Dr Walter Edmund Roth
London-born medical practitioner, anthropologist, protector of Aborigines and colonial administrator Walter Edmund Roth (1861 – 1933) worked in Queensland, Australia and British Guiana between 1898 and 1928.
The sixth child of a Hungarian physician who had found refuge in England and an English mother ( Anna Maria Roth, née Collins), he was educated in France and Germany and, following his brothers Henry Ling and Reuter Emerich, attended University College School in London. After studying biology at Magdalen College, Oxford — evolutionary biologist, anthropologist and ethnologist Baldwin Spencer was a contemporary — and undertook medical training at St Thomas's Hospital, London. In 1886, he published The Elements in School Hygiene.
After a four-year spell in Australia, where he taught at Brisbane Grammar School, Brisbane Technical College , the South Australian School of Mines and Industries and Sydney Grammar School, he returned to London in 1891 to complete his medical training.
When he returned to Australia, Roth served as a locum for his brother Reuter in Sydney, then moved to north-west Queensland from 1894, where he became the government medical officer at Normanton (1896-97) before appointments as the first Northern Protector of Aboriginals, based in Cooktown (1898-1904) and Chief Protector (1904 to 1906). Part of both roles involved recording Aboriginal cultures.
