Society > In Sickness and in Health
In Sickness and in Health
Reports in the 1860s and ’70s described houses in Mount, John and Bowman Streets: The toilets were “frequently dilapidated … and so badly constructed that a slight shower of rain causes them either to overflow or soak into the surrounding soil, creating a great deal of disease”.
A later inspector noted:
“it would be utterly impossible for a housewife to keep a bad house tidy. When she is placed in such a house, she soon ceases to strive to preserve order and cleanliness in her house; the husband does not care about coming home to his wife; she becomes careless and neglects her children; their diet is also neglected, and they are allowed to expose themselves to the sun.
”At the top of John St… there is a cow-shed (remnant no doubt of the original farm) the drainage from which was lying in pools in the yard, stinking and creating a nuisance”.
In Bowman Street “… we came to four houses built of rubble with corrugated iron roofs…. The drainage of these house runs down along the surface gutters to a vacant piece of land close by, the stench of which is something frightful.”
Many people gained cheap protein from nearby abattoirs or their own animals, but one account listed “stale bread and dripping, brown bread, potatoes, treacle and salt.”
“Meals were cooked on an open fireplace in their rooms”.
As a harbour precinct Pyrmont was especially vulnerable. The first recorded epidemic was smallpox in 1789, disrupting and dispersing every community in its path. Measles appeared every few years from 1866-67 compounded by scarlet fever in 1875-76. Smallpox in 1881-82 followed on the heels of the anti-Chinese protests of 1978 and sparked another wave of violence. ‘Asiatic flu’ in 1890 had a similar effect but it did lead to the adoption of quarantine and isolation to control epidemics.
Bubonic plague in 1900 had less impact than its reputation suggested, but it devastated harbourside precincts and provoked a general massacre of rats as well as the demolition of many unsanitary wharves. All epidemics (including smallpox in 1917) pale beside the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of the Great War. which killed between 20 and 50 million world-wide, and was particularly dangerous for young people.
Chronic ill-health and periodic epidemics are elements of Pyrmont’s heritage that nobody mourns.
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Further Reading
529 Wattle Street (rear) 1900
Looking south from John Street, 1916
Heaps of rats