WATER RATIONS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 425, 9 January 1933, Page 3

WATER RATIONS

AUSTRALIAN PROBLEM PECULIAR LIVING CONDITIONS OF COMMONWEALTH ABORIGINALS. SCIENTISTS INTERESTED. Sydney, Sat. Why can a Central Australian aboriginal exist for three days in terrific heat on half a pint of water when a white man, under similar conditions, would probably perish? That is one of the problems which Prof essor Whitridge Davies, Professor of Physiology at Sydney University, with three other scientific investigators, will seek to solve in the next three months. Professor Davies will lead an expedition to Central Australia for a physiological study of the aborigines. The other members of the group are : Dr. H. S. Wardlaw, lecturer in physiology, and president of the New South Wales Anthropological Society; and Messrs. M. R. Joseph and H. R. Barry, two medical students. Mr. F. P. J. Pockley, a third-year medical student, and son of a well-known Maequarie street specialist, will be Unofficially attached to the party. Professor Davies and Dr. V/ardlaw propose to examine principally the energy exchange and heat loss of the natives and white settlers of the district, who exist under conditions of high temperature and low humidity. Reports state that the natives are able to exist on remarkably small water rations — lower, it is believed, than what world physiologists consider is absolutely necessary in order to live. , The party is to malce the Hermannburg mission station its lieadquarters, and with its many cases of scientific apparatus will be eonveyed by motor truck from Alice Springs to the station — a distance of 80 miles. The region was chosen because oi its aridity and its isolation, and the fact that the aborigines in the vicinity have little contact with civilsation. The station will serve as a fixed base.1' Dr. Wardlaw explains that, as far as is known, there is a certain minimum water rc-quirements essential for the maintenance of the body under normal temperature. The proposed tests on the natives of the accuracy of this eonsidered dictum may competely revolutionise the theories of the world's foremost physiologists. In addition to apparatus for measuring losses by perspiration and respiration, water content of the blood, and an extremely sensitive and aceurate halance with which it is possible to determine. the rate of water loss from the body in quite short periods, meteorological apparatus, loaned by the Government Meteorologist, will be employed. Water loss from the skin and water vapor loss from the lungs, as well as other seeretions, will be closely tabuated, and comparisons with the results of figures obtained from experiments carried out in tests at the ■ Medical School will be made.