Events > Spanish Flu
Spanish Flu
Long before the eruption of ‘Spanish flu’, Pyrmont was familiar with epidemics. They often arrived by sea, and always spread swiftly along open drains, through crowded, insanitary cottages and hovels. Smallpox was the first disaster recorded in Pyrmont in 1789. Once the population built up in the 1860s, other infections and contagions followed: measles every few years, scarlet fever, smallpox (again and again) and ‘Asiatic flu’ before the more famous bubonic plague of 1900.
All these episodes seem minor compared with the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of the Great War. A vicious strain of N1H1 flared up in Europe. At first quite mild, its second wave was lethal: across the world between 20 and 50 million died before it faded away in 1920. Unlike most annual strains of influenza, Spanish flu was particularly dangerous for young people.
Health was still a state responsibility, and state authorities directed the responses: public events were cancelled, and people had to wear masks in public. Schools closed. Early in 1919 the government set up local depots where doctors, Red Cross workers and volunteers provided advice and support. In June these were formalised as 68 depots tasked to provide “medical attention, nurses, and medical comforts” to those in need. Pyrmont Public School hosted one of these depots.
Antibiotics were not invented for another generation. Patients’ survival depended on nursing. Throughout Australia, there was an urgent need for nurses and nurse-aides, preparing and delivering meals, offering social support, domestic chores - and in the end removing corpses. The authorities put it:
a special call is made for domestic helpers, voluntary or otherwise, who would be prepared to go into the homes of sick people and attend to their wants. Anyone used to doing domestic duties would be suitable for this special work.
In other words, women. Sometimes the moral suasion on women resembled the pressure on men to enlist in the Great War.
