Epidemic Proportions
by Matt Chun
Illustration / Matt Chun
I.
In April 1970, James Cook’s landing was re-enacted to mark the Bicentennial of Australia’s ‘discovery’. A nation-wide reaffirmation of colonisation was sustained throughout that year, spurred by a breathless acclamation of Cook across Australian media and amplified through public ceremonies, school programs and commemorative coins. As Robert Askin, then NSW premier, explained:
Cook's discovery tilled the ground for the seeds of settlement for Governor Phillip. From these seeds comes a great and free nation—predominantly British.
The ship ‘Monte Christo’, chosen and re-christened for the event, bore only a passing resemblance to the original ‘Endeavour’. But, to 50,000 enthusiastic spectators—amongst whom, Queen Elizabeth—this pageantry of myth-building required little more than the barest signifiers of whiteness: a boat with sails, a three-cornered hat, a flag. To an Australian audience, these blunt emblems of ownership and exclusion were, and remain, unambiguous.
Aboriginal actors were employed to perform feeble acts of resistance and bewilderment as the character of James Cook was rowed ashore. Upon landing, Cook’s hammy pantomime of peaceable gestures allowed spectators the consolation that—at least in this fiction—he tried his best to be friendly. The Aboriginal actors were then ‘dispersed with muskets’ for the pleasure of the crowd.
On the fringes of the performance, activists such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Faith Bandler and Paul Coe led an articulate boycott and protest. They were scolded by journalists for ‘insulting white Australian heritage’ and for displaying ‘bad taste’ in the presence of the Queen. The poet Noonuccal countered that genocide, too, was in very bad taste.
Billowing sails and musket smoke-blasts are theatrical motifs. However, an entirely more appropriate symbol of British colonialism can be found aboard the First Fleet—eighteen years after Cook’s landing—in the possession of Arthur Phillip’s ship’s surgeon: a jar of pale, smallpox-infected pus.
The surgeon, John White, transported the specimen as a form of inoculation for colonists. Historians disagree over the extent to which smallpox was deliberately deployed as biological warfare against Aboriginal nations. Nevertheless, the epidemic killed an estimated 70% of the continent’s existent population. In a devastating account, a First Fleet diarist Newton Fowell describes the bodies of entire communities laying dead upon beaches and rocky crevasses. Settler-colonial dominance was not the result—as the coloniser supposed—of intellectual, technical or spiritual superiority. The British were vectors of disease.
In the wake of smallpox, the coloniser brought influenza, measles, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, each inflicting new ravages upon Aboriginal nations. But this truth—like the coextensive truths of massacre, enslavement and dispossession—is incompatible with the enduring colonial mythology: a Boy’s Own Adventure of white heroism and ingenuity against an inhospitable land. Nor could the uncomfortable fact of British-borne disease be easily calibrated to the premise of White Australia Policy. To that regime of racial apartheid—essential to the very act of Federation—whiteness was synonymous with purity and vitality. Through this lens, Australian history was written. To white Australia, the othering of disease was, and remains, foundational.
II.
Smallpox erupted again in 1881, in the colony of Sydney. Although the first confirmed victim was a European man, the outbreak was openly blamed on Sydney’s Chinese community. In newspaper letters, editorials, articles and cartoons, Chinese people were caricatured as untrustworthy and ungodly, their homes as dirty and overcrowded. In the streets, they were attacked and spat upon.
Smallpox—as both an illness and a cultural idea—was seen not only as a particular condition of non-whiteness, but also of immorality, indiscretion and squalor. To white Australia, these traits were embodied in the Chinese immigrant. As a condition of public space, smallpox became synonymous with the opium den: an opaque liminal zone into which virtuous white women could be lured and corrupted.
In truth, of 154 total smallpox cases recorded during the two-year outbreak, only three infected people were Chinese. But this fact did nothing to allay public sentiment. In December 1881, in response to this anti-Chinese frenzy, built upon existing prejudice, the NSW parliament passed the ‘Influx of Chinese Restriction Act’.
Chief amongst the fantasies of white supremacy is the conception of non-whiteness itself as a contagious physical malady. Or, in the words of esteemed Australian eugenicist, Richard Berry: a ‘rotten heredity’. During the late 19th and early 20th century, Australia was an active participant within the international eugenics movement. The ‘science’ of white supremacy and racial improvement was popular throughout Europe and its colonies. In Melbourne (seat of Australian Federal Government until 1927) the movement included influential doctors, academics and policy-makers.
Working from Melbourne University from 1903 to 1929, Berry advocated for the segregation and sterilisation of those who he believed displayed defective genes, and advocated a ‘lethal chamber’ for ‘the grosser types of our mental defectives’. In addition to non-whites, Berry’s ‘defectives’ included homosexuals, prostitutes, alcoholics and the poor. Again: race, class and morality were conflated to form an imagined counterpoint to an imagined healthy white Australia.
Melbourne University resisted the removal of Berry’s name from a key building until 2017. In 2003, Berry’s dusty horde of bones and skulls emerged from the University’s collection, numbering hundreds of individuals. Many were Aboriginal, stolen from graves.
Kenneth Cunningham, a Berry contemporary and first director of the Council for Educational Research, alongside influential psychologist Chris McRae, published papers claiming to show that working-class children were unfit to be educated. Likewise, Australia’s first director of education, Frank Tate, supported Berry’s research on comparative head sizes and advanced his considerable influence within government.
The work of these and other Australian eugenicists spread beyond academia. In 1936, the Eugenics Society of Victoria was formed to lobby for eugenicist policies within education departments and government agencies. It operated until 1961.
As the full horror of the holocaust emerged in the wake of the second world war, embarrassed eugenicists quietly adjusted their language. In Australia, overt discussions of ‘fitness’ and ‘inferiority’ shifted towards a more coded politics of ‘cultural integration’. White Australia Policy was not officially dismantled until the 1970’s (and continues today under the guise of border protection). The removal of Aboriginal children—the Stolen Generation— was still occurring in the 1980’s (and continues today via carceral discrimination). White supremacy has slightly lowered its voice, yet remains the at the core of the Australian state.
III.
This year, 2020, brings Covid-19 – an ‘unprecedented pandemic’ in the popular memory of the white settler. In writing the history of themselves, Australian colonisers erased the impact of British-borne disease as carefully and deliberately as they erased the Frontier Wars and the fact of Aboriginal resistance. What white Australia did not forget, however, was the self-soothing fantasy that disease is external to whiteness.
Covid-19—like the smallpox outbreak of 1881—was immediately framed as a corruptive outsider. Newspaper headlines such as ‘Bat Man’, ‘Panda-monium’ and ’China Kids Stay Home’ resonated on the street with such as ’Death to Dog Eaters’ (painted on the road outside the home of an Asian Australian family). A significant increase in anti-Asian violence has been surveyed and reported in detail by organisations such as the Asian Australian Alliance. Again, victims have been attacked and spat upon. Australian racism is a well-worn groove—and utterly predictable.
Today, as I write this text, the Herald Sun has published an article by columnist Andrew Bolt titled: ‘Multiculturalism Made This Virus Worse’. Bolt blames ‘mass immigration’ and ‘toxic multiculturalism’ for the current pandemic lock-down. It hardly needs to be said that Bolt, a convicted racist, is an avid defender of James Cook memorials.
To bring this text full circle: Covid-19 has also interrupted Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plans for the sestercentennial of James Cook’s landing: a $50 million development to the Cook memorial site at Kamay Botany Bay and yet another re-enactment, with yet another ‘Endeavour’ replica. 2020’s planned reenactment was supposed to be a circumnavigation of the continent—a journey that Cook himself never attempted.
But to white Australia, historical inaccuracy is more than oversight, it is method. The myth of white Australian fitness and primacy is manufactured; cast through monument, gesture and emblem. Upon this hollow architecture, history itself is the vaguest of window-dressing—perpetually invoked, but never read.
Living, working and travelling with his 9-year-old son, Matt Chun’s work spans text, drawing, picture books and comics. Matt is the current Children’s Literature Fellow at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne/Naarm. He is also the 2019-20 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Emerging Writer.