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In 1932 four year old Betty Doherty was taken from the grasp of her older brother by a fourteen-foot crocodile in Far North Queensland. Through an examination of historical sources as well as the work of psychologists, cognitive scientists and zoologists, this paper explores the role ascribed to the crocodile as well as other 'dangerous' animals that have bitten, stung or consumed settlers across Australia, and asks whether and how they might 'act' or be given voices within our reading and understanding of the past. Animal historians have begun to ask questions about historical agency through analyses of domesticated or working animals, and interactions between people and wild mammals. Insects, fish and reptiles, however, remain anonymous and non-specific, disappearing back beneath the waves or into the dark holes from which they emerged, and yet they were often agents of great change in the human lives they encountered. This paper asks whether historical agency and intent can be found in these less sympathetic and less 'knowable' creatures, and examines how historians might conceive of watery predators or venomous creatures that disappeared from sight or perhaps were never seen at all.

Marks the contribution of Anne Crowther to scholarship in British history Focussing on Scotland, this collection draws together the three main strands of Anne Crowther's academic research - welfare, medicine and legal history - and reflects the range of her historical scholarship. Based on original research, the essays in this book examine important developments in key Scottish institutions, question enduring myths about the nature of Scottish legal and medical practice, and explore the intersections between medicine, the law and public policy.

Argument By examining sources created by people who were detained or employed at the quarantine stations of Australia and the Western Pacific, this article illuminates aspects of the history of disease control that cannot be observed in other source material. Most research examining the history of maritime quarantine has tended to rely on the records of official and government agencies. As a result, discussion has largely been confined to government policy and larger issues of the political, economic, and social consequences of maritime disease control. This article contributes to the historiography by examining personal sources that show how quarantine policy and practice were experienced from the perspective of its participants. They reveal the experiences of otherwise obscured healthy detainees and illuminate agency among quarantined individuals that cannot be observed without these sources.

In many respects the Australian colonies were what one person called “the proud offspring of a grand old mother.” Yet when it came to the prevention of imported infectious disease, Britain’s Australian colonies were not a chip off the old block. British opposition to the lengthy and costly imposition of quarantine had intensified throughout the nineteenth century, eventuating in the abolition of human quarantine in 1896. The Australian colonies, on the other hand, which had based their first quarantine regulations on British law and remained constantly aware of changing medical trends in the mother country, gradually expanded the breadth and capabilities of their maritime quarantine as the century progressed. Although other European powers and British colonies progressively adopted systems of medical inspection more in line with British port prophylaxis and away from quarantine, the Australian colonies invested increasing amounts of time and money into more elaborate quarantine stations and regulations. In this article I examine some of the basic features of coastal disease prevention in the Australian colonies and how they differed from British controls. Australia’s distance from Britain was emphasized in the quarantine debates geographically as well as in policy. I argue that the often controversial differences in quarantine policy were for the most part a product of Australia’s geographical location. The natural prophylactic of Australia’s remoteness was not a reason to minimize quarantine in the colonies but rather served to increase it; whereas, it was argued that “the geographical position of England deprived it of the advantages... derived from a comprehensive quarantine system.” I discuss this seeming anomaly in light of other arguments that have claimed that the close proximity of a state to the acknowledged origin of a disease was likely to increase its eagerness to quarantine.

This thesis is an investigation into infectious disease prevention in British ports in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the introduction of medical restrictions to immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century. It examines the processes which led from the imposition of human quarantine toward the implementation of sanitary inspection at British ports. Central to this development was the influence of international pressures and demands and their incorporation into British domestic port policy. These pressures and demands resulted from the differing systems of prophylaxis and related medical theories favoured by other European imperial powers. They were discussed at the numerous International Sanitary Conferences of the nineteenth century and related particularly to shipping and commerce. British use of quarantine for the prevention of the 'exotic' diseases, cholera, yellow fever, and plague was brought to an end with the repeal of the Quarantine Act in 1896. However, exclusionary methods were not banished from the ports but remained in place for the prevention of diseases introduced by foreign migrants. The prevention of disease among immigrants, as a distinct process in port health, increased during and after the cholera epidemic of 1892, and was largely a reaction to American port health measures. Immigration restriction appeared to contradict the general opposition to exclusionary prophylaxis at British ports. However, the fundamental difference between the exclusion of immigrants who were regarded as a potential health risk and the temporary exclusion of a vessel through quarantine, was that the detention of an immigrant vessel, and exclusion of immigrants, was not disruptive to trade.