Nguya, the Australian smallpox pandemic, was a series that I made in response to COVID. It was being reported in the news that the COVID pandemic was unprecedented in Australian history. However, as an Aboriginal person, I know that there have been other pandemics in Australian history.
The smallpox pandemics in 1789 and the 1830s killed an estimated 50 to 70 percent of the Aboriginal population on the Australian continent and was way more deadly than the COVID pandemic was. I wanted to make a work that highlighted the historical elements of the smallpox pandemic. I researched in the Kaurna dictionary different notes that had been taken by the missionaries.
The missionaries documented that smallpox had spread from the Sydney colony and headed westward down the Murray Darling to Adelaide. They even gave a name for it in Kaurna language, which was ‘Nguya’. They explained that there was a song that was used to treat it.
This song was recorded in western Victoria and describes the pain that people were suffering from the smallpox pustules. It described the pain of the pustules as being red hot echidna quills burning them. I represented these stories in the photographs by piercing from the back of the image little bumps that were similar to the markings of smallpox.
When the pustules burst open, they ruptured the surface of the photographs. I chose specific locations between Sydney and Adelaide to represent the areas that the smallpox had spread. Through this work, I wanted to teach people that there was a pandemic before COVID.
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