Watkin Tench – 1789

An extraordinary calamity is now observed among the natives. Repeated accounts brought by our boasts of finding bodies of Indians in all the coves and inlets of the habour… Pustules similar to those occasioned by smallpox were thickly spread on the bodies.⁵⁵⁶

Another use of the word ‘silence’ in regards to Aboriginal and European interactions, was made in the late 1960s by the Australian anthropologist W.E.H Stanner in his Boyer lecture ‘The Great Australian Silence’⁵⁵⁷ Here Stanner describes the period from the early 1800s up to the 1930s as a massive ‘Australian Silence’ where the great amount of dispossession of lands and damage to Aboriginal culture was instigated and simultaneously kept out of the view of the rapidly growing emigrant- Australian population.

^{556     3}Tench, source:Two Classic tales of Australian Exploration, edited by Tim Flannery (Australia: Text Publishing ,1996) ,102.
^{557     2}Stanner.