Ray Cilento shines at Adelaide medical school; national and world health leader but with racist outlook
Ray Cilento with his wife Phyllis, both Adelaide University medical graduates, who impacted Australian health nationally.
(Raphael West) Ray Cilento, a South Australian-born doctor and public health administrator, became an enigmatic actor on the international and national stage, with progressive ideas muddied by extreme outdated racist attitudes.
He was born in the South Australian mid north town of Jamestown in 1893 to Raphael Ambrose Cilento, a stationmaster (whose father Salvatore had emigrated from Naples in 1855), and Frances Ellen Elizabeth West. His younger brother Alan Watson West Cilento became general manager of the Savings Bank of South Australia to 1961-68.
Ray Cilento went to Prince Alfred College but, with early ambitions to study medicine blocked by lack of money, he trained first as an education department school teacher and taught in Port Pirie 1910-11. Cilento eventually entered Adelaide University medical school on borrowed funds but won so many scholarships and prizes he ended his course with a respectable bank balance.
In 1920, he married another Adelaide University medical student Phillis McGlew at St Columba's Church of England, Hawthorn. She became a well-known medical practitioner and medical writer.
Cilento's interests were mainly in public health and, specifically, tropical medicine. He served with the Australian army's New Guinea tropical force that superseded the German administration after World War I. In 1920, he joined the British colonial service and went to in Malaya, accompanied by his wife, after they briefly set up in general practice in the Adelaide suburb of Tranmere.
Back in Australia from 1922-24, Cilento became director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville. After another term in New Guinea, he moved to director (1928-34) of the federal government's tropical hygiene division.
In 1934, Cilento was recruited by the Queensland government as director general of health anf medical service to fulfil its aim to create one of the world's first universally free public health systems. Cilento maintained his belief in government-funded health care and, to assist his policymaking, he studied law and was admitted to the Bar in 1939.
As health director-general (until 1945), state medical board president and professor of medicine at Queensland University, Cilento was knighted in 1935, at 42, for contributions to public service and tropical medicine.
He achieved international fame after World War II for work in aiding refugees with the United Nations relief and rehabilitation administration. In 1945, he was the first civilian doctor to enter Belsen concentration camp, after considerable work on malaria control in The Balkans. Cilento was director for refugees and displaced persons 1946-47 and, from 1948, director of disaster relief in Palestine. He resigned in 1950 after expressing sympathy with dispossessed Palestinian refugees.
Cilento returned to Australia in 1951 but was frustrated at being unable to find appropriate jobs in government service or academia. This was partly because of his increasingly racist and ultra-conservative views. He was involved with the Australian League of Rights in the 1950s and 1960s and publicly supported the White Australian Policy long after it faded from the Australian political mainstream.
Professor Mark Finnane of Griffiths University explained that Cilento’s sound research and policy regarding tropical diseases also was applied to 19th Century ideas about racial hierarchies. These ideas were discredited by science unfolding in the 1920s but Cilento clung to his monomania into the 1970s.
The Cilentos’ three sons became doctors as did daughter Ruth. Another daughter Margaret was an artist and the other, Diane, was the famous film actress who, for 11 years, was married to Sean Connery.
