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Although Cook established a hospital for leprosy on Channel Island, the site had the disadvantage of no natural
water supply.
The government had long been concerned over the failure to implement the Bleakley report and the
anthropologists Dr Donald Thomson and Professor A P Elkin were recommending more financial support for
the church missions. It was decided to split the two departments of Health and Aboriginal Affairs; when Cook was
given the choice of which department he wished to run he replied ‘both or neither’. On 6 December 1938 Parliament
passed an Act placing the Northern Territory Department of Health under the Commonwealth Department of
Health in Canberra. From 1 April 1939 Cook became a lecturer at the School of Public Health and Tropical
Medicine at Sydney University.
In 1941 Cook joined the army and served two years as a pathologist, then as Assistant Director of Hygiene,
the latter being the area in which he had specialised. From 1946 to 1950 he was Commissioner of Public Health in
Western Australia, then he rejoined the Commonwealth Department of Health in Canberra until his retirement in
- In retirement he resided initially in Sydney then moved to the warmer climate of Burleigh Heads.
Cook died in a Sydney nursing home on 4 July 1985 in his 88th year.
E Kettle, Research notes for history of health in the Northern Territory.
ELLEN KETTLE, Vol 1.
COOPER, CATHERINE: see PETT, CATHERINE
COOPER, REUBEN JOHN (1898–c1942) was born on 6 February 1898 at Wandi, near Pine Creek. The only
son and eldest child of Robert Joel Cooper and his Iwaidja wife Alice Rose, Reuben played as much a part in the
development of the Northern Territory as did his well known father, if less spectacularly.
Spending his early years with Joe and Alice in the Pine Creek, Malay Bay and Melville Island areas, he was
taken in about 1908 to Adelaide, where he apparently attended a private school. He certainly returned to Melville
Island in 1915 a fine young man, almost as tall as the father whose build he inherited. For the next five years,
he worked with Cooper senior, primarily as a buffalo shooter, and in 1920 married a Darwin girl of Filipino
descent, Bertha McKeddie. From 1922 to 1926, in partnership with F E Holmes (who in 1923 contracted to supply
electric light and cold storage facilities for Darwin), he ran a slaughtering and meat supply business, owning one
of the two butcher shops in Cavenagh Street.
Following the failure of his marriage, Reuben met Salamah (Sally) Ah Mat, a Thursday Island girl, whom he
later married. The couple started out on Melville Island, then spent most of their lives, until Reuben died in late
1942, timber milling on the Cobourg Peninsula. They had five children, Ruby, Lorna, Ronald Joel, Josephine and
Dawn.
Cooper’s achievements were remarkable because he made them as his own man—not merely as the son of his
legendary father, but perhaps more as the son of the not so well known Alice Rose. At a time when the half-caste
was not well accepted by European society, his position was exacerbated by the fact that he was probably better
educated than many of those same Europeans and resented for it. An intelligent young man, he went ahead and
lived his life in his own way.
He established the Australian Rules football code in the Northern Territory on his return from Adelaide, and
was in demand as a player for the Buffaloes and later Vesteys teams, to the extent that a boat was often sent to
collect him from his mill to play in a match. It was claimed that it took three opposing players to mark him. He was
said to have been selected for the Olympic training squad, but dropped because of his colour. The colour/sport
combination saw him instrumental in having the colour bar removed in hotels to enable the football players to have
a glass of beer together after the match, although he himself was of fairly temperate habits.
An expert small ship’s skipper and according to Glenville Pike he was ‘renowned and respected by everyone’.
He also built two boats while he was working on Cobourg Peninsula, Prairie Moon and Dawn, the first of these
being skippered by him in rescue work in Darwin Harbour after the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942.
The Coopers ran a series of four mills on the Cobourg Peninsula—all of them well constructed and equipped,
even though for some years all equipment had to be brought from Darwin by boat and transported to the mills
via roads cut by the party themselves. At the first mill, the one truck that was available did double duty hauling
the logs, then being jacked up to run the mill. At subsequent camps, a generator was available to run the mill and
provide domestic power. The hygienic arrangements were said by his contemporaries to surpass those in Darwin
at that time and it was common practice for large numbers of the local garrison to spend leave periods with the
Coopers.
Like his father, he treated his staff of full blood and half-caste Aborigines fairly and kindly, educating them in a
lifestyle far removed from their more usual bush manner. Although stores and supplies were brought from Darwin,
there were often delays during which Reuben and his family were quite happy to live off the land.
Cooper was working for the army at the time of his death at Oenpelli in 1942, returning there from Adelaide
River along the Alligator River when he was taken ill. The cause could have been a recurrence of appendicitis,
or lead/petrol poisoning from drinking contaminated water. He was taken to Oenpelli where first aid was rendered,
but no doctor was available there, nor could one come out from Darwin and he died. Perhaps because of the
confusion in the removal of records from Darwin to Alice Springs as a wartime measure, no record is held of a
death certificate having been issued. He is buried next to Paddy Cahill in an unmarked grave, perhaps his only
epitaph written by H G Harnett: ‘It was presumed he was petrol poisoned.’
Sally and the children were evacuated to South Australia on Christmas Day, 1942, later returning to live in
Darwin.