Week 10: Douglas Grant: Soldier Between Two Worlds

In 1887, deep in the Bellenden Kerr Range of far north Queensland, a violent clash between local Aboriginal people, gold miners and police escalated into a brutal massacre. Out of that horror, only one survivor was found – a tiny Aboriginal toddler. Just a toddler. He was rescued from the aftermath by Robert Grant, a taxidermist for the Australian Museum who was up north collecting specimens. Robert and his wife took the orphaned boy back to their home in Lithgow and raised him as their own son, Douglas. And Lithgow at the time had a very tight knit Scottish community so this young Aboriginal boy grew up speaking with a thick distinct Scottish burr He was highly educated showed an early genius for drawing and eventually trained as a mechanical draftsman He was a man of immense intellect, but completely caught between two worlds. Then, in 1916, he decided to fight for his country. He enlisted, earned his sergeant's stripes, but was blocked at the last second from shipping out because of racist regulations banning Aboriginal men from serving. Yet he refused to give up He simply enlisting again the next year successfully joining the 13th Battalion as a private and was sent straight to the Western Front And it was there in the mud and terror of France that Douglass found a level of equality he had never known in civilian life He later recalled that the colour line was never drawn in the trenches His fellow diggers absolutely adored him. They even voted him the Red Cross representative in charge of distributing food parcels because they trusted him completely. But then, in April 1917, during the disastrous First Battle of Bullecourt, Douglas was wounded and captured by German forces. And that is where his identity took another surreal, clinical turn. To his German captors, this dark-skinned prisoner with a highly refined education and a thick Scottish accent was an ethnological curiosity. German scientists actually measured his skull, studied him, and reportedly modelled his head in ebony. It is heartbreaking To his comrades he was just a mate a fellow soldier To the world outside the trenches he was always a specimen And the deepest tragedy of Douglas life is what happened when the war ended and he returned home to Australia The camaraderie vanished overnight. While white veterans received land grants, pensions and transition support, Douglas, as an Aboriginal man, was legally shut out from those benefits. He struggled to find stable work, eventually losing his job at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory. By the 1940s an old acquaintance from the museum James Kinghorn was marching in an Anzac Day parade in Sydney when he spotted Douglas sitting entirely alone under a tree in the domain Kinghorn actually broke ranks ran over to his old friend and asked him why he wasn't marching Douglas looked up at him and said, I'm not wanted anymore. I don't belong. I've lived long enough. He spent his final years in a Salvation Army home, passing away in 1951. A brilliant, loyal man who gave everything for a country that, in the end, refused to see him.