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 Wünsdorf, 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. Grant's repatriation file (Service Number 6020) records his birth as 5 January 1887. 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 'rescued' 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 later fostered and renamed Douglas by Robert Grant and his wife Elizabeth. Then, 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 Annandale 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
Grant first joined the Australian Army at Scone on 13 January 1916. Grant completed training with the 34th Battalion, but was discharged because indigenous people were officially barred from military service. However, as the number of possible recruits dwindled, such legal barriers were increasingly ignored by recruiters. Grant re-enlisted in August 1916 and was sent to France to join the 13th Battalion. Douglas Grant was one of more than 1,000 Indigenous men who served in World War I.
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 small amounts of rations. Douglas Grant's POW colleague Harry Adams later remembered their experience in the Wittenberg camp, also recalling Grant's wit and sense of humour:"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 ... before you can tell whether I'm sick or not?' While at Wittenberg Grant was noticed by social scientists from the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission which had been established by the psychologist and musicologist Carl Stumpf, and by linguist Wilhelm Doegen, to study the languages and culture of the men held captive as German prisoners of war. Grant was transferred to the Wünsdorf POW camp and like many of the colonial soldiers from the British and French empires there, he became an object of study as part of this major research project. German doctors, scientists, anthropologists and artists sought to examine and document him. One German scientist argued that the POW camps were "a völkerschau [people show] without comparison", and Grant later told his war colleague Roy Kinghorne that "he was measured all over, and upside down and inside out". However, Grant was given some favour within the camp and allowed a certain level of freedom within it. The German sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled Grant's bust in bronze, and this significant work was only re-discovered by researchers in 2015.