Queensland's Black Leper Colony

An increase in the incidence of leprosy among North Queensland Aboriginal people in the late 1930s gave rise to fears that the disease might spread and threaten the white population. This concern resulted in an uninhabited offshore island being selected as a leper colony that was exclusively for blacks: it became a place to which Indigenous people suffering from leprosy were forcibly transported, isolated and treated. Queensland's right to take such action was enshrined in law by the Leprosy Act of 1892 and subsequently by the Public Health Act of 1937 which, while repealing the Leprosy Act, retained the main elements of the earlier legislation.