Traditional medicines in the Pacific | 273Perceptions of health
Indigenous people in each of the four countries discussed considered ill-health
to be the result of an imbalance, often as a consequence of an offence against
some spiritual teaching or being. Traditional treatment of ill-health thus
generally took the form of a variety of approaches: physical manipulation,
herbal medicine and oversight by a spiritual healer. Specific information about
such treatments has been difficult to obtain, largely because of the lack of a
written language in each country before the arrival of European colonists and
other visitors.
Accounts of treatments before this time were largely penned by tempo-
rary visitors such as explorers, missionaries and whalers who were not
necessarily aware of the complexities of the societies that they were
observing nor of course the subtleties of languages with which they were not
at all familiar.
This changed after these countries were settled by the colonists, who spent
more time with the native populations, learning their languages and
observing their customs, including their methods of treating illnesses.
Although these early settlers brought with them the means – mainly herbal
extracts – of treating illness then available in Europe, they also began to
experiment with local flora to extend their armamentarium of possibly medi-
cinally active plants. They also planted seeds of European plants, either delib-
erately or accidentally, and used them where applicable. At the same time, the
local populations observed the customs of the settlers, including their
methods of treating European sicknesses. When they in turn became infected
with the diseases brought in by the settlers, they too began to adopt Euro-
pean methods of treating themselves using the herbal medicines of their own
country and those introduced by the settlers. As a consequence, when infor-
mation about traditional medicines was later recorded in written documents
there was often some confusion between those that were originally used and
those developed only after colonisation.
Australia
Before the influx of Europeans in the late eighteenth century, it seems prob-
able that Aborigines enjoyed relatively good health, despite the rigours of the
Australian climate and the scarcity of some food sources. The ill-health that
they experienced was largely brought about by living in close proximity to
each other, leading to many skin problems and respiratory disorders. Their
diet was necessarily poor and they would frequently encounter sharp objects
in their wanderings in the form of either plants stumbled over or objects
wielded by other people. They did not, as far as we can ascertain, suffer from
most of the infectious diseases of the west, diseases such as smallpox,