Walter MacDougall

Walter Batchelor MacDougall (6 April 1907 – 5 May 1976) was an Australian missionary and patrol officer who worked with the indigenous peoples in the desert regions of Western Australia and South Australia

MacDougall was born in Mornington, the fifth son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. After some years in Tasmania, his family returned to Melbourne where he matriculated from Scotch College in 1922. For eight years (1931–1939) he served as an assistant minister at the Presbyterian mission at Port George IV (Kunmunya) in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In 1940 he took up an appointment at the Ernabella mission in the north western corner of South Australia, and picked up a working knowledge of Pitjantjatjara. Despite a physical disability from a bullet wound to his hand, which resulted in his losing a thumb and finger, he managed to be enlisted in the army and worked in a transport division in northern Australia until his discharge in 1944.

In 1947 he was hired to work, on the basis of his extensive experience with aboriginal communities, as a patrol officer attached to the Woomera Test Range. As Britain began to undertake weapons testing and experiments on the atomic bomb at Emu Field and Maralinga, MacDougall was delegated to shift people out of the affected area down to the Yalata. In 1956 he was promoted to the position of Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia and by that time was responsible for patrolling some 400,000 sq. miles of desert terrain, together with a new officer, Robert Macauley, with whom he had personal differences.

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