ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to provide some initial insights and an overview from existing historiography. It outlines the spread and diversity of diseases throughout Indigenous Australia, the ways in which the impact of disease was shaped by colonialism, and the various cultural understandings of disease voiced by Europeans and Indigenous people. The chapter divides this history up into three broad periods: the spread of colonialism (including missionary influence) during the nineteenth century; the interwar period, which saw a simultaneous growth of state power, ‘scientific’ racism and Indigenous activism; and period between the 1950s and the 1970s. With growth of protest movements within Indigenous and white Australia—at first comparatively liberal-democratic and focused on civil rights, and later increasingly radical—such health violations were again located within history of colonial oppression. The most powerful examples of how popular discourses of racial ‘health’ and ‘hygiene’ could serve to segregate and degrade became evident when the Freedom Riders tried to secure entry for Indigenous people.
