASE), the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department. To complement this showcase a new series of blog posts will provide a fresh response to each work through the contemporary lens of a prominent practicing historian. In today’s post, Professor Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney and University of Melbourne) writes about White Man in Tropical Australia: Anton Breinl and the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine by Lorraine Joan ‘Lori’ Harloe who completed her BA (hons) thesis in 1987 for the JCU History Department.

Townsville Hospital by P.D., 1875, JCU Art Collection, Photograph by Michael Marzik.

When I landed on the airstrip at Norfolk Island in 1995, I encountered an enthusiastic and somewhat zany woman from North Queensland, done up in colonial dress, welcoming delegates to the biennial conference of the Australian Society for the History of Medicine (ASHM). That was my first meeting with Lori Harloe (1947-2000), whose pioneering essays on the history of tropical medicine in Australia I had read almost ten years previously with admiration.

The Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine, Townsville, 1912.  Photographed by Frank Taylor who was an entomologist at the Institute.  Source: Lori Harloe’s BA (hons) Thesis.

Around 1987, as an errant medical doctor, I embarked on an MA thesis at the University of Melbourne on the history of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine (AITM), located in Townsville, Queensland. The first biomedical research institute established in recently federated Australia, the AITM was set up to investigate scientifically whether a (manly) working white race might prosper in the supposedly inimical tropical climate. It addressed the pressing question of whether the new White Australia Policy was physiologically and microbiologically possible. In a period of rising white nationalism, the topic appealed to me as it seemed to offer an opportunity to reflect critically on the racial politics of scientific and medical research in this country – on how racism permeated even ostensibly objective inquiries. I assumed that no one else – certainly no one in the history of science and medicine – had yet appreciated the significance of the topic.

A Proof of Tropical Health, October 1927 from Selected articles and advertisements from Cummins & Campbell’s Ltd. Monthly Magazine in NQHeritage@JCU.

Then I learned of a nurse historian at James Cook University (JCU), Lori Harloe, who had finished her BA (Hons) thesis (1987) on the AITM director, Anton Breinl, and published a few brief chapters derived from the thesis: one in a collection of ASHM papers edited by John Pearn (1988) on the incorporation of the AITM into the Sydney School of Public Health in 1930; the other on Breinl himself in essays edited by Roy M. MacLeod and Donald Denoon on health in tropical Australia and New Guinea (1991). I noted wryly some overlap with my interests, but by the late 1980s, I had moved on to study for my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania on US tropical medicine, climate and racism in the colonial Philippines, which later turned into Colonial Pathologies (2006).

When I was back in Melbourne for a few years during the late 1990s, I resumed my research into the AITM, broadening the focus to include other aspects of the congruence of white nationalism and biomedical science in Australia, leading to publication of The Cultivation of Whiteness (2002). Harloe’s published essays were valuable sources of information and insight into tropical medicine at Townsville. But in those days, last century, I could not get access to a copy of her thesis, which is now made available here. Having read it belatedly, I’ve found a lot of previously unpublished material that would have been important for my own studies.

A devout Catholic and committed humanitarian, Lori Harloe trained as a nurse in Townsville. She worked there for most of her career, though she spent some time as a nurse for Mother Teresa in Calcutta and caring for the sick in Indonesia and Bangladesh. She also contributed to the Townsville Advertiser as an art critic. In 1996, JCU awarded her a PhD in the history of nursing: the thesis topic was health in mining camps in Northern Australia – surely this research is also worth recuperating and circulating more widely. In her life and work, tropical Australia was her beat – as it mostly had been for Breinl too.

Official opening of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine, May 1913. Anton Breinl is seated in the front row, second from the left. Source: Lori Harloe’s BA (hons) Thesis.

 

It seems they did BA honours theses differently in the 1980s. These days, Harloe’s research might better qualify her for at least an MA. For me, the value of this exceptionally rich thesis is the additional local and regional context provided to explain medical research questions and methods in northern Australia. Her study of Breinl as a displaced intellectual in tropical Townsville is still unrivalled – there is nothing so comprehensive in the published literature. Harloe attempts to situate tropical medicine at a time when most medical historians favoured abstract accounts of discoveries and breakthroughs. I should also express my relief that the thesis does not really focus on the themes that I’d found so compelling, particularly white nationalism and the neglect of Indigenous health. Also, more attention might have been given to socioeconomic structures and imperatives. I feel the study gets a little rushed once Breinl retires – it tends to discount the activities of the AITM in the 1920s under Raphael Cilento, and to dismiss its continuing legacies through the School of Public Health in Sydney after 1930.

Nonetheless, we should be happy that some clever fossicking in academic archives has turned up such a valuable nugget.


Professor Warwick Anderson
University of Sydney and University of Melbourne