No one knows how many people lived on the Australian mainland and Van Diemen’s Land in 1788. Rightists assert that the numbers were low – about 500,000 on the mainland, and 3000–4000 in Tasmania. Leftists talk of totals in the millions on the mainland, and 7000–8000 in Van Diemen’s Land. Scholars independent of the History Wars guess at 750,000 and 3500. What is indisputable is that the 1788 populations fell disastrously within about two generations of the white invasion of each particular district. Some among the blame-layers invoke genocide, wrongly in my view, except perhaps in Queensland. Rightists dispute the reality or size of some alleged ‘massacres’, but acknowledge others and casual killings involving the deaths of hundreds of people, while stressing the efforts of the colonial and imperial authorities to prevent violence and punish perpetrators. The seemingly frequent intertribal battles that resulted in deaths and injuries are under-investigated by all parties. In 1844 Chief Protector Robinson saw the scattered bones of Gippsland adults and children slaughtered by the Omeo people, one of the worst such killings.

The controversialists refer in passing to the impact of disease, but do not pursue it; partly, I suspect, because disease does not yield easy certainties in the blame contest. About twenty years ago, the smallpox epidemics among Aborigines of 1789 and the late 1820s were alleged to have been deliberately spread, but that claim is now discredited – which is not to say that both outbreaks did not have terrible effects.

Many of the questions about the collapse of the Aboriginal population cannot be answered at present because of lack of evidence: those isolated, unrecorded shootings by half-demented convict shepherds, for example, which come to us in hearsay accusations. Even so, the swift, massive fall in Aboriginal numbers, by thousands, had it been effected mainly by guns and alleged poisons, would have left much more Aboriginal testimony, private records and official paper to survive to the present. We must look elsewhere to account for this calamity.

The search has barely begun. We are still unsure about the questions we should ask and how to formulate them. We could start with the health status of the population before 1788, guided by Professor John Goldsmid’s The Deadly Legacy (1988) and Dr Stephen Webb’s splendid pioneering work Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians (1995). The want of pathological and linguistic evidence on the endemic or epidemic presence of the crowd infections of Asia and Europe implies that Australia was free of smallpox, Yersinia pestis, pulmonary tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses, probably most of the sexually transmitted diseases (particularly syphilis), measles and other childhood infections. Most likely, there were yaws and various salmonella strains, now known to live in some native snakes, lizards, marsupials and birds.

Leptospira forms known in Asia might well have come across with Aboriginal immigrants, and been extended by reintroductions from Indonesia and Papua. Trachoma, transmitted by bush flies, may also have been endemic. Ticks and tick-fever, Murray Valley encephalitis, transmitted by native mosquitoes, Q fever, associated with bandicoots among other animals, were probably endemic, as were scabies, body lice and diarrhoea, linked to dogs that had arrived at least 4000 years before, although the Tasmanian head lice must have been there earlier. Many Aboriginal languages, I am told, have words for itch, ‘upset stomach’ and ‘pain in the head’. Wattle bark was widely observed by early settlers in the treatment of diarrhoea, and three delicately trephined pre-contact skulls are known from northern Australia and New South Wales. There is also a skull from northern Australia showing branding, possibly suggesting that what we understand as insanity was known and punished in prehistoric times.

It is also probable, I am told, that influenza strains and ticks could have been imported by birds arriving from the northern hemisphere via Asia and harvested by Aborigines. Sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis and particularly smallpox were, in all likelihood, sporadically spread in northern Australia as part of what is now accepted as much more regular contact with Indonesia and Papua during at least the last 400 years. The smallpox possibly moved slowly south, reaching Port Jackson in 1789, with another less virulent variety in the Murray–Darling system in the 1820s and 1830s, succeeded by a devastating outbreak imported into the Kimberley region by Malay fishermen in 1866 and spreading further south among tribal people to Geraldton and the east Pilbara. Australians may have escaped persistent, recurring epidemics of these pathogens by their small seasonally nomadic groupings distributed across vast distances. These assumptions imply smaller rather than larger populations through time. Pre-European Australia may not have been Hygeia’s domain, but it was safer than the colony it became.

The European occupation invalidated Aboriginal existence. The newcomers excluded natives from appropriated rivers and waterholes, grazing land that carried bush food, vantage points and landscapes intrinsic to creation myths and life rituals. Europeans proclaimed an all-powerful, supernatural order embodied in almost unattainable perquisites: manifest power over life and death; and the possession of animals, wagons, utensils, writing, clothes, clocks and guns. Tracking excepted, traditional Aboriginal skills and rituals became obsolescent and stigmatised. The limited bush-food supplies were quickly supplanted by flour, fatty meats, salt, sugar, tea and tobacco. Alcohol became a stand-by, acquired in a semi-monetarised economy by casual labour, theft, and male and female prostitution. Kinship systems were disrupted by the degradation of Aboriginal females and children, and by half-caste births. Mortality hitherto explicable in terms of sorcery, warfare, accident and old age now struck in bewildering new forms at all ages.

Many white observers reported near-universal black infanticide. The practice, usually involving strangulation with wet sand, had probably been common since pre-contact times as a means of population management in a hunter– gatherer society living on the margins. Observers in Victoria in the 1850s, and Queensland in the 1870s and 1880s, also noticed a cessation of births. This calamity could only have been deepened by the spread of introduced sexually transmitted diseases and by wildfire pulmonary tuberculosis and influenza when the pandemic of 1837 reached eastern Australia, together with malnutrition and low birth weights associated with malnutrition ensuing from the loss of hunting and gathering grounds and from the trade in native game for rum.

In 1839, a few years after white settlement, Aborigines in and around Adelaide were still deemed ‘healthy’. By 1860 a Protector reported them dying from ‘lung diseases, skin disease, bronchitis, colds’. ‘All,’ he said, were much weakened by ‘dissipated habits’, despite being given ‘ample food’. Measles was first identified in the white community of Sydney in 1834, but might not have become endemic until the 1850s. By 1875 it was rife. For example, among Aborigines on Framlingham Mission in Victoria, fifty-eight inhabitants got it, and twenty survived.

Two sets of information seem to me to be under-utilised. The first is Letters from Victorian Pioneers (1898). In 1853 Governor La Trobe envisaged writing an account of his colony. He distributed a questionnaire among pioneer land-takers enquiring about the dates and circumstances of their occupancies, the numbers of natives they observed, their relations with them, and Aboriginal customs and beliefs. He received at least fifty-eight replies, which remained unpublished until 1898. The respondents and other observers estimated that there were 11,500 people in the Port Phillip district in the 1830s when the Europeans began to settle. In 1848 Chief Protector Robinson calculated that there were 5000 blacks. Two years later, Protector Thomas counted 3224.

La Trobe’s respondents offer several explanations for this debacle. Dr Thomson, newly established as a squatter at Geelong in 1836, had William Buckley – the white man who had lived with the local Corio Aborigines for thirty years, fought in their battles and spoken their language – muster the natives and give each a blanket. Buckley collected 279 people. By March 1854, thirty-four adults and two toddlers remained. Thomson attributed the decrease to ‘drinking and exposure to all weathers bringing on pulmonary complaints’. In 1843 one tribe at Ledcourt in the Wimmera had numbered ‘over 100’, according to squatter John Carfrae; in 1853–54 they were thirty. Among the deceased was Neptune Melgorarainur (Light of the Mountain), the leader of his people, who died during a binge on spirits.

Peter Snodgrass, of the Mount Alexander district, told La Trobe that the decline in Aboriginal numbers began with the smallpox that broke out before white settlement and continued as a result of ‘other diseases’. But in 1839 Protector Robinson heard Snodgrass boast in a gun shop that he intended to ‘give these blackfellows another peppering’.

My count of Aborigines observed by La Trobe’s respondents at early encounters, of murder victims and of those surviving in 1853–54 is tenuous: many blacks would have avoided early contact while they could; there were unreported killings on all sides; Gippsland is under-represented; some respondents, as we know from Snodgrass, were shifty with the truth. Other known murderers do not appear to have answered the questionnaire. William Kirk was one of them. He took land in the Grampians district. His servants used guns on the natives and abducted women. Chief Protector Robinson arrived, silenced the guns and led the Aborigines to return to what turned out to be their ceremonial place. Kirk, apparently, had built his huts on this well-watered area, which was forbidden to blacks. With Robinson’s encouragement, they performed a ‘corrobery’ on this ground, despite disruptions from the mocking, foul-mouthed Kirkites. The Whyte brothers on the Wannon River held women and children as sex slaves and shot fifty-one Aborigines after they murdered a shepherd and stole sheep. William Bird, another land-taker, and his men closed access to a permanent spring and an adjacent, semi-permanent village on the Hopkins River and taught the women to answer to ‘fuckemall’ and ‘white cunt’.

Despite my caveats, here is my estimate for the 1830s and early 1840s: a total of approximately 7000 people. All the estimates give higher figures for males than for females. Traditional society was harder for women: skeletal materials usually show higher rates of nutritional deprivation among females and similar disparities in the distribution of cranial injuries. White shootings reversed that disparity. In 1853–54 the Aboriginal people in much the same districts totalled about 926. Recorded murders of Aborigines by blacks and whites amounted to about 556; murders of whites by blacks to about nine. Many of the black killings occurred in tribal fights, which may have intensified as whites took the best ceremonial and food-gathering places, abducted women and supplied tomahawks. In 1852 Protector Thomas told La Trobe that the Yarra tribe around Melbourne had been reduced to thirty-nine, and the Western Port people to fifty-nine. The Yarra group had two births between 1850 and 1853; both babies were killed by blacks within a month. The Western Port groups had none. Of the eighteen deaths among the adults, eight were caused by murder, two were the result of the hanging of the indigenous murderers, and three followed ‘almost perpetual drunkenness’. Only five died naturally, Thomas thought (‘by visitation of God’).

Edward Curr was a Victorian squatter with wide experience of eastern Australia. In the 1880s he embarked on a questionnaire project similar to La Trobe’s, but this time he attempted to cover the continent. By 1886–67 he had received at least 352 replies. These he chose to print in full or in part. The originals appear to have been lost. Only thirty-one contain population estimates for both arrival and response dates. Seventeen of those from central and northern Queensland amount to about 25,800 people at first intrusion, down to 12,000 in the 1850s and 1860s, and to 6340 in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After the arrival of whites, the Doora people at Mt Remarkable in South Australia were typically estimated between fifty and a hundred in 1849; there were eight of them in 1880. Around the Toorowotto Swamp, on the Wilcannia–Darling River, there were about 200 souls at the time of white settlement around 1861; by 1871 there were 150; by 1879, sixty. Twelve correspondents around the country noted that infanticide had become ‘normal’. Another correspondent answered Curr’s question whether the tribe contained any old people by remarking that ‘fully half of the adults remaining look old, but actually the old are few’. This shrinkage of ages must have been deeply corrosive of Aboriginal social structures.

The Reverend George Taplin was a missionary to the Narranjeri on the Lower Murray. In 1849 they were said to number 800 warriors, suggesting a population of around 1800. Taplin, between 1859 and 1869, had watched consumption cause twenty-five out of fifty adult Narrinyeri deaths. He also noted that the decline often set in after accidents and wounds, which, in his view, explained the frequency of this otherwise unaccountable disease among people who showed no family diathesis. Of 101 deaths at all ages in the 1860s, thirty-six were of infants; mainly, he said, as a result of ‘exposure’. Superintendent Hammond of Poonindie Mission, also in South Australia, reported twenty ‘pulmonary’ deaths among sixty ‘subjects’ in 1856–67. They had not ‘exhibited that resistance ... usual … in more vigorous ... constitutions ... Their weakness’ had come from the ‘far more stimulating’ sugar, suet and rice supplied by the mission.

During his near thirty years as a missionary, Taplin saw Narranjeri, by his diagnoses, die from apoplexy, cataract, diarrhoea, dysentery, epilepsy, anal fistula, hydrocephalus, acute and chronic hepatitis, hydatids on the liver, hydrothorax, influenza, nephritis, acute and chronic ophthalmia, phrenitis (inflammation of the brain), pneumonia, porrigo (ringworm etc.), ranula (cysts on the underside of the tongue), acute and chronic rheumatism, sunstroke, syphilis, sore throat, toothache, tabes mesenterica and pulmonary tuberculosis. The striking thing about this list, tuberculosis, syphilis and possibly hydatids apart, is the predominance of probably indigenous illnesses, rampaging amid concentration and despair.

Taplin also noted ‘several cases of lunacy’, unusual among the respondents. They ‘were treated kindly by the tribe’. By the 1880s Sydney and Brisbane lunatic asylums had admitted twenty-four male and eight female alcoholic Aborigines, usually on transfer from gaols where they had become ‘melancholia’ cases, also suffering ‘bronchitis and rheumatic fever’ ‘brought on’ by ‘intemperance’. Manning reported ‘mania’ to be their ‘prevailing disorder as might be expected in dark-skinned race’, together with ‘turbulence’ and ‘violence’. They did not, like whites, display ‘monomania’ or suffer ‘delusions’, but they did have ‘vivid hallucinations of sight and hearing’. To the asylum officers’ relief, they ‘did not last long’ because their ‘filthy and degraded habits’ brought on a ‘marasmus’ accompanied by ‘that peculiar form of melancholia known as nostalgia’ (then an uncommon word in this context). Back in the 1830s observers had noticed something like ‘homesickness’ in the ailing Vandemonians who had been transferred to Flinders Island. Two of the Sydney lunatics were described as ‘the last of their tribes’. This sort of remark, now disparaged as sentimental, nonetheless conveyed reality: Aborigines were by the 1880s truly ‘a dying race’.

Much of the disputation in the History Wars has focused on single events or brief time sequences. I have tried in this article to expand our view of the evidence. Other developments pertinent to that wider interaction of marginal humans’ life chances and their rulers’ racial beliefs and health policies should include drought and economic collapse, especially in New South Wales in the 1840s, eastern Australia in the mid-1860s and mid-1870s, and central and eastern Australia in the 1890s and again in 1918–20 and during the Depression of the 1930s. Hard times fed white indifference. The History Warriors could never be accused of that, but the last generation’s expressive politics, which fuelled this war, may be fading. This might allow a more searching, inclusive and useful historiography to emerge.