Colonial health transitions: Aboriginal and ‘poor white’ infant mortality compared, Victoria 1850–1910

Abstract

This paper presents results from the first two longitudinal historical cradle-to-grave datasets constructed in Australia: the Aboriginal population of the state of Victoria, reconstituted using genealogical research and vital registrations, 1835–1930; and an impoverished European population sample born at the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857–1900 and traced until 1985. It investigates the comparative infant mortality between these two severely disadvantaged population samples and finds apparently contradictory results. Aboriginal people had shorter survival at all ages apart from infancy. Infant mortality among the poor white women delivering in an urban charity hospital was extreme but their survival at all later life stages was superior to that of the Aborigines. Critical for both groups of babies and their mothers was the presence or absence of household support during pregnancy and the first year of life, and the poor whites' birth weights embodied a social gradient of degrees of family and breadwinner support. Aboriginal babies spent their first year of life, despite the community trauma of cruel government ‘management’ and exclusion from entitlements, in an ecology that protected them from the disorders of feeding and gastrointestinal disease that cut down so many of the poor white babies. The differences in both mortality and causes of death indicate very different relationships between babies and their mothers and fathers and with the state. The sudden fall in the Lying-In Hospital infant mortality from 1887 was effected by direct state and medical interventions. The equally sudden and continuing rise in infant mortality among the Victorian Aboriginal community can be traced to their expulsion from the support of the reserves and the commencement of decades of ‘invisibility’ and denial of state entitlements and medical care.