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RESEARCH PRODUCT

“This Racial Menace”?: Public Health, Venereal Disease and Maori in New Zealand, 1930–1947

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In 1939, Whakatane, on the remote east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, came to the attention of the New Zealand Department of Health as an area where syphilis was “suspected [to be] widespread”.1 This isolated part of the country was largely inhabited by Maori communities, and the revelation that venereal disease (VD) was so prevalent caught the Department by surprise, especially as a nationwide public health campaign against venereal disease had been in progress since 1917.2 In response, a comprehensive venereal disease campaign targeting Maori alone was developed––the earliest example of such a focus by the Department. This reaction highlighted what Dr Thomas Ritchie, Director of the Division of Public Hygiene, described as the “separate” problem of Maori health.3 The intersection of issues of venereal disease and race in the twentieth century is increasingly the subject of historical investigation.4 Some studies of South Africa and Papua New Guinea have found that public health campaigns against VD tended to be racist.5 Roger Davidson, in reviewing the historiography of venereal disease, has suggested that “the impact of racial stereotyping and discrimination upon VD policy making” was part of the New Zealand debate on this issue in the first half of the twentieth century.6 Yet so far there is a paucity of writing on Maori and venereal disease.7 This article evaluates the significance of race in the development of government policies regarding venereal disease, and explores the hitherto little understood impact that associated public health campaigns had on Maori in the 1930s and 1940s. Utilizing surveys of the incidence of syphilis and gonorrhoea in Whakatane as a starting point, this essay examines the relationship between Maori, doctors and the Department in the public health campaigns against VD.