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The ABC is not just any legacy media organisation: it’s a statutory body funded, to the tune of over a billion dollars a year, by the Australian taxpayer. As such it is bound – or is supposed to be – by certain obligations. Not just any old ‘guidelines’ or ‘codes of conduct’, but by law.
One of its legal requirements, as clearly spelt out in the ABC Charter, an act of Australian law, is telling the truth. As stated in the act: to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.
So, how do they get away with peddling blatant, provable, lies, like this:
Leading up to Australia Day, the ABC recently produced a short video of presenter Tony Armstrong claiming the First Fleet committed genocide by unleashing smallpox on Aboriginal people in Sydney. Australia Day, therefore, marks the deadliest day in Aboriginal history.
Ever noticed that it’s those who owe the most to British settlement in Australia – Armstrong is a multimillionaire, former footballer and now taxpayer-funded TV presenter – not least including a substantial portion of their ancestry, who whinge the loudest about it? But I digress.
Where is the ABC’s legal requirement to present accurate information?
Armstrong makes four main points:
The British introduced smallpox.
The introduction of smallpox was intentional.
This is supported by historians.
Australian society remains silent about it.
Of all his claims, rather than ‘silent’, the demonstrable fact is that a significant slab of the Australian chattering class just can’t shut up about it. If they remain silent about ‘genocide by smallpox’ at all, it’s because they know it just didn’t happen.
This is not a matter of opinion. There is simply no evidence to support the claim.
The sole ‘evidence’ Armstrong relies on is a single source: the journal of First Fleet officer Watkin Tench. To say that Armstrong grotesquely misrepresents that source is like saying Bruce Pascoe is a bit loose with the truth. Tench, writing in 1791, ponders an outbreak of smallpox two years earlier.
Is it a disease indigenous to the country? Did the French ships under Monsieur de Peyrouse introduce it? … No person among us had been afflicted with the disorder since we had quitted the Cape of Good Hope, 17 months before. It is true, that our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles; but to infer that it was produced from this cause was a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration.
Note that even Armstrong’s sole primary source dismisses the idea that the British introduced the disease as “unworthy of consideration”. Even without Tench’s (who was not a doctor) dismissal of the outlandish notion, modern science proves that it was simply impossible.
The “variolous matter in bottles” Tench refers to was smallpox scabs, which were commonly used at the time as an immunisation technique, using live virus matter. The only problem is that any live viruses carried by the First Fleet would have been long dead by 1789. Smallpox cannot survive three weeks at 35°C and 65 per cent humidity. The First Fleet took eight months to reach Sydney Cove.
Not one member of the First Fleet developed smallpox during the voyage or after arrival. Summer temperatures before the 1789 outbreak regularly exceeded 40°C. So, even if the British had wanted to spread disease deliberately, they simply would not have had any live viruses with which to do so.
The fact that British doctors treated Aboriginal people with smallpox also undermines any claims of ‘genocide’.
Pursuing the claim of deliberate, genocidal spread of disease, there’s one other massive problem with Armstrong’s ludicrous lie: Tasmania.
There is no evidence of smallpox in Aboriginal Tasmania. If it was an intentional policy to introduce smallpox, it is strange that the colony with the most physical conflict with Aboriginal people did not employ it as a tactic of biological warfare. It is also surprising that it did not occur in the early Tasmanian colony unintentionally, again most likely due to the fact that the first settlers had no cases of smallpox brought over from England.
Don’t just take my word for it: historians who’ve dedicated themselves to studying diseases like smallpox in Aboriginal Australia flatly state that there is no evidence that it was introduced by the British. Instead, they conclude, it most likely arrived in northern Australia, via Indonesia.
Expert in Indonesian sea trade Campbell Macknight found that around 2000 fishermen traded with Aboriginal people every year. In contrast, only 1500 people were on the First Fleet.
The sailors were skilled navigators, and could make it from south Indonesia to Northern Australia in 10–15 days, which was within the incubation period of smallpox. One of the earliest European accounts of smallpox in the ‘Malays’ comes from the explorer Matthew Flinders. His crew recorded conversations with sailors who treated smallpox by pouring cool water on the patient.
New research shows close social and economic ties between these sailors and Aboriginal people. It is not surprising then that an Aboriginal man named Jack Davis from Port Essington in 1870 said Aboriginal people referred to smallpox as Meeha-meeha, and the disease was on the Cobourg Peninsula a long time ago.
This is not a mere matter of standard legacy media lying. This is a taxpayer-funded organisation literally breaking the law. Either the ABC didn’t perform even the most cursory fact-check on Armstrong’s script – let’s face it, someone who’s sole claim to fame is kicking a ball around is hardly going to be an expert on Australian history – which alone is a breach of it’s statutory obligations to follow “the recognised standards of objective journalism”, or they did and still broadcast what they knew was a lie.
