Shattering History: Unveiling the Hidden Devastation of the 1789 Smallpox Epidemic on Aboriginal Australians
This finding debunks a common narrative that, when the First Fleet landed on the shore of Australia, the land was not densely populated, and that the few inhabitants that were there vanished quickly after the first colonists came.
“The smallpox story was a way that the British could say that there were no more of us in those early times, that everybody was wiped out. We want to undo the myth,” Shane Ingrey, a co-author of both papers whose Indigenous ancestors lived around Sydney Harbor, said to Science.
Wikimedia CommonsThis study seeks to upend the idea that there were only very few Aboriginal Australians present when the British first arrived.
Neither study addresses the question of whether these early British colonists knew that they were exposing the Aboriginal people to smallpox. That would only make this an even darker episode in the decades-long genocide of Australia’s Indigenous people.
Although there is no record of an intentional plan to infect the Indigenous people with the disease, this unfortunately was likely the case when British colonists brought smallpox to the New World, which caused catastrophe among the Indigenous populations there.
“It would be devastating to find out it was intentional,” Australian National University historian Ann McGrath, who was not part of the research team, told Science. “But the whole colonial project was intentional and damaging enough without proving smallpox was intentionally spread.”
After reading about how early British colonists likely caused the smallpox outbreak that devastated Australia’s Indigenous population, discover research that shows people lived in Australia 120,000 years ago, 55,000 years earlier than previously thought. Then, learn about Pemulwuy, the Aboriginal resistance fighter who led attacks against early British colonists.
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