Devastating aftermath of epidemics on local history

Without previous exposure to the virus, the First Nations people had no resistance and it is thought that between 50 and 70 per cent of the native population around Sydney died over the next few months.

The white population had been exposed to regular outbreaks of smallpox in Britain and had built up a high level of immunity. They carried the disease which ravaged the local Aboriginal people, but they were not affected by it.

A quarter of a century later, the first European settlement across the mountains was established at Bathurst in 1815. According to most written reports at the time, the land was sparsely inhabited by small, scattered groups of local Wiradyuri people.

Yet according to Wiradyuri elder Dinawan Dyirribang, there were thousands of Wiradyuri living on the Bathurst plains for millennia before white people arrived, as the area was so bountiful and well maintained.

Emeritus Professor David Goldney agrees. In Biodiversity Dreaming (2015), he estimates that before the arrival of Europeans on the continent "between 3,000-4,000 Wiradyuri living permanently in the upper Macquarie catchment" (the upper Macquarie catchment area being the equivalent of Bathurst, Lithgow, Oberon and Blayney Council areas combined).

If the land was indeed sparsely inhabited when Europeans first arrived, then it raises the question did Smallpox spread across the Great Dividing Range well in advance of the arrival of white settlers?

There were reports of Aborigines fleeing the Sydney basin during the 1789 epidemic and heading north and west along well-established native trade routes. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, explorers such as Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt reported seeing scarred and pock-marked faces from smallpox on Aborigines as far away as present-day Wellington, Bourke, Menindee and Balranald. All hundreds of kilometres in advance of European encroachment.

When Mitchell returned to explore this area again 10 years later he noted, "[smallpox] must have committed dreadful havoc amongst [the Aborigines], since on this journey I did not see hundreds to the thousands I saw on my former expedition." (Sturt 1838: 147)

Wherever smallpox struck the defenceless First Nations people, death on a catastrophic scale resulted.

In the Sydney epidemic of 1789, Europeans observed an almost complete collapse of long-standing Aboriginal social infrastructure. Elders, pregnant women and children under five died first. The effect was that knowledge, law and custom, held by the elders was almost totally eradicated.

A second and more permanent effect was that successive generations of warriors, hunters, healers and elders were virtually eliminated. There was simply no chance to reconstruct or revive their way of life.

A similar death toll must have happened across the mountains to the Wiradyuri people and goes a long way to explain the relatively low numbers of Aboriginal people reported by the first European observers.

It further follows that by the time Governor Lachlan Macquarie declared Australia's first inland settlement at Bathurst, the cohesive society of the Wiradyuri people was already in decline, as were their land management practices laboriously built up over thousands of years.

Nevertheless, these reportedly small scattered groups of Wiradyuri put up such fierce resistance to white occupation that Martial Law was declared in 1824, giving the settlers and soldiers a virtual free hand to rid the land of as many Wiradyuri as possible.

Imagine for a moment what might have been the outcome of Wiradyuri resistance if the small and vulnerable settlement of 100 Europeans at Bathurst had faced the combined strength of several thousand Wiradyuri determined to protect their country and their way of life.