Smallpox and the Baiame waganna of Wellington Valley, New South Wales, 1829-1840: the earliest nativist movement in Aboriginal Australia | NOVA. The University of Newcastle's Digital Repository

Home

Description	Size	Format
Publisher version (open access)	311 KB	Adobe Acrobat PDF	View/Open

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/27187

Title: Smallpox and the Baiame waganna of Wellington Valley, New South Wales, 1829-1840: the earliest nativist movement in Aboriginal Australia
Author/Creator: Carey, Hilary M.; Roberts, David
Description: Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the aftermath of the disease as it was experienced at the settlement site of the Wellington Valley of New South Wales (NSW). The discovery of this movement is of considerable significance for an understanding of Aboriginal responses to colonization in southeastern Australia. It is the earliest well-attested nativist movement in Australian ethnohistory.
Relation: Ethnohistory Vol. 49, Issue 4, p. 821-869
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00141801-49-4-821
Date: 2002
Publisher: Duke University Press
Keyword(s): smallpox; Baiame waganna; Wellington Valley, NSW; Tharrawiirgal; nativist movement; Wiradjuri people
Resource Type: journal article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/27187
Identifier: ISSN:0014-1801

92 Visitors

116 Hits

NOVA. The University of Newcastle's Digital Repository