As Aboriginal nations mounted a series of coordinated and strategic campaigns to defend Country against invading settlers, the smallpox epidemic spread across the southeast from 1830 to 1832.
It disproportionately affected Aboriginal people, killing large numbers of First Nations people exposed to it. Historical research so far has looked at the origins of the epidemic, mortality and the culpability of the settlers.
Yet Aboriginal warfare in the late 1830s suggests many communities survived the earlier epidemic. So how did Aboriginal people respond and survive in the face of a new and deadly disease?
With access to a lesser-known medical report from 1831 by army doctor John Mair, our newly-published research offers an alternative account of Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples of the plains and river country (of what is now western and northwestern New South Wales). This gave us an insight into their experience of what they named “Boulol” on the northwestern plains and “Thunna Thunna” in the Lachlan and Wellington Valleys.
Our research unearthed three distinct responses that are reminiscent of leading disease control measures across the globe and that continue today.
Efforts to isolate and separate
The 1830s epidemic probably was not the first time the peoples of the plains and rivers experienced smallpox. Old men at one cattle station told the station manager in 1831 they had experienced the disease when they were very young, and they had the distinctive scars to prove it.
It’s likely these men had previously caught smallpox in 1789 or 1790, after the disease had first broken out around the colonisers’ camp at Sydney Cove and moved west over the ranges. These men – and other plains country old people – would have understood the disease from the vast networks of trade and communication that linked the coast to the plains country.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they had well thought out strategies to respond to the epidemic, such as the movement of people away from the disease and population centres.
At that same station, the manager observed one smaller group isolating away from a larger group that had the disease. What the stockman interpreted as enmity could instead have been strictly observed isolation. This could have been similar to the sometimes violent quarantine practices of English-speaking societies.
In another example, this time from a station at Wallerawang (near present-day Lithgow), a group “convinced of the contagious nature of the disease” fled to Emu Plains, 100 kilometres southeast and on the opposite side of the mountains, in order to escape the epidemic.
Again, the Wallerawang station Wiradjuri people seem to have recognised how smallpox spread from person to person.
After the epidemic, they returned. We know this because a decade later the local pastoralist, James Walker, reported he was grateful for their return as he relied on their labour.
Devising treatments
The Aboriginal peoples of the plains and river country also responded to the smallpox epidemic with active treatment.
George Clarke was a bushranger known as “the Barber” who lived with the Gomeroi people for several years. He provided detailed descriptions of how Gomeroi doctors treated the disease.
Initially, treatment included immersion in cold water, but since deaths still occurred, this treatment was discontinued and other cures tried.
Head hair was removed by scorching close to the scalp. Further treatment included “pricking the pustules with a sharp pointed fish bone” and pressing out the fluid with a flat instrument.
John Mair, who interviewed Clarke, interpreted these treatments as being consistent with the best accepted medical interventions for smallpox then known in the world. Mair was highly trained, with a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh and training at leading British and French hospitals.
He found examples of head-shaving and pustule pricking in his textbook. He was comfortable with the idea that Aboriginal knowledge systems may have reduced mortality of the smallpox epidemic and mitigated symptoms.
Clarke’s bushranging itself pointed to the effectiveness of Gomeroi practices. “The Barber” was arrested twice in 1831, in April and October, before and after the epidemic. Gomeroi warriors were with him both times. Smallpox did not prevent them from fighting the invading squatters.
Getting vaccinated
Accepting vaccination was another way that Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples responded to the smallpox epidemic.
Smallpox was the first virus for which a vaccine was found. Yet in the 1830s, this technology was still only 30 years old, with significant limitations in its efficacy and safety.
Mair was committed to vaccination, offering it to settler children in Sydney. When he first heard rumours of the epidemic to the west, he sent vaccine packages and later performed vaccinations himself.
Mair was conscious that vaccination could only work if it was accepted by Aboriginal people. He soon found out Aboriginal people took up vaccination very readily, compared with the “little desire” he had seen in Sydney among the settlers.
Reading Mair’s views, we conclude these unnamed Wiradjuri people decided to trust Mair, even with limited evidence, to receive a procedure that they probably understood as an action intended to prevent the return of smallpox.
When vaccination was not possible, at least one group of colonisers offered a riskier alternative. Variolation involved controlled inoculation with smallpox pus, which supposedly caused a mild case of smallpox that prevented future infection.
Read more:
Eradicating smallpox: the global vaccination push that brought the world ‘arm-to-arm’
It mostly worked, even if it could have up to a three in 100 fatality rate.
When vaccination failed during the epidemic, Arthur Ranken, a pastoralist on the Lachlan River, performed variolation on several Wiradjuri people and convinced his neighbours John and Jeremiah Grant to do the same. The Grants experimented with variolation in stages – first testing it on ten people from “Miles’ and Camberrang’s tribes”, then others from the community, and lastly, on Jeremiah Grant himself.
This procedure did offer protection, but it also came with more risk. The pastoralists may have been motivated to resort to variolation to secure their Aboriginal labour force. Variolation had become common on slave plantations in the Caribbean and Americas during the 18th century for this reason, and Ranken had brothers who were both doctors and slave owners.
Yet Ranken and the Grants appear to have omitted one crucial part of the variolation procedure – the strict quarantine of people who’d had the treatment. Without this step, the colonisers let the recovering patients spread smallpox to others, even while being protected themselves.
Aftermath
The smallpox epidemic of the early 1830s undoubtedly was a devastating event that caused many deaths and affected survivors for decades. Yet to focus only on this impact is to tell an incomplete history.
The Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples of the plains and river country actively responded to smallpox just as they responded to other forms of violence. They carefully deployed Traditional Knowledge, observation and intuition in the treatment and response to smallpox, in ways that drew on networks across vast distances with earlier experience of the disease.
Less than a decade after the epidemic, from 1838 to 1844, Gomeroi, Wiradjuri and Wailwan led an uprising that has been described as a high point of resistance to the colonisers, forcing them, in some places, to retreat. Smallpox did not destroy either culture or willingness to fight for country.
