As Aboriginal nations mounted a series of coordinated and strategic campaigns to defend Country against invading settlers, the smallpox epidemic spread across the southeast from 1830 to 1832.

It disproportionately affected Aboriginal people, killing large numbers of First Nations people exposed to it. Historical research so far has looked at the origins of the epidemic, mortality and the culpability of the settlers.

Yet Aboriginal warfare in the late 1830s suggests many communities survived the earlier epidemic. So how did Aboriginal people respond and survive in the face of a new and deadly disease?

With access to a lesser-known medical report from 1831 by army doctor John Mair, our newly-published research offers an alternative account of Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan peoples of the plains and river country (of what is now western and northwestern New South Wales). This gave us an insight into their experience of what they named “Boulol” on the northwestern plains and “Thunna Thunna” in the Lachlan and Wellington Valleys.

Our research unearthed three distinct responses that are reminiscent of leading disease control measures across the globe and that continue today.

Efforts to isolate and separate

The 1830s epidemic probably was not the first time the peoples of the plains and rivers experienced smallpox. Old men at one cattle station told the station manager in 1831 they had experienced the disease when they were very young, and they had the distinctive scars to prove it.

It’s likely these men had previously caught smallpox in 1789 or 1790, after the disease had first broken out around the colonisers’ camp at Sydney Cove and moved west over the ranges. These men – and other plains country old people – would have understood the disease from the vast networks of trade and communication that linked the coast to the plains country.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they had........

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