First Fleet

A chief investigator of the study, Professor Corey Bradshaw at Flinders University, has told SBS the research considers anew the impacts of frontier violence and disease outbreaks.

We've just published a couple of months ago a paper looking at the initial epid-epidemic, smallpox epidemic in, uh, Botany Bay, um, just after the First Fleet arrived, and that was also vastly underestimated.

We determined that there could have been up to two hundred and twenty thousand Indigenous people that died within the first year or so of that occurring.

And that was only one.

New research suggests Australia's Indigenous population before European colonization was far larger than previously estimated, at about two point two million people.

Researchers say around ninety-three percent of that population was removed in less than 80 years following the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.

The study also estimates more than two million excess deaths occurred between 1788 and 1861 from disease.

Flinders University Global Ecology Professor Corey Bradshaw says understanding the size of Indigenous populations during that period is essential to truth-telling and reconciliation.

Previous to commencing any further account of the subject which I am about to treat, such a retrospection of the circumstances and situation of the settlement at the conclusion of my former narrative as shall lay its state before the reader seems necessary in order to connect the present with the past.

The departure of the first fleet of ships for Europe on the fourteenth of July seventeen eighty-eight had been long impatiently expected and had filled us with anxiety to communicate to our friends an account of our situation, describing the progress of improvement and the probability of success or failure in our enterprise.

That men should judge very oppositely on so doubtful and precarious an event will hardly surprise.

Such relations could contain little besides the sanguineness of hope and the enumeration of hardships and difficulties which former accounts had not led us to expect.

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Chapter 2.

Transactions of the Colony from the Sailing of the First Fleet in July 1788 to the Close of that Year It was impossible to behold without emotion the departure of the ships.

On their speedy arrival in England perhaps hinged our fate by hastening our supplies to us.

Pitt Street, that relates to something.

Even the name Sydney relates to some of these people that were, you know, setting up the first fleet and organizing it at the time.

So hopefully people can walk around Sydney and other places around the country because it's very similar in Brisbane and Melbourne and other places and start to recognize some of these names and really understand how these people shaped our history.

But what we want to do today is again set the table of what was happening at the time around 1787 when the first fleet was about to set sail for Australia.

We focused on following the money last week and what was the motivations for sending the first fleet and setting up the colony of New South Wales.

But what we want to talk about today is what britain was like at the time and also maybe a decade or two prior to that because britain was actually going through a lot of change a lot of radical change with its society it was faced with the industrial revolution at the time it was had evangelism taking place and also cultural changes we're going to go through all that today so Let's set off just generally, paint the picture of what was happening in the UK because I think the narrative that we get at school and other places is that the UK was already an evolved society And they were able to go out in the world and rape, pillage and plunder and take over all these other places of the world.

But the people in Britain were actually going through a lot of change themselves.

So

Initially, so often the incoming British were regarded as the deceased family members of the people who met them, and this o- this occurred in the s- uh, Sydney area.

Um, Inga Clendinnen's book, Dancing with Strangers, puts together the old evidence for the fact that the, the First Fleet people were greeted with songs and dancing and crying and laughing.

Um, well, people were welcoming back their own dead.

Was that partly to do with of them having pale skins? Was that part of the association with the dead?

Um, there was no room in the dreaming legends or the dreaming mythology for horses and carts, white people, razor blades, and axes, scissors.

And it was particularly the penetrating things that, that were of great interest to the ear- early contact people.

They, from the First Fleet onwards, there are records saying, "The natives came on board and much admired our daggers and a- and ha- hatchets." And they didn't admire their clothes, uh, although quite often people did want to wear something for a while and then they'd give it away or throw it away in the early days.

So there was a desire to adopt the fruits of Western industrial production.