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"A great deal of sickness": Introduced diseases among the Aboriginal people of colonial Southeast Australia
Abstract
Previous palaeopathological studies have sought to build up a picture of Australian Aboriginal health before European settlement in 1788 and epidemiological studies of Aboriginal health in the twentieth century are now legion. But, despite a growing body of literature on Aboriginal history set in the intervening colonial period, our knowledge of Aboriginal health following European colonisation remains understudied. This thesis is a contribution to filling that gap through an examination of documentary and skeletal evidence in the changing bio-chemical situation experienced by Aboriginal populations of Southeast Australia from 1788 to 1900.
This thesis examines one of the major biological components of this change – disease that were introduced unto Australian Aboriginal populations during the process of colonisation. The epidemiology, timing, diffusion of diseases are considered with specific attention given to infectious and respiratory diseases that were responsible for causing major epidemics of morbidity and mortality.
The medical model for the contact period in the late 18th and 19th centuries is proposed. This model considers three major stages in the disease environment of Aboriginal populations in Southeast Australia; a pre-contact stage with endemic pathogens causing chronic diseases and limited epidemics, an early contact stage where introduced exotic human diseases cause severe epidemics of infectious and respiratory diseases among Aboriginal populations, and a third stage where remaining Aboriginal populations were institutionalised on government and mission settlements and were subjected to a high level of morbidity and mortality form the introduced diseases.
The major epidemic diseases during the early stage were smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, and measles. Each of these diseases was responsible for excessive morbidity and mortality. During the period of institutionalisation infectious and respiratory diseases were responsible for over 50% of recorded deaths on 8 separate Aboriginal settlements in Southeast Australia. The major diseases recorded as causes of death were tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, diarrhoea and dysentery.
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian infant mortality rates are calculated to provide an indicator to compare the state of health of the two populations. Aboriginal rates were high when compared to the non-Aboriginal populations of Victoria and South Australia. The rates reveal a substantial health differential between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations. Aboriginal infant mortality improved into the latter quarter of the twentieth century but the corresponding improvement in non-Aboriginal infant mortality has been at a much higher rate. The gap between the health status of each has widened rather than narrowed over the last one hundred years.
... Before the eighteenth century, in 1788, Indigenous people usually enjoyed better health than Europeans. They did not suffer from smallpox, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, venereal syphilis and gonorrhea, diseases common in Europe in the eighteenth century (Macrae et al., 2012) Indigenous people are known to have had hepatitis B, some bacterial infections (including non-venereal forms of syphilis and yaws) and some intestinal parasites (Dowling, 2011). Trauma is likely to lead to other health issues like anemia, arthritis, periodontal disease, and dental loss (Macrae et al., 2012). ...
... Trauma is likely to lead to other health issues like anemia, arthritis, periodontal disease, and dental loss (Macrae et al., 2012). The population-level influence of these diseases was comparatively small compared to the consequences of the diseases that affected Europe in that time period (Dowling, 2011). ...
... All this changed with the arrival of Europeans in 1788 who brought with them these aforementioned pathologies (Dowling, 2011). These diseases, in particular smallpox, caused considerable loss of life among the Indigenous population, and the impacts have continued to the present (Dowling, 2011). ...
Australia’s First People, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, have inhabited the Australian continent for some 60,000+ years. They comprise hundreds of individual nation groups, each with its own beliefs, stories and traditions. Prior to European colonization in 1788 they enjoyed varied diets, active lifestyles and resulting good health derived from their deep connection with each other and the lands on which they lived. The arrival of Europeans brought not only new diseases but had such a profound impact on the social determinants of health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and these ramifications remain overtly evident to this day. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples revere their elders and ageing is viewed as a particularly auspicious time of life in many Indigenous cultures. Due to increased morbidity and reduced life expectancy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are often affected by the conditions of age at a much younger age than other Australians. This chapter will examine the health disparities facing Australia’s First People with respect to ageing, and explore the historical context, modern-day consequences and current responses to this complex issue.
... Curr 1883). Dowling (1997Dowling ( & 2021 documented the impact of a series of infectious diseases leading to massive depopulation of Traditional Owners, effectively and rapidly ending millennia-long TO-LM (including mosaic burning), and initiating an ecologically traumatic event with no recovery once Europeans invaded to exploit their grasslands. ...
The nineteenth century mass mammal extinctions in the semi-arid zone of the Murray‒Darling basin, southeastern Australia, are examined in the context of prior traditional land management. A model of grassland dynamics reveals a multi-trophic level productive pulse one to five years post-fire, followed by senescence and increasing flammability. Traditional Owner patch burning of grassland optimized human and mammalian food (including tubers, seeds and fungi) and decreased fire risk. Over at least 40 000 years, the persistence and abundance of fauna responded to this energetically closed self-reinforcing management. In 1830, depopulation (disease, massacres and displacement) effectively ended traditional management, an ecologically traumatic event that extinguished these productivity pulses. Associated mammal populations of c. 20 species collapsed, and all eco-engineering and mycophagous species, such as bilbies, bettongs and bandicoots, rapidly disappeared. Traditional land management increased productivity, habitat heterogeneity and reduced wildfire risk, underpinning mammal abundance. This has remained unrecognized by most mammalogists and land managers. Blaming extinctions predominantly on the additions by Europeans (introduction of ungulates, feral grazers and predators etc.), disastrous as they were, fails to acknowledge the initial cause of rarity, i.e. loss of productivity, habitat and niches when traditional management was subtracted from country. As ecosystems continue to degrade, understanding the primary cause is fundamental to improved management. Although too late for extinct species, respect for, and inclusion of, traditional land management knowledge provides a direction for future land management.
... When the British arrived in Australia, their microbial imperialism in 1788 was devastating for the aboriginals (Dowling, 1999) as Figure 1 indicates. Recent investigations reckon that the British may have deliberately orchestrated the disease spread, with contaminated bottles in their ships (ibid). ...
Pandemics afflict human beings across millennia. Pandemics arise in different historical periods reflecting particular cultural ethos. Pandemics are time markers that take place in different paradigms. People’s movements and economic processes encompassing the luxury industry trigger pandemics. This study presents several paradigms as unique processes of pandemics associating with respective luxury behaviors. This study’s objectives include questioning economic models and examines how Anthropocene historical eras are transformable for better or worse.
... While there have been some investigations from an archaeological perspective of the impact of Old World pandemics (e.g. Dowling 1997) there has been no discussion in the literature on mass graves associated with these often catastrophic events. ...
The Spanish Influenza of 1919 had a devastating effect on Aboriginal Australian communities, particularly Cherbourg (formerly known as Barambah Aboriginal Reserve), which resulted in a loss of ~15% of their population. Deaths happened so quickly that coffins were not built and, in some cases, trenches or mass graves were used to inter the dead in addition to individual graves. Although the trench locations were formally unknown by the Cherbourg community today, a major concern of the Cherbourg Elders is that they wanted to memorialise those affected by the 1919 pandemic, especially 100 years later. One attempt to locate the mass graves was to apply geophysical methods in the New and Old Cherbourg cemeteries to detect these unmarked burials. Our paper demonstrates how ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetic gradiometry were used along with oral histories and Indigenous knowledge to detect three mass graves associated with the Spanish Influenza. Outcomes such as this play an important role is supporting ‘Truth Telling’ for the Cherbourg Aboriginal community.
... The loss of life as critical mass and presence coupled with the loss of political structure and the transmission of powerful knowledge has a profound effect on all expressions of identity (Kearney 2014:54-5). This creates particular relations on the frontier and often-desperate efforts to make sense of illnesses (see Campbell 2002, Dowling 1997, and Dussart 2010 who gives a contemporary rendering of sense making in relation to diabetes in remote community contexts). ...
The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.
The story of colonial expansion has often been entwined with the social and health impact of syphilis. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of syphilis (in its primary, secondary and tertiary forms) on hospital admissions and individual patients in Queensland in the pre-antibiotic era. This article centres on available hospital patient records for the years 1880–1920, stored at the Queensland State Archives. From these records, 220 cases of syphilis were retrieved, the majority diagnosed as primary-stage infections. Overall, it was found that the number of deaths from syphilis in its tertiary form was not significant compared with other causes of death in that period. The perception of colonial syphilis as highly prevalent and a serious threat to the population is not supported by our review of hospital records, which suggests that its reputation in relation to its social implications exceeded the evidence of its prevalence.
Barngarla is a Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan language originally spoken on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia and adjacent northern hinterlands. This paper proposes various etymologies and supports the Barngarla language reclamation. Reflecting Barngarla epistemology and traditional ecological knowledge, toponyms are intimately connected to place name reclamation and language reclamation. Delineating hunting, foraging and fishing places, geographical features, and sites embedded in oral history, toponyms also provide windows into broader diachronic processes within grammar and phonology. Oral history recorded by the German missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann indicates naming practices dating back to the late-Pleistocene showing some similarities to other, non-Barngarla groups. Several named band areas seem focused on floristic regions. Barngarla toponyms exhibit signs of diachronic processes both regarding phonology and grammar. We explore the extent to which post-invasion Barngarla names are identifiable, propose evidence for Thura-Yura lenition of an original gabi ‘water’ form, and discuss a locative form -la unrecorded by Schürmann.
The Sāmoa Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Database was begun in 2016 as an ongoing means of encouraging and assisting more archaeological research in Sāmoa. It is also building a stronger engagement between the Archaeology and Cultural Heritage research and teaching programme at the Centre for Sāmoan Studies at the National University with government agencies here, and is contributing to the still incomplete processes of preparing heritage protection legislation. Known as “Utu” (meaning “a container for treasures”). The Sāmoa Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Database maps known archaeological sites and previously undocumented sites identified by surveys and analysis of LiDAR images using a global information system (GIS) program. Mapped sites are linked to information about them, including archaeological analysis, historical sources, and oral traditions and any other available information. The work so far has provided new evidence for Sāmoa's prehistory in relation to population size and distribution, settlement patterns and land use.
Prophylactic vaccines are crucial in modern healthcare and have been used successfully to combat bacterial and viral infectious diseases. Infections like polio and smallpox, which were dreaded historically, and which devastated the human race over many centuries, are now rare. Smallpox has been eradicated completely and polio is nearly eradicated because of vaccines. Vaccines differ fundamentally from other classes of medicines in that they are usually administered as a preventive measure to a healthy individual rather than to a sick person already with an infection, although exceptions to this practice exist. Most currently used prophylactic vaccines are based on established platforms, but many vaccine candidates, in late development stages, including several COVID-19 vaccines, use highly novel vaccine platforms not available historically. History of infectious diseases and prophylactic vaccines are filled with important scientific lessons, and thus provide valuable insights for the future. With hindsight, historically there were some ethically questionable approaches to testing vaccines and the germ warfare against native populations in the Americas and other regions. In this review, we examine key historical lessons learned with prophylactic vaccines with reflections on current healthcare dilemmas and controversies with respect to influenza and COVID-19 vaccines.
Ongoing uncertainty over the relative importance of aerosol transmission of COVID-19 is in part rooted in the history of medical science and our understanding of how epidemic diseases can spread through human populations. Ancient Greek medical theory held that such illnesses are transmitted by airborne pathogenic emanations containing particulate matter (“miasmata”). Notable Roman and medieval scholars such as Varro, Ibn al-Khatib and Fracastoro developed these ideas, combining them with early germ theory and the concept of contagion. A widely held but vaguely defined belief in toxic miasmatic mists as a dominant causative agent in disease propagation was overtaken by the science of 19th century microbiology and epidemiology, especially in the study of cholera, which was proven to be mainly transmitted by contaminated water. Airborne disease transmission came to be viewed as burdened by a dubious historical reputation and difficult to demonstrate convincingly. A breakthrough came with the classic mid-20th century work of Wells, Riley and Mills who proved how expiratory aerosols (their “droplet nuclei”) could transport still-infectious tuberculosis bacteria through ventilation systems. The topic of aerosol transmission of pathogenic respiratory diseases assumed a new dimension with the mid-late 20th century “Great Acceleration” of an increasingly hypermobile human population repeatedly infected by different strains of zoonotic viruses, and has taken centre stage this century in response to outbreaks of new respiratory infections that include coronaviruses. From a geoscience perspective, the consequences of pandemic-status diseases such as COVID-19, produced by viral pathogens utilising aerosols to infect a human population currently approaching 8 billion, are far-reaching and unprecedented. The obvious and sudden impacts on for example waste plastic production, water and air quality and atmospheric chemistry are accelerating human awareness of current environmental challenges. As such, the “anthropause” lockdown enforced by COVID-19 may come to be seen as a harbinger of change great enough to be preserved in the Anthropocene stratal record.
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