In a conversation with NITV Radio Nicole Monks explained that “devil devil is a collaboration with her mom and revisits the smallpox outbreak at the beginning of colonisation.
Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity and caused millions of deaths before it was eradicated. Vials of the disease were brought to Australia by surgeons on board the First Fleet.
A year after the first contact, with the onset of the Frontier Wars, smallpox spread like wildfire killing between 60 to 90% of the local population (Aboriginal population).
“Just imagine the devastation that that would have caused, waking up and finding dead people everywhere,” Nicole Monks reflects.
Through ‘devil devil’, the outbreak of smallpox and its devastation are re-enacted in vivid and dramatic fashion. “You put on all of the scrubs and are taken through the coroner’s work little room by little room; all the way down into the basement going through all of the hidden stories in the basement that don’t want to be told,” Nicole Monks said.
“Then you can decide and judge and be the coroner in the case, and decide how the fate of the 60 to 90% of local mob in the area came to be.”
The very setting of the event on, and around, the premises of the The Old Coroner’s Court, the heart of colonial Sydney, adds another layer to the highly engaging work.
