Indigenous Knowledge Production (Open Access) by Marcus Woolombi Waters

Author:Marcus Woolombi Waters [Waters, Marcus Woolombi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781315437798
Google: g-5aDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-16T04:44:09+00:00

It is of little surprise that with first contact, when we witness for the first time our people with eyes turning red, sneezing, and hundreds of thousands dying around us, that we would attribute the cause and effect to muuliyaay misinterpreted by early Europeans as magic. One of the biggest impacts on the Australian Aboriginal population was in the City of Yarra in Victoria with up to ‘sixty per cent of the local Wurundjeri population lost to disease’ (Presland, 1985, p.90). The spread of disease ‘was even faster than the spread of the Europeans with up to a third of the Aboriginal population killed by an epidemic of smallpox before the whites began arriving in the local area’ (Edmonds, 2010, p.27). In addition to smallpox, there were other ‘diseases introduced intentionally such as tuberculosis and venereal diseases including syphilis’ (Christie, 1979, p.43). Starvation was also killing our people in rapid numbers.

Once whites occupied land and cleared local farming and food harvesting areas changes to diet also became a source of ill health and disease. The forced adoption of a European style diet, including refined sugar, flour and offal, replacing what had been a high protein diet was made worse by the provision of rations that consisted of the worst quality and cheapest grains and meats available.

(Christie, 1979, p.43)

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