Douglas Grant

This article is about the Australian Aboriginal soldier. For the Canadian hockey player, see Doug Grant (ice hockey). For the writer who used this as a pen name, see Isabel Ostrander.

Douglas Grant
World War I veteran Douglas Grant sitting on the wall of a water-fountain with his model of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Callan Park, where he worked as a clerk. Photo taken between 1932–1940.
Born	1885 Yarrabah
Died	December 4, 1951(1951-12-04) (aged 65–66) Little Bay
Buried	Botany Cemetery
Allegiance	Australian
Service/branch	Army
Rank	Private
Unit	13th Battalion
Battles/wars	World War I
Relations	Robert Grant and E.J. Cairn
Other work	Labourer

Douglas Grant (1885 – 4 December 1951) was an Aboriginal Australian soldier, draughtsman, public servant, journalist, public speaker, and factory worker. During World War I, he was captured by the German army and held as a prisoner of war at Wittenberg, and later at Wunsdorf, Zossen, near Berlin.

Early life and career

Grant was born around 1885 into the rainforest Indigenous Nations of north Queensland near Malanda on the Atherton Tablelands. In 1887, as an infant orphaned as a result of a massacre of Aboriginal people by colonial police during the Australian Frontier Wars, he was fostered by taxidermists Robert Grant and E.J. Cairn, who were in the region on a collecting expedition for the Australian Museum. The Aboriginal child was renamed Douglas by Robert Grant and his wife Elizabeth, and contrary to the laws of the time they smuggled him aboard the steamer ship 'Barcoo' from Cairns, Queensland, across state jurisdictions and eventually to Lithgow, New South Wales. There, he lived with the extended Grant family until Robert and Elizabeth moved, together with their son Henry, to another Scottish diaspora community in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, New South Wales.

Grant attended public school and trained as a draughtsman, working for Mort's Dock & Engineering in Sydney. In 1913, he was employed as a wool classer at Belltrees, near Scone, New South Wales. It was from Scone that he enlisted to serve in World War One, and numerous newspaper articles of the time celebrated his enlistment by describing his educational attainments, Scottish cultural skills, and skin colour:

"a man of high attainments, with a great love for Shakespeare and poetry generally. He is an artist, and is said to play the bagpipes as well as any Scot."

World War One

Douglas Grant seen in The Herald, 9 September 1916

Grant first joined the Australian Army at Scone on 13 January 1916. Private Grant completed training with the 34th Battalion but was blocked from embarkation because, at that time, Aboriginal Australians could not leave the country without permission. He re-enlisted in August 1916 and was sent to France to join the 13th Battalion.

On 11 April 1917, during the First Battle of Bullecourt, Grant was wounded and captured. He was first sent to Wittenberg, where POWs received very slim amounts of rations. Grant's POW colleague Harry Adams later remembered their experience in the camp:

We had been here about three or four months. We weren’t getting very much food, so Doug with others he used to go sick with the idea of getting the doctor to declare them unfit for further laborious work around the front. The doctor, on examining him [Douglas] said 'You don't look sick! Doug said, ‘What have I got to do – turn white, he said, ‘before you can tell whether I’m sick or not?’

his colleague the German prisoner of war camps he became an object of curiosity. German doctors, scientists and anthropologists sought to examine him. As a result, he was given favour and allowed some comparative freedom within the camp. The German sculptor Rudolf Markoeser modelled Grant's bust in ebony.

During his incarceration (April 1917 to December 1918), Grant became president of the British Help Committee (The Red Cross) and organised food parcels and medical supplies for the large number of Indian and African prisoners held at the Halbmondlager prisoner-of-war camp for coloured soldiers, near Zossen. Grant wrote on behalf of his fellow prisoners to agencies such as the British Help Committee, the Invalid Comfort Fund for Prisoners of War, the British Red Cross and the Merchant Seaman's Help Society.

On 22 December 1918, Grant was repatriated from Germany to England. He took the opportunity to visit his adoptive fathers' family in Scotland. Grant was able to mimic a Scottish accent and attracted much attention in Scotland. In 1919 he sailed back to Australia on the troopship Medic and arrived in Sydney on 12 June. He was discharged from service on 9 July and returned to civilian life, and to his former position as a draughtsman at Mort's Dock.

Post-War and death

Not long after returning to Sydney, Grant left Mort's Dock and moved to Lithgow, working as a labourer at a paper products factory and then at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory. While living in Lithgow, he also ran a radio show.

In the early 1930s, after the deaths of his adoptive parents, Grant returned to Sydney and eventually became a clerk at the Callan Park Mental Asylum where he also lived.

In his later years, he lived at the Salvation Army's old men's quarters in their Home at Dee Why, New South Wales, then after 1950, at La Perouse, New South Wales. It is not known if Grant associated with the Aboriginal community at La Perouse.

Grant died in Prince Henry Hospital, Little Bay, on 4 December 1951. His cause of death was a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He is buried at Botany Cemetery. He never married or had children.

Legacy

A character in the play Black Diggers, written in 2013 and staged in January 2014, is based on Douglas Grant.

The Douglas Grant Park, located at Chester Street, Annandale, is named in his memory.

External links

• "Douglas Grant: the skin of others". ABC Radio National, "The History Listen". ABC Radio National. 16 October 2018. Retrieved 16 October 2018.