Robyn Williams: One of the paradoxes of history is that the bad can come with the good. Domestic animals are a good thing, are they not? Most have been with us only a short time, with the dog going way, way back, probably domesticating us, rather than the other way around, 20,000 or even 40,000 years ago.
Horses, goats, sheep and cattle came later, say 10,000 years ago. And so the bad things, the diseases that came with them in big populations, have been new to us and devastating. Diseases like smallpox, coming from cows, maybe, or even camels.
But what was the effect of the arrival of pox, of whatever kind, in early European Australia? Dr Jack Carmody, a physiologist from the University of Sydney, has a firm view.
Jack Carmody: It is sometimes said that our history is a series of culture wars. Certainly, these commonly involve societies with incompatible views of the world, of ethics, or religion, of politics and, yes, of culture. Often, the outcomes of those wars have been decided by disease and in some of them, disease has been used as a weapon. So while, nowadays, we often hear the rhetoric of war against particular diseases, we must not forget that long history of wars which deployed diseases or were seriously complicated by disease.
In mediaeval times, during outbreaks of the plague, victims' corpses were sometimes catapulted across city walls in the hope that the defenders would be forced into capitulation by the resulting pestilence. Furthermore, we are all too familiar with modern biological warfare (or its threat) even if many people do not realise that Cold War fears and suspicions compromised the achievement of the extermination of smallpox by the World Health Organisation. Despite that marvellous outcome, which was certified in 1980, the Soviet Union and the United States both insisted that they should retain stocks of the virus; and they still do because such mutual suspicion remains deep, enduring, and, needless to say, dangerous.
That mention of smallpox is a reminder of a disease which has, over and over again, significantly changed the history of the world. It has even been asserted - by Noel Butlin and Craig Mear (who spoke on the subject on this program about a year ago) - that the serious outbreak of smallpox in the fledgling colony at Port Jackson in April 1789 was an example of such warfare, waged through disease, and an early example of the colonists' practice of genocide: 'Our original aggression', as Butlin called it.
I consider that assertion to be utter nonsense, and for several reasons. One of them - and this is something which I've always tried to inculcate into my students (as well as trying to practice it myself) - is the imperative of scepticism in dealing with both science and history. Certainly, in this case, I include scepticism about Butlin's and Mear's terrible allegation; but no less importantly, scepticism about the disease itself. I do not, for a moment, believe that it was smallpox. Rather, I believe that it was chickenpox.
So why do I hold such iconoclastic views?
Part of the problem in accepting that diagnosis of smallpox, and even its adherents concede this, is deciding how it entered the colony. In fact, nobody has any clear or convincing evidence on that point. The eminent Australian virologist, Professor Frank Fanner, is one of those who consider that smallpox did not exist in Australia before the advent of the Europeans. Did it, therefore, come with those founding settlers themselves? There had not been a single case of the disease throughout the 8 months voyage from Portsmouth and this so-called smallpox occurred a further 14 months after the arrival of the fleet at Sydney Cove - this with a disease which has an incubation period of 10-12 days. The marvellous colonist diarist, Watkin Tench, wondered about the French under La Perouse. The British had encountered them when they visited Botany Bay, but as he wrote in his journal which was published in London later in that year of 1789, 'Let it be remembered that they had now been departed more than a year and we had never heard of its existence on board of them.'
So, if smallpox did not come in through the east coast, how - if it came in then at all - could this serious disease have entered the colony? The more adventurous theorists - and Tench actually anticipated them all - have argued that it came in from the north-west, brought in by Macassan fishermen; then (so they assert) it crossed the continent. This I believe is sheer fantasy. Whilst smallpox is a severe disease, which kills 20% to 30% of its victims, it is not especially infectious: only 3% to 5% of exposures result in the disease developing. Most experts consider that reasonable population densities with significant inter-communal contacts are therefore needed for its spread to occur. Thus successful transmission across the vast and sparsely-populated desert to the east of the continent is most unlikely. This hypothesis of a medical 'threat from the north' is untenable.
What, though, of the Butlin-Mear argument that some of the 8 surgeons of the fleet deliberately infected the indigenous people with the so-called 'variolous matter' which they brought with them? This comprised dried scrapings of pus and scabs from the skin of previous victims which, when an epidemic threatened, could be used as prophylaxis, since the death rate from that 'variolation' procedure - scratching the skin and introducing the potentially infected material - was only about 10% that of the normal disease.
There are several impediments to this theory and the first of them is practical. While to start with, we do not know how fresh that surgeon's material was, we do know that it had to endure three summers before that 1789 outbreak: in 1787 as the equator was crossed; in 1787-88 between South Africa and Port Jackson; and then in 1788-89 when numerous temperatures about 30-degree Celcius were recorded. In such circumstances the virus in this 'variolous matter' would survive no more than a fortnight or so, at the very most. Furthermore, to judge from their journals, I think that those surgeons were highly ethical men. Even if they were not, they were well aware that King George III's commission to Governor Phillip, which was read publicly in the colony on February 7th, 1788, made it plain that the indigenes were to be treated humanely. 'You are,' it stated, 'to endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you cause such offenders to be brought to punishment, according to the degree of the offence.' Only a reckless fool would disregard that order from the King.
Where, then, did the often-repeated identification of smallpox originate? This came primarily from the journals of a few colonists, notably David Collins, the Judge-Advocate, and Watkin Tench, neither of whom was a medical man. They wrote either that it was smallpox (Collins) or that it looked like it (the more cautious Tench). Why, then, do I doubt the testimony of those contemporary eye-witnesses? Simply because it was only in 1767, just under 20 years before the First Fleet left, that the eminent British physician, Dr William Heberden, in a lecture to the Royal College of Physicians, first distinguished chicken pox from smallpox. Prior to that, chicken pox was simply considered a milder form of smallpox. For all that they were competent practitioners, we could hardly expect that those early surgeons would have been aware of Heberden's findings. After all, they had been trained as apprentices under an earlier generation of naval surgeons, none of whom would have been aware of the Proceedings of the learned and exclusivist College of Physicians.
Furthermore, if the doctors were unaware of that disease distinction, the rest of the colonists would know no better. But isn't chicken pox a transient and essentially innocent disease? How could it have produced so many deaths of the local indigenous population around Port Jackson? So many? How many was it? In fact, we do not know. Certainly, finding any bodies at all in a strange land about which they knew so little, would have been frightening for the colonists. 'An extraordinary calamity was now observed among the natives,' Tench wrote: 'Repeated accounts, brought by our boats, of finding bodies of the Indians in all the coves and inlets of the harbour, caused the gentlemen of our hospital to procure some of them for the purposes of examination and anatomy ... intelligence was brought that an Indian family lay sick in the neighbouring cove. The governor, attended by Arabanoo and a surgeon, went in a boat immediately to the spot. Here they found an old man stretched before a few lighted sticks and a boy of nine or ten years pouring water on his head from a shell which he held in his hand. Near them lay a female child dead, and a little farther off, its unfortunate mother ...'
This depicts a dramatic scene but the number who died is a mystery, as is their proportion of those who became ill or of the entire local population. From various published estimates, my own guess is that perhaps between 100 and 300 died from maybe 7,000 or so living in the vicinity. Without question, that is a significant death-rate, but the striking thing is that none of those victims was a European, neither the examining surgeons nor the colonists who nursed some patients in their own homes. Yet, if it had really been smallpox, I would have expected about 50 cases amongst the colonists.
But that lack of any cases would not be in the least surprising if the disease were really chicken pox, since essentially all of the colonists would have been immune from childhood illness. Nevertheless, could chicken pox have killed so many indigenous people? I believe so. The lack of what is commonly termed 'herd immunity' can lead to severe results when a new virus is introduced into a community. For example, in the Fiji Islands in 1875, an epidemic of measles killed about 20,000 people, or 25% of the population; and in 1935, in the French colony of Cameroun, an outbreak of unequivocal chicken pox affected about 2,000, most of them adults, and killed 370 - a death rate of about 19%. So chicken pox can kill on a scale that occurred in Pork Jackson in 1789, whatever the actual death rate was then.
That diagnosis also answers the question: how did it enter the colony? The virus came in a latent form in the nervous system of every colonist who had experienced the disease in childhood, that is, almost everyone. In the harsh conditions of the colony - food shortages, climatic stress, scurvy, psychological deracination and so on - a proportion of the population would have developed shingles, which is caused by the self-same virus. Importantly, the fluid in the skin eruptions of shingles is rich in the virus and, accordingly, some of the 60 odd children in the colony would, most probably, have developed chicken pox as a result. If, or when, they had some contact with the native people, the match of the epidemic would have been lit.
This early part of our history therefore, needs to be freshly and correctly understood. Importantly, nobody can now contend that smallpox was introduced as a deliberate and malevolent act, no matter that many cruelties were later inflicted by the colonists. So, while culture wars have certainly been a bitter part of Australian history, in this case at least, there was not a medical war.
Robyn Williams: Good to know. Dr Jack Carmody is a physiologist at the University of Sydney, lecturing on medical matters, and sometimes on music.
Next week more on plague, this time in Brisbane with Rosaleen Love, who talks about times a century ago.
I'm Robyn Williams.