page_title: History of Australia
section_title: Conflict and disease
hierarchical_section_title: History of Australia / Aboriginal Australia / Conflict and disease
caption_attribution_description: English: Hermannsburg Lutheran church, Northern Territory, Australia. Deutsch: Lutherische Kirche in Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, Australien.
context_page_description: The history of Australia is the story of the land and peoples of the continent of Australia. Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the Australian mainland by sea from Maritime Southeast Asia between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago, and penetrated to all parts of the continent, from the rainforests in the north, the deserts of the centre, and the sub-Antarctic islands of Tasmania and Bass Strait. The artistic, musical and spiritual traditions they established are among the longest surviving such traditions in human history.
  The first Torres Strait Islanders - ethnically and culturally distinct from Aboriginal Australians - arrived from what is now Papua New Guinea around 2,500 years ago, and settled in the islands of the Torres Strait and the Cape York Peninsula forming the northern tip of the Australian landmass.
  The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was in 1606 by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon. Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through, and navigated, what is now called Torres Strait and associated islands. Twenty-nine other Dutch navigators explored the western and southern coasts in the 17th century and named the continent New Holland.
context_section_description: According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation".
  Conflict in the Hawkesbury Nepean river district near the settlement at Sydney continued from 1795 to 1816, including Pemulwuy's War (1795–1802), Tedbury's War (1808–1809) and the Nepean War (1814–1816), as well as the interwar violence of the 1804–1805 Conflict. It was fought using mostly guerrilla-warfare tactics; however, several conventional battles also took place. The wars resulted in the defeat of the Hawkesbury and Nepean Indigenous clans who were subsequently dispossessed of their lands.
  Even before the arrival of European settlers in local districts beyond coastal New South Wales, Eurasian disease often preceded them. A smallpox epidemic was recorded near Sydney in 1789, which wiped out about half the Aborigines around Sydney. Opinion is divided as to the source of the smallpox. Some researchers argue that the smallpox was acquired through contact with Indonesian fishermen in the far north and then spread across the continent, reaching the Sydney area in 1789. Other research by Craig Mear, Michael Bennett, and Christopher Warren argues that, despite controversy, it is highly likely that the 1789 outbreak of smallpox was a deliberate act by British marines when they ran out of ammunition and needed to expand the settlement out to Parramatta. Smallpox then spread well beyond the then limits of European settlement, including much of southeastern Australia, reappearing in 1829–30, killing 40–60 percent of the Aboriginal population.
  The impact of Europeans was profoundly disruptive to Aboriginal life and, though the extent of violence is debated, there was considerable conflict on the frontier. At the same time, some settlers were quite aware they were usurping the Aborigines place in Australia. In 1845, settler Charles Griffiths sought to justify this, writing; "The question comes to this; which has the better right—the savage, born in a country, which he runs over but can scarcely be said to occupy ... or the civilized man, who comes to introduce into this ... unproductive country, the industry which supports life."
  From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia—with works including Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact (1966) and Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads (1975). In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between Europeans and Aborigines as "the great Australian silence". Historian Henry Reynolds argues that there was a "historical neglect" of the Aborigines by historians until the late 1960s. Early commentaries often tended to describe Aborigines as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans. William Westgarth's 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed: "the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms ...it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear."
  Many events illustrate violence and resistance as Aborigines sought to protect their lands from settlers and pastoralists who attempted to establish their presence. In May 1804, at Risdon Cove, Van Diemen's Land, perhaps 60 Aborigines were killed when they approached the town. The British established a new outpost in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1803. Although Tasmanian history is amongst the most contested by modern historians, conflict between colonists and Aborigines was referred to in some contemporary accounts as the Black War. The combined effects of disease, dispossession, intermarriage and conflict saw a collapse of the Aboriginal population of Tasmania from a few thousand people when the British arrived, to a few hundred by the 1830s. Estimates of how many people were killed during the period begin at around
caption: Hermannsburg Mission in the Northern Territory
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