Congratulations to Boyd Hunter, CAEPR Senior Fellow, and John Carmody, University of Sydney

Drs Hunter and Carmody were recently awarded the Sir Timothy Coghlan Prize for the best article in 2015 by the Australian Economic History Review for their paper, 'Estimating the Aboriginal Population in Early Colonial Australia: The Role of Chickenpox Reconsidered'.

The abstract for the paper is as follows:

Noel Butlin radically altered the debate about the pre-colonial Aboriginal population when he provided a set of hypothetical demographic scenarios, which nonetheless were both grounded in economic theory or human ecological considerations and broadly consistent with what we know about the historical record. This research builds on Butlin's legacy by exploring how his scenarios are consistent with both the medical understandings of the infectiousness and mortality of various diseases and the history of settlement.

Another contribution from this paper is to highlight the possible role of chickenpox in the Aboriginal depopulation in the early colonial period.

Hunter, B.H. and Carmody, J. 2015. 'Estimating the Aboriginal population in early colonial Australia: the role of chickenpox reconsidered', Australian Economic History Review, 55(2): 112-138, DOI: 10.1111/aehr.12068

The paper was featured in an article by Journalist Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2015:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/maybe-the-colonialists-didnt-outnumber-our-aboriginal-population-swiftly-20151224-gluntd.html