User:Legalgrad77/Leonard Sammut

Col. Leonard 'Lennie' Robert Samut

Born in Southsea, Portsmouth in England in 31 August 1894.

Birth and childhood

He was born to Maltese parents and was educated in Malta.

War years

He served at Gallipoli as part of the British contingent and then been part of the colonial administration in India organising troop movements by rail.

He served with the Maltese Labour Corps in Gallipoli and then moved with the British Army’s Worcestershire Regiment to Asia. This accords with records of the 1st Battalion’s presence in India and Persia (1919 – 1929). He was “Mentioned in Despatches” of 25 Jan 1917. He served in the Gallipoli theatre under FM Stivala (late major) of the Maltese Labour Corps who went on to become Commissioner of Police. These corps served from April 1915 to August 1916 in Gallipoli.

Marriage by proxy fame and arrival in Australia

He was ‘married in his sleep’ on 4 April 1929, as reported in Darwin newspapers. While sleeping in Darwin, his fiancé, Henrietta Scerri De Caro, was married to him by proxy on a ship.

Having come out to Australia 1928 on the eve of the depression to sell railway company shares, Samut got a low paid job in the Northern Territory Public Service . He lost this job due to lack of application. Out of work and with a new wife, his military background gained him employment as a guard at Darwin’s Fanny Bay Gaol.

Meeting with Nemarluk

Nemarluk was the most famous of the gaol’s guests, a 22 year old fully initiated aboriginal warrior, six foot, with deep and broad ceremonial scars on his chest and legs. Nemarluk had led a small band of warriors who lived by poaching cattle and robbing isolated travellers. They came to the stark attention of the Darwin community by killing five Japanese fishermen over a dispute over tobacco.

Samut met Nemarluk awaiting his upcoming trial for murder. Samut took Nemarluk and five prisoners out to empty their toilet-buckets outside the perimeter of the jail fence. According to prison reports, when Samut turned his back, Nemarluk saw his chance and bolted towards the bush. Lennie raised his rifle, fired and missed . He was found guilty of incompetence and Nemarluk’s escape was an embarrassment for head jailer, and the Minister of the Interior in Canberra who ordered a major man hunt. The search and capture was to continue for months with sensational press reports of his pursuit occurring weekly in the national press. Seven months later, injured by a bullet and alone, far from his people, Nemarluk was recaptured when he ventured into a station for rations. .

Aboriginal Compound Superintendent at Kahlin

The escape of Nemarluk brought Samut’s superiors embarrassment, and his job became untenable. The dual job of superintendent and matron of the Kahlin aboriginal compound became vacant, and Samut wrote to his father, who had visited Australia in 1926 as part of the Empire Parliamentary Association,, to ask John Latham, then Attorney-General, who his father had met in diplomatic circles, to intervene to get him the job . In the meantime he took a job at a Leper colony close to Darwin, but the couple were scared and untrained to deal with the disease. Luckily, Latham’s handwritten request carried the day with the northern territory administration and Samut started his job as superintendent of the Kahlin Compound at the end of 1934 .

The camp he inherited was a dirty disorganised confusion of people amidst hastily whitewashed barrack type buildings on a flat patch of ground near the military air strip. The camp’s population fluctuated according to the state of the drought and tribal alliances and wars, and could reach 500 in the wet season. They were mainly the dispossessed tribes from the area. There was a separate enclosure for half-caste children who were given special treatment. The previous superintendent resigned suddenly because his wife, the matron, who had the responsibility for the half-caste home had recently had a nervous breakdown. The camp was run at almost no expense to the federal government and turned out cheap black labour for white families in Darwin. The half-caste kids were raised as easy wives for the male dominated town and home help for white families.

There was an official policy of segregation by race. Samut had initiated the first scout troop in Darwin, and attended with the boys when Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement stopped in Darwin on his way to Melbourne. Photos from the time show a troop of pale white boys in starched khaki uniforms. This shows us his interest developing young people, because of the effort needed to start a group of this kind, although letters to the local newspaper complained not a single boy achieved a badge of merit in the 18 months he led the group. Again, he could do nothing right according to some.

The state of the Compound

The food at Kahlin was dietician’s nightmare: mouldy porridge and doughy bread cooked complete with weavels served a sugary jam. Cans of human faeces were dumped outside the houses and not cleaned up. The Aboriginal clinic was built close to the camp to treat indigenous people separately from the whites, to put up a token fight against the obvious afflictions. The camp was locked at night under barbed wire. By announcement in the local paper the black contingent was occasionally allowed to come into Darwin for films that were selected to show the white presence in a good light. Other than these special outings, there was basically nothing constructive to do from sundown to sunrise, with ill people mixing with more healthy ones. Sex in such an artificial environment was uncontrolled by any social order and venereal disease in the community was rife.

Kahlin was an indispensable part of the economic structure of the Territory and the Stolen Generation phenomenon - but like so many policies imposed from above - although its official purpose was to help those it actually oppressed them. The policy of integration had the convenient benefit of creating black househelp which was used to lure white families to northern climates. Canberra deliberately staved Kahlin of funds so that its residents would have to become paid hands for the growing white hub that was Darwin.

Xavier Herbert's account of Samut

If we trust Xavier Herbert, Leonard Samut was the 'fat Maltese', the worst superintendent Kahlin ever knew . According to Herbert, he reputedly started to use violence on children who breached the rules of the camp, using a network of other children who acted as his eyes and ears. While this might have maintained order in a POW camp, it was a disaster for a community of children that relied on the availability of support, interest, nurturance and attentive care. According to Xavier Hebert, the Samut liked to describe himself as the ‘playboy’ who had the ‘cushiest job’ in the Territory, often getting drunk in the bungalow with the members of his amateur string band, while his charges slept outside in squalor

Transition to Bagot camp

In 1937 a cyclone tore through Darwin, pushing over and ripping up the compound's poorly constructed buildings. . A new site was picked to rebuild the compound, Bagot, a more natural bush setting, and out of sight from the expanding white-peopled metropolis. The use of black labour was also rapidly going out of fashion due to the increasing strength of the union movement.

Final years

In the transition to Bagot, Samut and his wife found themselves without work, and with the improvement of the European economy, returned to Malta. Due to his weight he was not considered for active service in the second world war, and died in the 1960s in Malta.

External links

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