What an absolute disgrace the ABC has become.
Just days out from Australia Day — a day meant to unite Australians — the national state media is instead peddling resentment, division, and historical falsehoods.
The ABC has chosen this moment to revive and amplify a long-debunked myth: that British soldiers deliberately distributed smallpox-infected gifts to Aboriginal people at Manly Cove as an act of biological warfare designed to cause genocide. This claim is not merely wrong — it is reckless.
It‘s claim has been throughly debunked multiple times. There is no evidence to support it. The ABC knows this. And yet it aired it anyway.
That is not ignorance. That is intent. By broadcasting this fabrication without context, challenge, or historical correction, the ABC is deliberately deceiving its audience.
By broadcasting such allegations without reference to the historical facts that comprehensively debunk them, the ABC ensures that viewers the low-information voters who rely almost exclusively on its reporting will absorb this distortion of history uncritically.
Hook, line, and sinker.
The ABC’S goal is obvious: inflame resentment, deepen racial division, and recast Australia’s founding as an act of deliberate evil rather than historical reality. And the result is predictable: heightened resentment, deepened division, and the stoking of anti-Australian sentiment – and violence through incitement.
So let’s destroy this myth with facts — facts the ABC refuses to present.
In the 1770s, dried smallpox scabs were routinely carried by surgeons for variolation, a crude but recognised medical procedure of the day. Dr John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, transported sealed samples for variolation, a risky, but proven inoculation method of the era. This was medicine, not a weapon.
By April 1789 — sixteen months after settlement — any such samples would almost certainly have been rendered inert. No refrigeration. Three brutal summers. Heat alone would have destroyed their viability.
Even more damning to the ABC’s narrative: attempts to spread smallpox via infected clothing or bedding had already failed elsewhere. A Swiss mercenary fighting for the British in North America tried precisely this tactic in 1764 — using fresh material from an active outbreak — and it did not work.
Yet we are expected to believe the British successfully executed a sophisticated biological attack using degraded medical remnants, in an open settlement, with constant contact between settlers and Aboriginal people? That is fantasy.
Smallpox was one of the most feared diseases on Earth. The British were terrified of it — for good reason. The suggestion that the British would deliberately unleash it in a fledgling colony is absurd. Such an act would have endangered settlers as much as Indigenous people. During the colony’s first year there was constant interaction between the two groups. There was no way to “contain” a smallpox outbreak to Aboriginal people. Any use of “biological warfare” would have amounted to self-inflicted catastrophe.
Further, when “infected” blankets were given to American Indians during a war in 1764 (which failed anyway) it was at a time when there was already outbreaks smallpox amongst the British troops. In contrast Sydney was smallpox free at the start of 1789.
It’s also worth nothing that a severe smallpox pandemic struck the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1874. The outbreak was particularly deadly in London, where it killed over 10,000 people between 1870 and 1872.
The evidence strongly suggests the 1789 outbreak in Sydney was in fact chickenpox not smallpox. Watkin Tench himself observed that the markings on victims were merely “similar” to those of smallpox . Chickenpox is a disease to which the British settlers would have had significant immunity from past exposure back in England. And that explains why no one from the First Fleet contracted what was then described as “smallpox.”
And even if the disease was smallpox, David Collins — the colony’s Judge Advocate — proposed a far more plausible explanation: introduction by American whalers who regularly moved in and out of Sydney Cove prior to the outbreak.
If you read through the diaries of the First Fleet, their compassion towards the local aboriginals is clear. Even when Arthur Phillip was nearly killed when speared at Manly Cove, he insisted on no retaliation. Yes, the epidemic that began around March 1789 inflicted a devastating toll on the local Indigenous population.
That tragedy is not in dispute. But tragedy is not evidence of genocidal conspiracy. Smallpox ravaged humanity for millennia. It killed roughly one in three people it infected. As travel increased, it spread across the world. In the 20th century alone, it killed an estimated 250 to 500 million people.
Thanks to Western medicine, it no longer exists as a threat today, no Australian has to worry about smallpox outbreaks in 2026. But nuance, evidence, and historical context have no place at the ABC.
Instead, it broadcasts long debunked inflammatory claims as “comedy” without challenge or balance — claims that radicalise discourse and poison public debate. These fake narratives peddled by the ABC don’t exist in a vacuum. They fuel vandalism, legitimise grievance, and provide moral cover for extremists who justify attacks — including the use of Molotov cocktails — against Australians celebrating their national day.
This is not journalism. It is not “comedy”. It is ideological warfare, waged against the nation that funds it. The ABC should be defunded. Stripped of every cent.
Australians should not be forced to bankroll a broadcaster that spreads division, distorts history, and inflames social tensions. If the ABC truly believes in “truth-telling,” it should start by telling the whole truth — including the facts that dismantle its preferred myths about the long debunked claims of deliberate biological warfare.
Until then, it has forfeited any claim to public trust — and any right to public funding.
Tony Armstrong is Toxic!