Australian Dictionary of Biography

Drawing of Sister Muriel Stanley, 1945

State Library of Queensland

Muriel Conomie Stanley (1918–1979), obstetric nurse and welfare worker, was born on 6 April 1918 at Yarrabah mission, Queensland, eldest of six children of Luke Stanley, lay preacher, and Jessie ‘Keppel’ Ross. Luke Stanley (1888–1936) was born in Townsville, the son of William Stanley, a European man, and Kitty, a Bindal woman. Jessie Ross (b. c. 1891), known as Pearly, was born on Great Keppel Island, the daughter of Charles Ross, a European man, and Judy, a Baiali woman of Great Keppel Island. Luke and Jessie were married on 27 April 1910 at St Alban’s Anglican Church, Yarrabah mission. Muriel’s siblings were Jessie Esme (b. 1921), Luke Cornelius Owen (b. 1924), Joan Ella (b. 1927), Charles Redman (b. 1930), and Luke Septimus (b. 1934).

Muriel attended the mission school and lived with her parents until she was ten or eleven years old, at which age she was required to move to the girls’ dormitory. There she joined other girls from families on the mission as well as girls who had been removed from other parts of the State under Queensland’s laws. At least one hundred girls were housed in the dormitory. They attended church every morning and evening, accompanied by the dormitory supervisor, who carefully monitored their every move. They were required to have short haircuts, to wear a uniform at all times, and to perform menial chores.

On finishing school Muriel became an assistant teacher at the severely underfunded mission. In 1935 Raphael Cilento, director-general of health in Queensland, visited Yarrabah and reported that the children’s diet was ‘entirely lacking in vitamins’ and ‘an actual menace to healthy development’ (cited in Craig 1980, 74). Three years later, when the anthropologist Norman Tindale visited the mission, the situation had not improved. According to him, the rations were ‘only enough to prevent starvation’ (cited in Craig 1980, 74). Muriel, her mother, and siblings are listed in Tindale’s 1938 genealogies.

In August 1938 Muriel left Yarrabah for Newcastle, New South Wales, to train as a missionary with the Church Army, an evangelical and welfare branch of the Anglican Church. After completing the theoretical side of her training, she gained practical experience working at St Christopher’s Home for Little Children, Lochinvar, and St Elizabeth’s Home for Girls, Mayfield. In April 1941 she was commissioned by the bishop of Newcastle as a Church Army mission sister. She subsequently became sub-matron, later matron, of Clarendon Children’s Home, Tasmania.

Muriel returned to New South Wales in around 1943, working first at a boys’ home in Armidale then at St Elizabeth’s. It was during this time that she decided to train as a midwife, as she felt she ‘could do much more for my people in a more practical way than by just being an Evangelist’ (Stanely 1962, 11). That few white nurses wanted to work in Aboriginal missions at this time may have also influenced her decision. The Church Army assisted her to gain admission to a training school—a difficult task due to colour prejudice. ‘There was no end of obstacles’ (Stanely 1962, 11), Muriel recalled, but eventually the South Sydney Women’s Hospital accepted her. Eighteen months later, in November 1944, she qualified as an obstetric nurse. Her wish ‘to go back among my own people in North Queensland’ (Sun 1944, 10) was fulfilled when she was appointed matron of St Luke’s Hospital at Yarrabah in 1945. She was granted an exemption from the provisions of the Queensland Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act (1939) to enable her to travel freely in Queensland and to receive her wages directly, rather than into a trust account.

Affectionately known as ‘Stanley,’ Muriel ran the mission’s hospital for the next thirteen years. Catering to approximately seven hundred residents, and attending to around eighty outpatients and up to twenty inpatients a week, she acted as combined nurse, doctor, midwife, and community health advisor, visiting invalids in their homes, riding on horseback to the remoter parts of Yarrabah to deliver babies, conducting a girls’ club, and undertaking evangelical work. In 1946, reporting that the conditions on the mission were ‘deplorable’ (Herald 1946, 8), she lent her voice to calls for reform of Aboriginal education in Queensland as a step towards full citizen rights.

On 25 April 1948 Muriel adopted a baby girl whose mother had died in childbirth, naming her Mina after her own mother who had passed. In 1953 she featured as a nurse in the controversial film Children of the Wasteland produced by the Australian Board of Missions. She resigned as matron of St Luke’s in 1959 to travel to England to undertake a two-year course in moral welfare. Leaving Sydney aboard the Fairsea, she and Mina arrived at Southampton on 5 April 1959. When they returned to Australia in 1961 Muriel was appointed a welfare officer at Cairns, north Queensland. The role included visiting Aboriginal people in their homes, teaching hygiene and home management, representing Aboriginal people to local authorities, explaining the implications of citizenship to the community, and counselling people regarding business and personal problems. During an address to the Church Army assembly at the North Queensland Synod in June 1961, Muriel remarked that her work was hampered by a lack of transportation. The delegates raised nearly £600 on the spot for her to purchase a car to aid her in ‘the battle for assimilation’ (Stanley 1962, 11), then seen by church and government alike as the path to Aboriginal people’s ‘future social, economic and political advancement’ (Hasluck 1961, 1).

In 1967 Muriel moved to central Queensland, working as a liaison and guidance officer at Woorabinda, an Aboriginal settlement near Rockhampton. She moved to Brisbane two years later to work for the Aboriginal and Island Affairs Department, staying there until 1973. In 1970 she had married Norman Gresham Underwood, a canecutter and widower, at St Alban’s Church, Yarrabah mission. Together they ran the One People of Australia League Joyce Wilding Home, Eight Mile Plains, Brisbane, from 1973 to 1976.

Muriel died on 18 May 1979 at Gordonvale and was buried in the Gordonvale cemetery. In 2010 a new health facility at Yarrabah was named in her honour. She was inducted into the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council Hall of Fame in 2012 and remains a ‘role model to Aboriginal women seeking training as a nurse or midwife’ (Gurriny Yealamucka Health Services Aboriginal Corporation 2022/23, 14).

Odette Best (Yugambeh, Goreng Goreng, Boonthamurra), Abby Slinger (Wiradjuri), and Tracey Bunda (Ngugi/Wakka Wakka) co-wrote the article, with assistance from Muriel Stanley’s family.