Journal of the Plague Year Issue 8
I spent a few moments yesterday reflecting on mass in a time of corona-virus, and how much worse the restrictions must have been in 1919. If memory serves me, Church services were still permitted if held outdoors, although I can’t find a definitive reference to outdoor services. In Father John Hope’s biography, there is references to the fact that Father Statham used the quarantine as an excuse to resume wearing the chasuble for high mass, which Archbishop Wright had banned a decade before as a “popish garment”. When I was in the choir, I have a vivid memory of the last chasuble laid up in a glass case at the back of the nave. It’s gone, now, as a gesture of reconciliation. I wonder what would happen if Fr Daniel were to resume wearing it during the current crisis?
The other surprising fact about our last adventure with a pandemic—I leave polio out of it, even though vaccination against the disease was still regarded as a medical miracle when I had the unpleasant syrup (Sabin, I think)—was how mildly Australia and New Zealand suffered compared to American and Europe, let along the Pacific countries. Of course it came home with the soldiers, almost certainly from contact with Americans in the transportation camps in France as the diggers began the long trek home. There were three waves of infection and probably 12,000 Australians died from a population of 5 million, which would translate to a death rate of 48,000 were it to recur today (that’s pretty horrifying).
By coincidence, I read John Barry’s The Great Influenza last year, and while obsessed with the disease’s role in establishing medical science in the USA, the book had some comments about the Australian experience.
Australia had escaped. It had escaped because of a stringent quarantine of incoming ships. Some ships arrived there with attack rates as high as 43 percent and fatality rates among all passengers as high as 7 percent. But the quarantine kept the virus out, kept the continent safe, until late December 1918 when, with influenza having receded around the world, a troopship carrying ninety ill soldiers arrived…
The Great Influenza p.331
By then the strain had lost much of its lethality. In Australia the death rates from influenza were far less than in any other Westernized nation on earth, barely one-third that of the United States, not even one-quarter that of Italy. But it was lethal enough.
When it struck in January and February, the war had been over for more than two months. Censorship had ended with it. And so in Australia the newspapers were free to write what they wanted. And, more than in any other English-language newspaper, what they wrote of was terror.
The conclusion Barry reaches is surprising and supported by a great deal of oral history: Australia was the first major Allied country to be affected after the end of wartime censorship, the same censorship that led to the first reports of deaths to come from Spain, and not Kansas, where Patient Zero almost certainly originated. The reaction of the population of Sydney was to associate it with the Black Death, which had only recently been eliminated from the Rocks.
One Australian historian in the 1990s was recording oral histories. She was struck when people she interviewed mentioned “Bubonic Plague,” and she explored the issue further.
One subject told her, “I can recall the Bubonic Plague, people dying by the hundreds around us that was come back from the First World War.”
Another: “We had to get vaccinated. . . . And I bear the scar today where I was inoculated against the Bubonic Plague.”
Another: “I can remember the Plague. There were doctors going around in cabs with gowns and masks over their faces.”
Another: “They all wore masks . . . after the war and how they used to be worried here in Sydney . . . about the Plague.”
Another: “We were quarantined, our food was delivered to the front door. . . . We didn’t read about the Bubonic Plague. We lived it.”
Another: “[T]hey called it the Bubonic Plague. But in France they called it bronchial pneumonia. See that’s what they said my brother died from. . . .”
Another: “The Plague. The Bubonic Plague.
Rookwood has hidden mementos of the time, which is why it’s a good idea to visit the place voluntarily before it becomes compulsory. Sad stories, and too many: let’s hope we don’t see too many of these this time around.
