Smallpox in Australia information

The European colonisation of Australia, was accompanied by epidemic diseases to which the original inhabitants had little resistance. Colds, influenzas, tuberculosis (TB), and measles were major killers.^[1] 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;^[2] 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, "Pustules, similar to those occasioned in the smallpox, were thickly spread on the bodies; but how a disease to which our former observations had led us to suppose them strangers could at once have introduced itself, and spread so widely, seemed inexplicable."^[3]

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.^[4][5] 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.^[6] 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.^[7][8] These were successfully confined to port cities, and predominantly affected European colonists. Thereafter, further brushes with imported smallpox were relatively minor.^[9]

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,^[7] and its relatively slow infection rate.^[10] They did not selectively kill Aborigines, and there was no mystery as to their origin. In total this second group killed about one hundred people.^[7]

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, “Between 1780 and 1870 smallpox itself was the major single cause of Aboriginal deaths. The consequences of Aboriginal smallpox are an integral part of modern Australian history.”^[11]

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 Aborigines had considerable immunity. The famous virologist Frank Fenner, who played a major role in the worldwide elimination of smallpox, remarked in 1985:^[12]

Retrospective diagnosis of cases or outbreaks of disease in the distant past is always difficult and to some extent speculative. We can never be sure whether the 1789 outbreak was due to smallpox or chickenpox, but the scanty data available seem to me to favour smallpox, though the question of its origin is unexplained.

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;^[13][14] yet most historians continue to prefer the traditional view that it was smallpox. (The journals of the First Fleet’s surgeons have not survived,^[15] but historians infer that they, like Governor Arthur Phillip, called it smallpox.)^[16] 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.^[17][18] However, the historians Henry Reynolds, Peter Dowling, and Cassandra Pybus still regard this theory as unproven.^[19]