Smallpox at Sydney Cove – who, when, why?

1. Campbell Macknight, “The View from Marege: Australian Knowledge of Makassar and the Impact of the Trepang Industry Across Two Centuries,” Aboriginal History 35 (2011): 121–43.

2. Michael J. Bennett, “Smallpox and Cowpox Under the Southern Cross: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1789 and the Advent of Vaccination in Colonial Australia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83.1 (2009): 37–62.

3. We can be confident that the outbreak near Sydney and spreading across the Blue Mountains was smallpox because Aborigines near Bathurst with pockmarks were immune to smallpox in 1829–30. This immunity would not have occurred if the 1789 outbreak was any other disease. See J.H.L. Cumpston, The History of Small-Pox in Australia 1788–1908 (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia Quarantine Service, 1914), 153.

4. Bennett, Smallpox and Cowpox, 43, 46.

5. Bennett, Smallpox and Cowpox, 48.

6. Although around 300 infectious particles per ml. may be required for a 50% success rate from deliberate doses – using analogy with vaccine virus, see Frank Fenner et al., Smallpox and its Eradication (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1988), 684, Note a, Table 14.15.

7. John M. Neff, “Variola Virus (Smallpox),” in Principles and Practices of Infectious Diseases, ed. Gerald L. Mandell et al. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 1350a.

8. Neff, Variola Virus, 1350b. The largest and longest epidemics were caused by variola minor (common name, alastrium).

9. As in Yemen, see Fenner, Smallpox and its Eradication, 1034f.

10. Fenner, Smallpox and its Eradication, 1015.

11. Martin I. Meltzer et al., “Modeling Potential Responses to Smallpox as a Bioterrorist Weapon,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 7.6 (November–December 2001): Appendix 1, 2.

12. Hayley Hughes, Information Paper Smallpox Disease and Smallpox Vaccine (Falls Church, Virginia: United States Military Vaccine Agency, 2008), 2.

13. Section 3, Smallpox Disease – What it is – Answers, Military Vaccine Agency, accessed September 1, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/MIL-smallpox.

14. Noel Butlin, Our Original Aggression Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia 1788–1850 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 23.

15. Fenner, Smallpox and its Eradication, 179.

16. H. Nishiura and M. Eichner, “Infectiousness of Smallpox Relative to Disease Age: Estimates based on Transmission Network and Incubation Period,” Epidemiology and Infection 135.7 (2007):1146.

17. John White [1790] in Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales by John White with a Biographical Introduction by Rex Rienits, ed. Alec H. Chisholm (Sydney: Angus and Robertson in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1962), 133.

18. Phillip to Sydney, July 9, 1788, in Frank M. Bladen, ed. Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 1.2 (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1893), 150. Also, on death and wounding of natives, see William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales The Journal of Lieutenant William Bradley RN of HMS Sirius 1786–1792, facs. (Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1969), 112; George B(ouchier) Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon (Sydney: The Library Council of New South Wales, 1978), 51.

19. A vegetable collector plus two rushcutters. Phillip to Sydney, July 10, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2 167–69.

20. David Collins [1798], An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales with Remarks…, Volume 1, ed. Brian H. Fletcher (Sydney: AH & AW Reed, 1975), 32.

21. Phillip to Sydney, September 28, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2 191.

22. Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 1, 36.

23. Robert Brown, “Extracts from a Journal kept by Robert Brown, on the Fishburn, Storeship,” Historical Records of New South Wales (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1893), vol. 2, 410.

24. Watkin Tench [1793], “A Complete Account of the Settlement in New South Wales,” in Sydney's First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge (Sydney: Angus and Robertson in Association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1961), 137.

25. Anon, Letter from a Female Convict, November 14, 1788, in Historical Records, vol. 2, 747.

26. Phillip to Nepean, January 4, 1787, in Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 45.

27. Ralph Clark had his own box of shot; see Ralph Clark in Journal and Letters of Lt. Ralph Clark 1787–1792, ed. Paul G. Finlon and R.J. Ryan (Sydney: Australian Documents Library in Association with the Library of Australian History Pty Ltd, 1981), 94. Sergeant James Scott on the Prince of Wales found 196 cartridges damaged. Phillip told Lord Sydney that they “were only supplied with what was necessary for immediate service while in port”. See Phillip to Sydney, June 5, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 106f.

28. Myra Stanbury, HMS Sirius 1790: An Illustrated Catalogue of Artefacts Recovered From the Wreck Site at Norfolk Island (Adelaide: Australian Institute for Marine Archaeology Special Publication no. 7, 1994), 83.

29. Phillip to Sydney, June 5, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 106f.

30. Phillip to Nepean, June 5, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 107f.

31. Phillip to Nepean, June 10, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 108f.

32. Charles Lyte, Sir Joseph Banks 18th Century Explorer: Botanist and Entrepreneur (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1980), 230.

33. Wilfrid Oldham, Britain's Convicts to the Colonies (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1990), 140.

34. Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip 1738–1814: His Voyaging (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), 153.

35. Phillip to Nepean, September 2, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 111.

36. Phillip to Nepean, July 9, 1788, enclosure, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 155.

37. Tench, “A Complete Account,” 162. This practice was discontinued when a signal flag was established on South Head at the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

38. Worgan, Journal, 50.

39. Watkin Tench [1789], “A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay with an Account of New South Wales … A Complete Account of the Settlement in New South Wales (1789),” in Fitzhardinge, Sydney's First Four Years, 48.

40. John Cobley, Sydney Cove 1788 (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1962), 107.

41. George Caley in Reflections on the Colony of New South Wales, ed. J.E.B. Currey (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1966), 40.

42. On 17 August, 1788, Hunter's musquet misfired; see John Hunter [1793], An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island … (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia Facsimile, 1968), 83. Musquets misfired at Manly Cove in September 1790; see Tench, “A Complete Account,” 180.

43. Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1959), 34, note 30.

44. Brian J. Given, A Most Pernicious Thing: Gun Trading and Native Warfare in the Early Contact Period (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 103.

45. Joan B. Townsend, “Firearms Against Native Arms: A Study in Comparative Efficiencies with an Alaskan Example,” Arctic Anthropology 20.2 (1983): 1–33; H.A. Parsons, The Truth About the Northern Territory, (Adelaide: Hussey and Gillingham, 1907), 5; Dorothy Shineberg, “Guns and Men in Melanesia,” Journal of Pacific History 6 (1971): 77.

46. Cobley, Sydney Cove 1788, 22.

47. Hunter, Transactions, 54.

48. R. Money Barnes, A History of the Regiments & Uniforms of the British Army (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1951), 62; George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia During the Years 1837, 38 and 39… (London: Thomas W. Borges & Co., 1969), 1, 105.

49. Ross to Stephens, November 16, 1788, Historical Records, vol.1.2, 215–18.

50. David Collins to George Collins, February 1, 1787 in David Collins, A Colonial Life, ed. John Currey (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 33; Phillip to Sydney, March 12, 1787, in Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 56–57.

51. Phillip to Sydney, March 12, 1787, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 56f.

52. Phillip to Nepean, July 9, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 153.

53. Newton Fowell to his Father, July 31, 1790 in The Sirius Letters - The Complete Letters of Newton Fowell, ed. Nancy Irvine (Sydney: The Fairfax Library, 1988), 115.

54. Phillip to Nepean, July 9, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 153. Phillip told Lord Sydney that he wanted to send three or four companies to Parramatta (head of the harbour); see Phillip to Sydney, July 9, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 150f.

55. See Appendix to this article.

56. See George Raper, Plan of Port Jackson, coast of New South Wales…as Survey'd by Cap'n Hunter 1788, National Library of Australia, accessed September 1, 2013, http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm3458.

57. Phillip to Nepean, July 9, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 153.

58. Watkin Tench in An Authentic Journal of the Expedition Under Commodore Phillips to Botany Bay with an Account of the Settlement …, An Officer (London: C Forster, 1789), 27.

59. Tench, “A Narrative,” 74.

60. Ralph Clark to William Collins, September 30, 1788; see Ralph Clark, in Fidlon, Journal and Letters, 269.

61. John Thomas Bigge, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry on the State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales (London: The House of Commons, 1823), 12.

62. Phillip to Sydney, September 28, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 189.

63. Aborigines attacked fishing parties with spears at night; see Jacob Nagle in The Nagle Journal, A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the year 1775 to 1841, ed. John C. Dann (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 96.

64. John Easty, Memorandum of the Transactions of a Voyage from England to Botany Bay, 1787–1793: A First Fleet Journal (Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, 1965), 107, 109, 112. A release of smallpox at this point could produce the epidemic observed in April.

65. See report of 1763 Fort Pitt smallpox event in Elizabeth A. Fenn's “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History 86.4 (2000): 1553f.

66. Major (Robert) Donkin, Military Collection and Remarks (New York: H. Gaine, 1777), 215f.

67. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Colonel Henry Boquet (and Captain Simeon Ecuyer) in 1763; see Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Indian War (London: MacMillan & Co., 1907), 44f; General Thomas Gage and possibly Sir William Howe in 1775; see Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 88f; Concerning John Murray (Earl of Dunmore) in 1775–76, Major Robert Donkin in 1777, Generals Alexander Leslie and Charles Cornwallis in 1781, and Guy Charleton in 1775–76, see Fenn, Biological Warfare, 1567–73. Concerning British commander of Fort Mackinac (Mackinaw) in 1782, see Helen Jaskoski, ed., Early Native American Writing New Critical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 146f and an alternative account at 147f. Another account is by William W. Warren in History of the Ojibway Nation (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, Inc., 1957), 259–62. For British commanders at Montreal circa 1757, see Jaskoski, Early Native American Writing, 141–45.

68. Fenn, Pox Americana, 92.

69. Cyril Field, Britain's Sea-Soldiers (Liverpool: Lyceum Press, 1924), 153, footnote 4. In south India, a General Order to inoculate all East India Company soldiers was issued in December 1787; see Niels Brimnes, “Variolation, Vaccination and Popular Resistance in Early Colonial South India,” Medical History 48 (2004): 202.

70. David Day, Claiming a Continent a History of Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1996), 63. Robert Murray had previously included a deliberate spread by “a scared or vengeful convict or soldier” – see Bob Murray, “Epidemic Wiped out Half the Population,” Sun-Herald, January 31, 1988, 45.

71. Bennett, “Smallpox and Cowpox,” 49.

72. Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1989), 188f.

73. Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 47.

74. Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 53.

75. Fowell, The Sirius Letters, 113. The British probably burnt some corpses; see Foley, Repossession of Our Spirit Traditional Owners of Northern Sydney (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 2001), 56.

76. Alexander Logbook entry for June 1, 1788 in Historical Records, vol. 2, 401.

77. Easty, Memorandum of the Transactions, entry for December 29, 1788, 108.

78. Editorial, New South Wales Medical Gazette, 1871–72, cited in J.H.L. Cumpston, The History of Small-Pox in Australia1788–1908 (Melbourne: Quarantine Service: Commonwealth of Australia, 1914), 148.

79. Concerning Botany Bay, see Phillip to Lord Sydney, October 30, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 208. Concerning down the harbour, see Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, entry for March 4, 1788.

80. First cases would have been relatively mild, as inoculation cases. Second and third generation instances, one to two months later, would have been more lethal. There was an interval of two to three weeks between each generation of cases – see Fenner, Smallpox and its Eradication, 208.

81. William Charles Wentworth, Description of New South Wales, facsimile edition (Adelaide: Griffin Bros., 1978), 44.

82. Edward M. Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, and the Routes by Which it Spread Itself Over That Continent (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1886), 226.

83. See William Dawes Notebooks, Book C, 9, accessed September 1, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/berewalgal.

84. Davis, “First 150 Years,” in Aborigines of the West Their Past and Their Present, ed. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1980), 58. Davis's comments were attacked by Peter Biskup, Canberra College of Advanced Education, as indicating a “biased, one-sided brand of new Australian history, as false as the old one has been.” See Biskup, “Aboriginal History,” in New History Studying Australia Today, ed. G. Osborne and W.F. Mandle (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 30. In his thesis “Aboriginal Dreaming Tracks or Trading Paths: The Common Ways” (Phd Arts, Griffith University, 2006), Dale Kerwin notes “Aboriginal people have long argued that smallpox was introduced by Europeans in 1788,” 45. There is no material basis for implicating the French in releasing smallpox in New South Wales. Such suggestions in Aboriginal lore and from Watkin Tench (1795) and Dr Thomas Jamison (1804) date from before the spread of smallpox was sufficiently understood. See “La Perouse at Botany Bay,” in History of New South Wales from the Records, ed. G.B. Barton (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1889), 1, 522ff.; and G.W. Rusden, History of Australia, 2nd ed. (London: Melville, Mullen & Slade, 1897) 1, note 7, 128f.

85. Foley, Repossession of Our Spirit, 96–98.

86. Peter Sköld, The Two Faces of Smallpox: A Disease and its Prevention in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sweden (Umeå: Sweden: University of Umeå, 1996), 77.

87. Pan S. Codella, “The Case of Smallpox of Theodorus Prodomus (XIIth Cent. A.D.),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (1946): 212.

88. Joel N. Shurkin, Invisible Fire The Story of Mankind's Victory Over the Ancient Scourge of Smallpox (New York: G.P. Putman's Sons, 1979), 58.

89. Replica blankets can be viewed as part of the Endeavour display at the National Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour, Sydney.

90. Walter E. Roth, Ethnological Studies Among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines (Brisbane: Edmund Gregory Government Printer, 1897), 100.

91. J.V.S. Megaw, “Marks of Natives Everywhere,” Mankind: Official Journal of the Anthropological Societies of Australia 8.3 (1975): 231. Frederick McCarthy, “Artists of the Sandstone” (typescript, MS 3495, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, n.d., Canberra), 593.

92. Without carbon dating, the age of burials can be vastly exaggerated. See Colin Pardoe's note, Stop the Press, in “Sharing the Past: Aboriginal Influence on Archaeological Practice, A Case Study From New South Wales,” Aboriginal History 14 (1990): 221. Carbon dating cannot date material more recent than the seventeenth century.

93. L(eonard) Freeman, “Metrical Features of Aboriginal Crania From Coastal New South Wales, Australia,” Records of the Australian Museum 26.12 (1964): 311.

94. Jack Carroll, The Mosman That Was (Sydney: P. Leahy, 1950), 6; Les “Tummy” Kewin also reports a skeleton was uncovered near Balmoral Beach; see http://tinyurl.com/Balmoral-NSW (accessed 1 September 2013). Traditional burials were not concentrated into sites; see Jo MacDonald, Salvage Excavation of Human Skeletal Remains at Ocean and Octavia Streets, Narrabeen Site #45-6-2747 (Sydney: Jo MacDonald Cultural Heritage Management Pty. Ltd., Australian Archaeological Consultancy Monograph Series, 2, Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc., 2008), 14.

95. Maggie Brady and Yin Paradies, “Health and Wellbeing,” in Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia, ed. Bill Arthur and Frances Morphy (Sydney: The Macquarie Library, 2005), 156.

96. Lionel Frost, Janet McCalman, and Rebecca Kippen in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart MacIntyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 295, 322; Peter Hiscock, Archaeology of Ancient Australia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 13f; Malcolm Prentis in A Study in Black & White: The Aborigines in Australian History, 3rd ed. (Sydney: Rosenburg, 2009), 35.

97. J. Burton Cleland, “Some Diseases to, or of Interest in Australia,” in Cumpston, History of Small-Pox, Appendix B, 167, 169.

98. Judy Campbell, Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

99. Craig Mear, “The Origin of the Smallpox Outbreak in Sydney in 1789,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94.1 (2008): 17.

100. Bennett, Smallpox and Cowpox, 46.

101. Macknight, View from Marege, 137.

102. Campbell, Invisible Invaders, 66.

103. Alan Frost, Botany Bay Mirages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 202.

104. Christopher Warren, “Could First Fleet Smallpox Infect Aborigines?,” Aboriginal History 31 (2007): 158.

105. Campbell, Invisible Invaders, 107, citing assistant surgeon R.M. Davis.

106. According to Boomgaard, smallpox occurred at Macassar in 1789. Presumably, there was no prior outbreak significant enough to be recorded; see P. Boomgaard, “Smallpox and Vaccination on Java, 1780–1860; Medical Data as a Source for Demographic History,” in Dutch Medicine in the Malay Archipelago 1816–1942I, ed. G.M. Heteren, A. de Knecht-van Eekelen, and M.J.D.Poulissen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 120.

107. D. Schoute, Occidental Therapeutics in the Netherlands East Indies during three Centuries of Netherlands Settlement 1600–1900 (Batavia: Netherlands Indian Public Health Service, 1937), 65.

108. From at least 1715, see Schoute, Occidental Therapeutics, 62.

109. Cleland in Cumpston, History of Small-Pox, 170.

110. Luise Hercus and Peter Sutton, eds., This is What Happened: Historical Narratives by Aborigines (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), 119ff.

111. F.D. McCarthy, “Trade in Aboriginal Australia, and Trade Relationships with Torres Strait, New Guinea and Malaya, continued,” Oceania 10.1 (1939–40): 100 and Map 16 in Oceania 10.2 (1939–40): 191.

112. Six most important trade routes are detailed at Dale Kerwin, Aboriginal Dreaming Paths and Trading Routes The Colonisation of the Australian Economic Landscape (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 109–12.

113. Robert Dawson, The Present State of Australia: A Description of the Country, its Advantages and Prospects … (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1830), 323f.

114. Edmund Lockyer to Governor Darling, April 2, 1827 in Journal and Proceedings Western Australian Historical Society 2.19 (1936): 7.

115. Judy Campbell, “Smallpox in Aboriginal Australia, 1829–31,” Historical Studies 20.81 (1983): 546.

116. For Botany Bay, see Iris Williams in Talking Lapa A Local Aboriginal Community History of La Perouse (North Sydney: New South Wales Board of Studies, 1995), 15. For Port Jackson, see Anita Heiss, Life in Gadigal Country (Sydney: Gadigal information Service, 2002), 12. Both sources lack authority by themselves but, taken together, present a consistent picture. Bradley notes that natives fled west (“up the harbour”). Fowell notes natives fled north.

117. Curr, Australian Race, 226.

118. Macknight, View from Marege, 137.

119. Butlin, Our Original Aggression, 17.

120. Butlin, Our Original Aggression, 22.

121. Brian Fletcher, “National History and National Identity in Postcolonial Australia,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 83.1 (1996): 2.

122. Campbell challenged Noel Butlin's work on this ground; see Campbell, Invisible Invaders, 61.

123. According to J. Shyllon, “the law and public opinion in eighteenth-century England did not regard Africans as human beings…they were chattels or playthings”. See J.O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: The Institute of Race Relations, 1974), 196–97.

124. The Zong was a ship carrying slaves. The owners claimed insurance when the ship's captain, Luke Collingwood, killed African-American slaves. If slaves died naturally, no insurance payout was available. Collingwood's deliberations and later court hearings shed light on British practices and values concerning native people in the 1780s. According to statements from British Solicitor-General Lee and Justice Buller, “a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property” and murder does not apply if they are necessarily destroyed; see English Law Report, Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. 232. According to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, throwing African-American slaves overboard was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. See Jeremy Krikler, “The Zong and the Lord Chief Justice,” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 36. The Zong's captain reasoned: If slaves died naturally, ship owners would lose, but if slaves were necessarily destroyed, insurers would lose; see Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade which was moved in the House of Commons on 10^th June 1806…(London: Phillips and Fardon, 1806), 178.

125. Fenn, Biological Warfare, 2000: 1574–1576.

126. Charles Wilson proposed that it may have been “the commonsense Englishman in (Phillip) that bound him to respect the instructions of his Royal Commission;” see Wilson, “Aboriginal Depopulation a Rejoinder to Noel Butlin,” Quadrant (July 1985): 18. Wilson similarly claimed that Arthur Phillip and his principal officers “carried out their Commission to protect Aborigines and live in amity with them with unbelievable patience” in “History, Hypothesis and Fiction: Smallpox and Aboriginal Genocide,” Quadrant (March 1985): 29, and he argued that Governor Phillip “took the terms of his commission and especially his duty to the Aborigines in deadly earnest” in Australia 1788–1988 The Creation of a Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 78. Frank Welsh in his Australia - A New History of the Great Southern Land (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2004) says “it would also be completely at odds with Phillip's character”, see note 11, 588. Also see, Anon., “The Dreadful Havock Sydney's 1789 Smallpox Epidemic,” the Site Gazette, Friends of the First Government House Site 14.4: 4b, suggesting that eighteenth-century concepts of honour, duty, patronage, and the authority of superiors meant they would not unleash smallpox. Phillip's Instructions are at Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 84–91.

127. See Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada 1759–1791 (Ottawa: Canadian Archives, 1918), 199, 319f.

128. See Justice Blackburn's Milirrpum v Nabalco & Commonwealth (1971), Decision at 17 FLR 141, section (5)(b)-(c).

129. Phillip to Marquis of Lansdowne, July 3, 1788, Historical Records, vol. 2, 411.

130. David Blair, The History of Australasia (Glascow: McGready, Thomson, & Niven, 1879), 259.

131. Marjorie Barnard Eldershaw, Phillip of Australia: An Account of the Settlement at Sydney Cove 1788–92 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 151. Jan Kociumbas describes the situation as “propitious for a genocidal response;” see “Genocide and Modernity in Colonial Australia, 1788–1850,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 80.

132. October 2, 1788, Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 1, 35.

133. Tench, A Complete Account, 136f. Fishburn and Golden Grove departed on 19 November.

134. Captain James Campbell wrote to Baron Ducie, “There is nothing but distress staring us in the face”. See George Mackaness, Admiral Arthur Phillip Founder of New South Wales 1738–1814 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1937), 184. Collins felt that being left without a ship created a strikingly novel circumstance and a peculiar, precarious, situation. See Collins, An Account of the English Colony, 1, 46.

135. Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales, 125. Lieutenant Ralph Clark labels Aborigines as “beginning to be very troublesome” in his letter to Hartwell, July 12, 1788 in Fidlon, Journal and Letters of Clark, 266f.

136. At this time, Lieutenant Clark writes privately, “I never was so Sick of any thing in my life as I am of this Settlement”. Clark to Reynolds, November 17, 1788 in Journal and Letters of Clark, 274f.

137. Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28. This is an understatement.

138. Phillip to Sydney, February 13, 1790, in Historical Records, vol. 1.2, 310.

139. Cooper v Stuart (1889) 14 AC 286 at 291.

140. C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society. Aboriginal Policy and Practice, Volume 1 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), 2, 6.

141. W.E.H. Stanner, The Boyer Lectures 1968 After the Dreaming Black and White Australians, an Anthropologist's View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1968), 36.

142. W.E.H. Stanner, “The History of Indifference Thus Begins,” Aboriginal History 1.1 (1977): 23.

143. W.E.H. Stanner, “Foreword,” in Aborigines Now, New Perspective in the Study of Aboriginal Communities, ed. Marie Reay (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964), viii.

144. Available from 1972; see Phyllis Mander-Jones, ed., Manuscripts in the British Isles Relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972), 341.

145. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians A History Since 1788, 4th ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 13, 187.

147. Macknight, View from Marege, 137.