Aboriginal Studies/Australian History/Medicine and Health
Book Details

Invisible Invaders

Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780–1880

Academic Monograph

Judy Campbell

In Invisible Invaders, Judy Campbell argues that epidemics of smallpox among Australian Aboriginals preceded European settlement.

Opinion

‘This is a study of international importance. Judy Campbell has produced the most scientifically informed and comprehensively researched work we have yet seen on the role of Old World diseases in the destruction of the indigenous peoples of Australia.’
Dr Janet McCalman - Centre for the Study of Health and Society, University of Melbourne

'The significance of Judy Campbell's work is that it provides a detailed account of the three major smallpox outbreaks in Australia in the first century . . . This she does with authority and care, generally avoiding startling estimates of their impacts. Her estimate that half the indigenous population of northern Australia might have died of tuberculosis between 1780 and 1870 is thus believable as well as dramatic.' (Canberra Times, 18 May 2002)

About this Title

This is a study of international importance. Judy Campbell has produced the most scientifically informed and comprehensively researched work we have yet seen on the role of Old World diseases in the destruction of the indigenous peoples of Australia.
Dr Janet McCalman
Centre for the Study of Health & Society
University of Melbourne

An epidemic of smallpox among Aboriginal people around the infant colony of Sydney in 1789 puzzled the British, for there had been no cases on the ships of the First Fleet. Where, then, did the epidemic come from?

As explorers moved further inland, they witnessed other epidemics of smallpox, notably in the late 1820s and early 1830s and again in the 1860s and 1870s. They also encountered many pockmarked survivors of early epidemics.

In Invisible Invaders, Judy Campbell argues that epidemics of smallpox among Australian Aboriginals preceded European settlement. She believes they originated in regular visits to the northern coast of Australia by Macassan fishermen from southern Sulawesi and nearby islands. They were searching for trepang, for which there was a profitable market in China.

The Macassan fishermen usually visited during the monsoon season, and the local Indigenous people traded with them. Once the monsoon was over, these Aboriginals resumed their travels into the interior for food, social contact and ritual events, carrying small pox with them. Smallpox thus slowly moved across the continent, eventually reaching the south-east, where it was first recorded by Europeans.

Judith Campbell’s research on the incidence of smallpox and other diseases among Aboriginal people has extended over more than twenty years. Accumulating evidence from other disciplines supports her findings.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Frank Fenner
Preface
Abbreviations

1 Aboriginal Australians and Old World Diseases
2 'the most dreadful scourge of the human species'
3 Myths
4 The Indonesian Archipelago 1780-1880
5 Hidden History
6 The Frontiers of Eastern Australia 1824-1830
7 The Colony of New South Wales 1828-1832
8 Eastern Australia 1860-1867
9 Western Australia 1860-1870
10 The Diseases that Killed

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Judy Campbell was educated at the University of Melbourne. After travelling in the United States and Mexico, where smallpox destroyed the Aztec Empire, she taught in the Department of History at the Australian National University. During that period she researched and began writing about Aboriginal smallpox, and has since continued this work privately.

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978-0-522-84939-4