[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 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.
[20] Early in April 1789,[21][b] British observers noticed the sudden disappearance of the "native canoes" from the Harbour's many coves, investigated, and described the pitiable conditions of the sick or dying Aboriginal persons they discovered there.
[22] The naval officer William Bradley who sailed into Sydney on 9 May 1789 was shocked, noting that some of those abandoned in rock shelters seemed to have died of thirst while too sick to seek water, and that children had often perished beside a dead parent.
[23][24] Another naval officer John Hunter agreed that thirst or hunger had increased the mortality of sufferers "immediately deserted by their friends and left to perish in their helpless situation for want of sustenance".
[26] Bradley, unlike Tench, thought it an open question whether the Aboriginal peoples were previously "strangers" to smallpox,[27] while Lieutenant King in his journal was sure they were not;[28] and this has remained a point of contention among historians.
Most point to the lack of visible scarring at first contact; but some, including Robert Barnes and Alan Frost, feel that since three observers, King, Hunter and Collins "demonstrated that the Aboriginals had a name for it", the disease was more likely a pre-existing, if infrequent, visitor.
[57] Looking back in around 1970, the poet Les Murray wrote of how "The thoughtful savage with Athenian flanks/ fades from the old books",[58] and described how the Aboriginal peoples, no longer seen as a threat or as rivals for land, began to be seen as sad exotica, having "the noon trees' spiritual walk", while perhaps "pathetic with sores".
[78] In 1986 C. C. Macknight, an authority on the centuries-old interaction between Indigenous Australians and the people of Makassar (Sulawesi, later part of Indonesia), disagreed, and revived the theory that smallpox was introduced to Australia by Makassan mariners visiting Arnhem Land.
[82] Campbell notes that the fleets of fast Macassan fishing vessels, propelled by monsoonal winds, reached Australia after being at sea for as little as ten to fifteen days, well within the incubation period of smallpox.
[86][87] However, Macknight re-entered the debate in 2011, declaring: "The overwhelming probability must be that it [smallpox] was introduced, like the later epidemics, by [Macassan] trepangers on the north coast and spread across the continent to arrive in Sydney quite independently of the new settlement there.
[89] The independent scholar Christopher Warren (2014), in an expanded statement of his case that smallpox was deliberately released by the Royal Marines in 1789, rejected the notion that the 1789 epidemic had originated from Macassar.
Jamison calls this confusion, "an error that may be readily imbibed by those who are not conversant in the natural small pox: for I most positively affirm, on my own personal knowledge for ten years past, that not a single instance of the latter disease has occurred in this country.
Rusden[117] and Roderick Flanagan,[118] and also George Bennett M.D., who suggest or assert that the symptoms, or the scars, of chickenpox or "native pock" were often mistaken in this period by non-medical observers for true smallpox.
[119] Cumpston also quotes several authors who, being aware of low levels of vaccination in parts of New South Wales, express surprise that the supposed smallpox so rarely transferred from Aboriginals to European adults or children.
In fact, Watkin Tench, among others, was more cautious, referring to "pustules similar to those occasioned by the small pox", while Mair in 1831 claimed only that "the greater number" [i.e. a majority] of experienced lay observers agreed that the current outbreak was smallpox.
[124] (A consignment of cowpox serum, permitting true vaccination, had been brought to Sydney in 1804, six years after Jenner's successful experiment in 1796; and with official support it had been fairly widely distributed.
Busby also remarked:[127]It is the concurrent testimony of all who have had opportunities of affording them [Aboriginals] assistance, that in every case, even of the worst kind, in which a little salts were administered, and a little food, such as tea or milk, supplied them, with protection from the inclemency of the weather, they have, without exception, recovered.
Dowling stated, "The little evidence we have pertaining to the 1789 epidemic in the Sydney region has left some historians and medical writers (Crosby 1986; Cumpston 1914; Curson 1985; Hingston 1985: 278) with doubts as to whether it was smallpox.
However, another medical researcher working on diseases among Aboriginals in the early colonial era (this time not on the Eora but on adjacent groups to the North West), G. E. Ford, stated in late 2010 that he had previously and independently reached Carmody's conclusions: "In a project applying a specialist understanding of disease and epidemiology from my own previous professional life as a pathobiologist, I had verified that the small pox was not Smallpox but was Chicken Pox brought to the colony in a latent form later known as Shingles".
[174] However Ford concedes that neither he nor Carmody can claim priority for this theory since: "In 1985 a teacher of 'medical geography', Peter Curson of Macquarie University presented a good case on historic evidence that the disease was chickenpox.
[177] In a conference paper in February 2014 on historic Aboriginal demography, the Australian National University's Boyd Hunter joined with Carmody to argue that the recorded behaviour of the 1789 epidemic rules out smallpox and indicates chickenpox.
"[17] The speed with which the 1789 disease spread does not necessarily prove it was chickenpox, since unknown cultural factors or behaviours might have aided it; and Dowling says that it was common for smallpox to become highly transmissible "in a virgin soil population".
For instance, Carmody and Hunter remark that it is "reasonable to assume that chickenpox then [i.e. after 1789] spread relatively quickly across the continent from Port Jackson [Sydney] because it has a very high infection rate.
Butlin did not specify how the virus was released, but (having argued that the Macassan/overland theory was implausible) he suggested that the most likely explanation of smallpox's appearance in 1789 was that it had been transferred somehow, by theft, accident, or the like, from scab originally stored in glass containers carried by just one of the seven medical officers on the first fleet.
[207] However, in 2014 he laid out a detailed argument that the colony in April 1789 was in an extremely weak military position versus the Aboriginals, and speculated that the release of smallpox was a response to this by one or more of the colonists, perhaps without the Governor's knowledge.
[215] The analogy with the Sydney colony is not perfect, in that smallpox had long been a scourge in North America, whereas in Australia the British would have been infecting their new territory with a deadly disease from which it (and its new colonists) had been free.
[220] Also, in August 2021, the historian Cassandra Pybus, in a review of Peter Dowling's 2021 book Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia's First People,[221][1] rejected the suggestion that smallpox was deliberately released from the surgeons' "variolous matter" as "very circumstantial", drew attention to "David Collins' observation that the only non-Indigenous person to be affected by the disease was a Native American", and suggested that if the disease was smallpox "it was more likely to have come from the American whalers who came to and went from Sydney Cove prior to and during 1788–1789.
[17] Some Aboriginals, and their supporters, have implied that they feel the pattern of Australian history will be incomplete until evidence can be found that the smallpox outbreaks were in some way a deliberate plot contrived by British colonists.
[225] Professor Carmody told a journalist in 2013 that a further reason for doubting that the 1789 plague was smallpox released by the surgeons was that he had read their surviving records and, "They all struck me as being of really ethical character and I simply can't believe any of them would do that.