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This book focuses on twentieth-century Australian leprosaria to explore the lives of indigenous patients and the Catholic women missionaries who nursed them. Distinguished from previous historical studies of leprosy, the book examines the care and management of the incarcerated, enabling a broader understanding of their experience, beyond a singular trope of banishment, oppression and death. From the 1930s until the 1980s, respective governments appointed the trained sisters to four leprosaria across remote northern Australia, where almost two thousand people had been removed from their homes and detained under law for years - sometimes decades. The book traces the sisters' holistic nursing from early efforts of amelioration and palliation to their part in the successful treatment of leprosy after World War II. It reveals the ways the sisters stepped out of their assigned roles and attempted to shape the institutions as places of health and hygiene, of European culture and education, and of Christianity. Making use of accounts from patients, doctors; bureaucrats; missionary men; and Indigenous families and communities, the book offers fresh perspectives on two important strands of history. First, its attention to the day-to-day work of the Australian sisters helps to demystify leprosy healthcare by female missionaries, generally. Secondly, with the sisters specifically caring for Indigenous people, this book exposes the institutional practices and goals specific to race relations of both the Australian government and Catholic missionaries. An important and timely read for anyone interested in Indigenous history, medical history and the connections between race, religion and healthcare, this book contextualizes the twentieth-century leprosy epidemic within Australia's broader colonial history

Between 1937 and 1986, Australian Indigenous people diagnosed with Hansen's disease (leprosy) were compulsorily isolated under the care of Catholic religious nursing Sisters in remote leprosaria across the north of the continent. This thesis explores the forces that gave rise to and maintained this policy; the underlying ideals and anxieties; and the ways the policy was executed across the four institutions that form the focus of the study: Derby (WA), Fantome Island (QLD), and Channel Island and East Arm (both NT).Missionary archival documents, oral histories and publications are used to examine the lives, work and traditions of the Sisters and other influential Catholic missionaries. Government records also reveal medical and social objectives implicit in the founding, staffing and ongoing operations of the institutions. Comparisons are made with management strategies for white Hansen's disease patients in Australia to unravel prevailing conceptions about the separate categories of race and disease.The Indigenous leprosaria derived from the Commonwealth government's interwar vision of a healthy White Australia, and the supervision and treatment of the inmates was considered a necessary corollary to this initiative. Catholic women religious were uniquely positioned for this role, being prepared for the incumbent risks, and having the requisite nursing and midwifery qualifications, resulting from a current upsurge in Catholic missionary activity in northern Australia. The Sisters expanded their nursing duties to encompass the holistic care of their patients and to educate them in Western skills, culture and morality. They ushered in the more intensive participation of Catholic Brothers and priests in evangelising the patients. In many ways the Catholic project aligned with government objectives for the social assimilation of the Indigenous population, but in the leprosarium, the object of such efforts was that 'civilised' and 'Christianised' residents would comply stoically with their enforced detention. Prescribed activities, whether hard work or leisure, were to keep patients occupied, diffusing their yearnings for home, and offering a gentler alternative to more punitive controlling measures. In later years, the Sisters became modern therapists, and agitators for better conditions and less stringent discharge criteria, thus more effectively helping patients regain their health and independence.