Free Leviathan by John Birmingham Page A

unprotected hosts.
    Smallpox was the mass killer. It was already burning at the edge of the Iora when Tench and his patrol set out for Botany Bay. The English blamed La Perouse and his crew for introducing the fearsome disease, but every European who penetrated the harbour was effectively bearing a death sentence with them. Smallpox was particularly well adapted to its new home. A stable virus which can live outside the body for months in dust or clothing, it has a long incubation period of up to two weeks, during which time the new host is infectious without showing it. A contaminated hunter could travel hundreds of kilometres, meeting others and passing on his gift. The virus cooked up and gathered strength within the warm, dark oven of the victim’s organs and, when it was ready, announced itself with a burst of unpleasant symptoms: fever, headache, muscle pain, nausea and vomiting.
    Taking to his bed, fussed over by the women of the tribe, the hunter would break into a rash two or three days later; a flat spot, or macule, changing into a blister – clear at first – but soon filling with a rich contagious pus. Another week or so and scabs would form and fall off; although at the extremities, the hands and feet by which a hunter lives, they were longer lasting because of the tougher skin. The scabs left ugly scars, or pockmarks, by which the disease is known. However, with no natural immunity to draw on, unable to hunt or gather because of the painful eruptions, and with the tribal structure collapsing around them, the Iora hunters had more to be concerned about than their good looks. They were in the first stage of being annihilated.
    By the 1850s a few hundred remained in bands scattered over the entire Sydney plain. A Russian naval officer, Pavel Mukhanov, describing a visit to Sydney in 1863, recounted a meeting with Ricketty Dick, the ‘last survivor of the aboriginal tribe who used to be masters of this district’. Mukhanov found him sitting by the road at the gate of a wealthy farm, grunting two or three English words, begging for alms. He was a small brown crippled man with long matted dreadlocks. The Russian thought his every line was imprinted ‘with stupidity and hopelessness’ and pondered whether nature was right, to condemn ‘this pitiful race’ to extinction. Echoing the fashionable theories of the time, he predicted that Dick’s brothers would soon simply vanish, without explicable cause, leaving in their place a ‘strong and vigorous British race’. Mukhanov threw the old beggar a shilling by way of recompense.

We do not have to look so many years ahead of Phillip’s time to find evidence of the Aborigines’ decline. Their ancient civilization had been thoroughly debased and overcome by the convict state within a few years of the First Fleet’s arrival. It often took the unbiased eye of a foreigner such as Mukhanov to bear witness and take note. In April 1792 Judge-Advocate David Collins remarked favourably on the integration of black and white cultures or, more accurately, on the assimilation of the former by the latter. He noted that the natives had not recently launched any hostilities against the settlement and several of their younger people lived in the township, which was visited in turn by their relatives. In 1796 he thought the two races were getting along famously, the ‘friendly intercourse … so earnestly desired’ having been established, ‘these remote islanders have been shown living in considerable numbers among us without fear or restraint; acquiring our language; readily falling in with our manners and customs; enjoying the comforts of our clothing; and relishing the variety of our food …’. They had always been their own masters, wrote Collins, and ‘by slow degrees we began eventually to be pleased with and to understand each other’.
    To throw a less rosy tint on the state of the Iora we have