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Alarming new allegations have emerged of medical experimentation on Aborigines and of policies allowing long-lasting contraceptives to be implanted in indigenous girls as young as 12.
The federal Government has started an investigation into claims that children of the "Stolen Generations" were used as guinea pigs for leprosy
treatments in the first half of the last century.
Queensland's acting chief health officer, Dr Linda Selvey, has said contraceptives had been implanted in young sexually active girls who were "not in a position to make good decisions for themselves".
The allegations of medical experimentation were made at a hearing in Darwin of the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee's inquiry into compensation for members of the "Stolen Generations", taken from their families as children.
Kathleen Mills of the Stolen Generations Alliance said her uncle had in the 1920s been a medical orderly at Darwin's Kahlin Compound - where separated children were confined - and had seen children injected with serums to gauge their reaction.
"These are the things that have not been spoken about," she said.
Although Health Minister Nicola Roxon said her department would do all it could to investigate the claim, there are doubts about both the survival of documentation and of the accuracy of the allegation.
Infectious diseases expert Warwick Britton, Professor of medicine and immunology at Sydney University, told ABC radio that oral tradition may have confused regular leprosy treatments with experimentation.
"These injections with chaulmoogra oil were quite painful and were given every month or two months, and it is possible that this has been misunderstood as some kind of guinea pig therapy."
David Hollinsworth, national secretary of the Stolen Generations Alliance, also said it was extremely unlikely that records supporting experimentation would be found, especially as vast amounts of documentation had been destroyed in the devastation of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.
But he said experimentation was "extremely possible" given a long history of paternalistic medical decisions made on behalf of Aborigines - and continued in the present Northern Territory intervention.
Leprosy hit indigenous Australia hardest, with the biggest toll in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland.
Hollinsworth said infected Aborigines in the NT had been bound in neck chains, and in WA were not allowed to travel below latitude 40 to prevent their passing the disease on to whites.
In Queensland, State Opposition child safety spokeswoman Jan Stuckey attacked a policy that allowed the implanting of contraceptives in young girls without protecting them against predators and sexually transmitted diseases.
Selvey said that only a small number of procedures had been carried out and implants were done only in consultation with health professionals and with the consent of a parent or guardian.
Implants were also confined only to children known to be having unsafe sex, who had not responded to counselling, and were not in a position to make good decisions for themselves.
