One of easiest ways to wreck a conversation is to reduce a topic to two opposed views or actions between which a choice must be made. One must be for censorship or against it, endorse capitalism or socialism, be liberal or conservative, a friend or enemy of China, and so on.
This way of thinking leaves no room for exploration, in which the conversation partners enter with curiosity the world of those from whom they differ, and so are open to qualify their own certainties. It reduces conversation to a debate in which both parties regard their positions as unassailable and use argument as a weapon, not as an exchange. At its worst it argues against opposed positions by vilifying and cancelling their proponents rather than meeting their arguments. Such debates are normally shallow, the attention span is short, and complexity is disrespected.
After exposure to such stuff it is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples. In his study of epidemics he brings to bear the discoveries of modern medical science on the evidence of observers of the illnesses that ravaged First Nations people from the arrival of the First Fleet to the end of the nineteenth century.
He gives structure to his account by focusing on the impact of each major disease on First Nations peoples in each Australian state. The chapters deal with small pox, measles, syphilis, tuberculosis and influenza, as well as cognate illnesses associated with each disease. He quotes freely from contemporary accounts of these illnesses as he weighs their evidential value in describing the experience of those who suffered from them and of the communities to which they belonged.
Fatal Contact is exemplary in the qualities that distinguish it from oppositional thinking, particularly in its humility. Dowling acknowledges the limitations of the evidence which he analyses and the provisional status of his conclusions. Many of those who described the diseases lacked medical experience, and the vast majority were settlers. How the epidemics affected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples beyond the reach of early colonial forces remains uncertain. Throughout the work the author is more concerned to explain than to persuade.
The book is also notable for its sustained attentiveness. Its gestation was