We should have learned from past epidemics that the only way through this crisis is together
We live in dangerous times, not unprecedented times. This is not the first infectious agent to devastate Australia, but our collective memory as a nation and the great Australian amnesia have failed us. The consequences will be lethal.
The first episode in our post-invasion history began in the late 1780s and rapidly spread across the continent. There are written accounts of vast areas around Sydney Harbour where bodies of Aboriginal people were piled high in caves, and coves were filled with the floating dead. Smallpox was the agent of apocalypse during that time, and it moved like the grim reaper along our highways, songlines and trade routes from nation to nation, leaving societal collapse in its path.
So severe was its impact that the early English descriptions of Aboriginal society around New South Wales reflect a society recovering from collapse. We read in the early journals of nomadic hunter-gatherers, living a subsistence lifestyle in humpies – dehumanised, traumatised. Through the bias and ignorance of the English it was assumed that those people had always lived that way and European logic followed that Aboriginal people were therefore inferior. Inferiority justified the conquest of land and confirmation bias enabled it, despite the overwhelming physical evidence demonstrating otherwise.
Aboriginal oral history tells of many organised nations across Australia consisting of often large and sophisticated societies before the arrival of the English, with extensive trade and economic routes, complex governance and justice systems, permanent and semi-permanent villages, both firestick farming and active tilling of the land, resource accumulation, preservation and siloing of food, water sequestration and controlled borders. Bruce Pascoe’s excellent book Dark Emu provides us with some insight into what pre-pox Aboriginal societies looked like, found in the early English journals written as the invasion front fanned further out and encountered societies restoring their systems and societies. We were still doomed though, with Australia’s population plummeting from 100% Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander to the current 3%. Where the pox had failed, the musket, hate and rifle finished the job.
The second major episode in Australia came in 1918-1919, with the arrival of the “Spanish influenza” pandemic. By that time Australia had become a federation and its Indigenous peoples