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https://www.science.org/content/article/british-first-fleet-brought-smallpox-australia-and-may-have-killed-millions>
"On a hot summer day in January 1788, 11 ships filled with British convicts and
sailors landed in Australia’s Sydney Harbor. There, naval Captain Arthur
Phillip raised the Union Jack and claimed the continent for the British crown.
The arrival of this so-called First Fleet preceded a catastrophe that befell
the continent’s Indigenous people. More than a year after the first landing,
“there are a significant number of Aboriginal people perishing in horrible,
ghastly circumstances from what sounds like smallpox,” says Lynette Russell, a
historian at Monash University. “By 1789, a horrendous depopulation has
occurred.”
Historians have long wondered whether the deadly disease arrived with those
first ships or took some other route. A study published this week in
Nature
Human Behaviour tracks how it spread to argue the First Fleet was the only
possible source. A related preprint suggests the toll of smallpox and other
impacts of colonization was far greater than believed. It argues that Phillip
and his shipmates set foot on a continent that was home to millions more
Aboriginal people than previous scholars had estimated. “It’s a very rigorous,
careful analysis,” says Australian National University historian Ann McGrath,
who was not part of the research team.
It also undercuts a popular narrative holding that the British colonized a land
whose few inhabitants quickly vanished after early colonists arrived. “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,” says molecular
biologist Shane Ingrey, whose Indigenous ancestors, the Dharawal, lived around
Sydney Harbor and might have been watching as the First Fleet landed. A
co-author on both papers, Ingrey is the research manager for a Dharawal
cultural organization called the Gujaga Foundation. “We want to undo the myth”
of an empty continent, he says."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
