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Illness, Disease and 18th Century Indigenous Australians


But historian Craig Mear ruled out this theory due to that anyone infected with diseases could not walk from Northern Australia to Sydney cove by foot, because they would be too ill to travel. Mear also proposed that such diseases could have been brought over on the clothes of the first fleet settlers. There were other theories and proposals on how infections and illnesses were brought over to Australia and killed many Indigenous and Europeans, but no matter who brought these diseases over they impacted badly on a lot of innocent people that also resulted in death.
             Times were rough for indigenous Australians as before Captain Cook discovered Australia, Aboriginals isolated for years with no contact to any other countries and they didn't have any immune systems, so when the Europeans came with an overflow of illnesses the Indigenous had no way to fight them off, they couldn't even resist a common cold. Due to this in less than a year half of the aboriginal population living in Sydney had died from illnesses. Whenever Europeans went out exploring, they discovered late Aboriginal bodies lying limp throughout bush lands putrefying and decaying in the hot sun unburied and forgotten. "I have seen myself, a women sitting on the ground, with her knees drawn up to her shoulders, and her face resting on the sand between her feet." {A written piece from Captain John Hunter 1788}. There were also times where people came upon caves with human bones in them. "We found natives laying dead on the beaches and in the caverns of rock, forsaken by the rest as soon as the disease is discovered on them. They were generally found with the remains of small fire on each side of them and some water left within their reach." {A letter from Newton Fowell to his father in 1789}. In the late 1800's people tried to escaped Sydney due to the foul smells, toxic air, unsanitary conditions and the filthy water.


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