Smallpox in Australia
was a variable yet often fatal viral infectious disease. Even with good nursing, it regularly killed around 30% of recognised cases. Though widespread in Europe and Asia, it was probably unknown in southern Australia when the first British colony began in 1788.
It never became widely established among the colonists, killing only about 100 of them over the next 100 years, and mostly in port-city outbreaks that were traced to visiting ships. Yet a smallpox outbreak in 1789 devastated the Aboriginal people near the Sydney colony, killing perhaps half of them, while sparing the British.
This imbalance leads some medical experts to argue that the main agent of death during major outbreaks of "smallpox" in 1789 and in 1829–1831 was in fact chickenpox. This is a disease to which the British were largely immune but which, in a virgin soil epidemic, can produce symptoms very similar to smallpox. Doctors began to distinguish smallpox more clearly from chickenpox in the early to mid-nineteenth century; and during the 1829–1831 outbreak there was vigorous debate among the colony’s surgeons as to which disease it was, with the chief surgeon favouring chickenpox.
However, most historians have called the 1789 and 1829–1831 diseases smallpox. Smallpox is commonly described as the main or one of the main diseases that reduced the Aboriginal peoples and left them unable to resist European settlement. Debate among modern medical and historical experts as to the identity of the deadly 1789 disease, how it reached Australia, and why it did not infect any of the British is ongoing.
Overview
was accompanied by epidemic diseases to which the original inhabitants had little resistance. Colds, influenzas, tuberculosis, and measles were major killers. Such diseases devastated Aboriginal populations, weakened their cultures, and often left them in no position to resist the newcomers. Within perhaps as little as six months of the arrival of the First Fleet, venereal disease was already a serious problem for local Aboriginal peoples; but the first disease to produce a major fall in the Aboriginal population around Sydney was the 1789 outbreak, some 16 months after the Fleet arrived, of what Governor Phillip and others referred to as "smallpox". Watkin Tench, a captain in the Marines, wrote that,A full list of smallpox outbreaks in Australia falls into two main groups. Firstly, there were three widely-spaced "Aboriginal" epidemics which devastated Aboriginal populations but largely spared the colonists. Two of these outbreaks were recorded in New South Wales: in 1789 and in 1830. Later there was a long-running outbreak in the 1860s, which spread through much of Northern and Western Australia and down to the Great Australian Bight in the south. In the second group, there were six major ship-borne outbreaks in the nineteenth century, in 1857, 1868–1869, 1871, 1881–1882, 1884–1886, 1887 and 1893. These were successfully confined to port cities, and predominantly affected European colonists. Thereafter, further brushes with imported smallpox were relatively minor.
Although the electron microscope, which is capable of seeing and distinguishing viruses, did not begin to become available to doctors until the 1940s, there is little doubt that at least the second group of outbreaks were true smallpox. They had its typical death-rate of around one death per four recorded infections, and its relatively slow infection rate. They did not selectively kill Aboriginal persons, and there was no mystery as to their origin. In total this second group killed about one hundred people.
The first group of outbreaks, which primarily affected non-Europeans, was more deadly, spread more rapidly, and had a much greater effect upon the history of Australia and the current situation of its Aboriginal peoples. The historian Judy Campbell remarks,
The 1789 outbreak, in particular, has been much debated. Several medical experts and anthropologists have argued that it cannot have been smallpox and was probably chickenpox—a highly infectious disease, with partly similar symptoms, to which Europeans though not Aboriginals had considerable immunity. The famous virologist Frank Fenner, who played a major role in the worldwide elimination of smallpox, remarked in 1985:
Since Fenner's 1985 remarks, further historical evidence has been produced, and opinions have hardened. The medical experts Ford and Carmody insist that the failure of the 1789 outbreak to affect Europeans, despite what they consider abundant opportunities, rules out smallpox; yet most historians continue to prefer the traditional view that it was smallpox. The extent to which smallpox and chickenpox in 1789 were seen as separate diseases is a grey area.
Among those who believe the disease was smallpox, there are two main theories: that it was introduced from Sulawesi in Indonesia by Macassan traders, and that it was brought directly to south-eastern Australia by European ships. Some, like the independent scholar Christopher Warren, have insisted both that the disease was smallpox and that it was probably released by British colonists in a deliberate act of biological warfare. This view has resonated with some Aboriginal authorities, including professors Maynard and Langton, and the medical officer Dr Mark Wenitong. However, the historians Henry Reynolds, Peter Dowling, and Cassandra Pybus still regard this theory as unproven.
Outbreaks
Outbreak of 1789
This disease swiftly inflicted a huge toll on the local Eora population of Aboriginals, causing most of those not infected to flee the region. The epidemic probably began in March 1789, and "subsided by early May". Early in April 1789, British observers noticed the sudden disappearance of the "native canoes" from the Harbour's many coves, investigated, and described the pitiable conditions of the sick or dying Aboriginal persons they discovered there.The naval officer William Bradley who sailed into Sydney on 9 May 1789 was shocked, noting that some of those abandoned in rock shelters seemed to have died of thirst while too sick to seek water, and that children had often perished beside a dead parent. Another naval officer John Hunter agreed that thirst or hunger had increased the mortality of sufferers "immediately deserted by their friends and left to perish in their helpless situation for want of sustenance". Judy Campbell in her 2002 book Invisible Invaders summed up that the disease's initial impact in 1789 "was especially severe because of shock, flight, and fear, as well as the virus itself". Bradley, unlike Tench, thought it an open question whether the Aboriginal peoples were previously "strangers" to smallpox, while Lieutenant King in his journal was sure they were not; and this has remained a point of contention among historians. Most point to the lack of visible scarring at first contact; but some, including Robert Barnes and Alan Frost, feel that since three observers, King, Hunter and Collins "demonstrated that the Aboriginals had a name for it", the disease was more likely a pre-existing, if infrequent, visitor.
The precise proportion of Aboriginal peoples that perished is difficult to determine, though Governor Phillip estimated that perhaps half had died; and the Aboriginal Bennelong also believed that half the Eora in the Sydney district had died. After a few weeks the canoes returned, and 20 were seen passing Sydney Cove on 2 June 1789; but Phillip's expeditions in subsequent months showed him that the disease, if it began near Sydney, had rapidly moved on to nearby Aboriginal populations.
The Aboriginal peoples do not seem to have associated this disease with the settlement. In mid-1788, they had shown strong resentment of the colony, with several spearings; but by 1791 they had become regular peaceful visitors, even to the Governor's House, as depicted in William Bradley's watercolours. John Hunter noted, "before I left Port Jackson, the natives very familiar and intimate with every person in the settlement; many of them took up their rest every night in some of the gentlemen's houses". Yet, in 1789 the outbreak reduced not just the number of Aboriginal persons living near the new settlement but also their fighting strength and presumably their confidence in their culture. The historian Peter Dowling argues that it probably put an end to any possibility of Aboriginals attacking and destroying the colony in its first years.
Like smallpox, this outbreak produced abundant small pustules which often left permanent scarring on survivors. Though it is probable that other recently-introduced diseases were already at work, it is clear that this pustular disease was the main killer of Aboriginal persons. Carmody and Hunter calculated in 2014 that if the disease was really smallpox it would have caused some 30 to 50 recorded cases within the colony, especially among the 84 children. Those who believe the disease was smallpox counter-argue that in early 1789 there was simply not enough contact with the colonists for the disease to reach them.
Some have cited official correspondence in which Governor Arthur Phillip lamented his inability to make contact with Aboriginals. Yet the memoirs of the colony's Lieutenant Governor David Collins suggest that convicts and some of the colony's children may not have had the same problem. He describes, "large parties of the convicts of both sexes on those days in which they were not wanted for labour", holding regular parties with friendly Aboriginals in an adjoining cove "where they danced and sung with apparent good humour". Collins also says that:
This sailor on Supply, known as Joseph Jeffries, died on 2 May 1789 without, as Dowling notes, transmitting it to any of his shipmates. Phillip twice came across groups of sick or dying Aboriginal persons and had them carried back into the colony and carefully treated by the surgeons. In each case, the adults died but a child survived, and was later adopted into a colonist family. No Europeans seem to have caught the disease from these patients; but an Aboriginal person living in the colony, known as Arabanoo, who helped care for the Aboriginal patients, caught the disease and died.
Such evidence led to the 1985 debate between Fenner and Hingston on whether the 1789 disease could really have been smallpox.
The epidemic also began a change in how Aboriginal peoples were seen by Europeans. The surgeon George Bouchier Worgan had written of the local Eora Aboriginals that they: "seemingly enjoy uninterrupted Health, and live to a great Age". Yet as syphilis, TB, influenzas and pneumonias began to afflict the Aboriginal peoples, they began to be seen as diseased and even dying peoples. Looking back in around 1970, the poet Les Murray wrote of how "The thoughtful savage with Athenian flanks/ fades from the old books", and described how the Aboriginal peoples, no longer seen as a threat or as rivals for land, began to be seen as sad exotica, having "the noon trees' spiritual walk", while perhaps "pathetic with sores". Thomas Keneally in his 1967 novel Bring Larks and Heroes, based loosely on the Sydney settlement, makes smallpox a symbol of the settlement's spiritual sickness.