Leviathan (24 page)

A year after Jevons's freelance investigations, a Royal Commission parroted his findings. A year after that the Legislative Assembly despatched a committee to walk the same streets and come to the same conclusions. As Max Kelly wrote, there was no doubt that here were slums of the most abject kind. A lack of sanitary inspection and an absence of health laws, population pressure, land-sweating by landlords, rising rent levels and a falling supply of inner-city accommodation, all combined to deepen the slum problem. The committee's chairman, Henry Parkes, found working-class accommodation ‘deplorably bad', with many of the older tenements being ‘unfit for the occupation of human beings'. A section of Ultimo Road was described as consisting of ‘human slaughter houses'.

Fast forward another decade and a half and the Health Board's report into Sydney's sewerage and water supply recounts the same depressing litany of overcrowded, tumble-down shanties tucked away within the folds of the emerald city. Decades of frenzied growth, the first burst of urban sprawl, had compacted life at the centre to a point where one house had a yard, a metre square, surrounded on three sides by seven-metre high walls. At the corner of Market and Clarence, the committee inspected a row of weatherboard humpies, variously used as a butchery, workshops and residential premises. If you wanted to know how long colonial timber could last until it decayed into powder, they quipped, these places would satisfy your curiosity. They contained just enough solid timber to keep them standing, but not a splinter more. One house in particular grabbed their attention, representing as it did ‘the
ne plus ultra
stage of dilapidation'. It contained two small ground-floor rooms with a rickety ladder climbing into the darkness of a sleeping nook under the roof. Originally a weatherboard cottage, the inspectors couldn't say what it was now, so much rubbish having been tacked on during patchwork repairs. Boards eaten out by white ants had been papered over or covered by scraps of tin. Upstairs, countless layers of rotting wallpaper curled down from the roof, a ruined tapestry clogged with cobwebs and dust. One sorry mattress lay on the floor, the only furniture in the house, which was otherwise crammed with piles of old clothes. Needless to say there was no drainage from any of these hovels. The city's poor were still swimming in filth. In Glebe, where the gutters were choked by dead dogs, cats and chickens, bones, offal and decaying vegetable matter, the committee found a three-room house with broken floorboards and scarcely a single pane of glass in any of the windows. The toilet had collapsed into its own cesspit. It had no door, not even an old sack, and anyone wishing to use it had to crouch over the spot where the seat used to be, holding onto the doorposts which remained, in full view of the neighbourhood.

The committee members, drawn from the ranks of Sydney's comfortable, self-satisfied burghers, found themselves mired in ever more horrifying sinks of poverty. Led by Professor John Smith, an expert chemist of ‘cultivated intellect, extraordinary patience and industry', they plunged into a secret world, guided by missionaries and guarded by police. It was far removed from the liberal certainties of their lives. These were celebrated by the
Herald
on Australia Day 1876 when it preached about the rareness of poverty in a city, where ‘the many have plenty as well as the few' and where ‘we are not entirely free sometimes from the danger of having too much'. This land-of-plenty thesis ignored the pale riders of disease which stalked the city's poorest quarters. The 1870s witnessed an alarming rise in mortality rates, particularly amongst Sydney's children who were, according to the government statistician, ‘literally decimated' by diarrhoea and atrophy, pneumonia and bronchitis, diphtheria, convulsions and measles.

The
Herald
's bumptious optimism must have rung hollow to the committee as they picked their way through hundreds of treacherous alleys and lanes and ‘rows of mean looking, ill-ventilated, poorly drained tenement buildings, all seemingly crammed to bursting with the city's poor'. Reading their reports, I was struck by how often their descriptions simply shuddered to a stop as the degradation overwhelmed their ability to describe it. Sometimes I could almost see them standing there, gape-mouthed in confusion, completely baffled by the awful scenes in front of them. One such occasion was at a house in Abercrombie Lane, an evil, constricted, otherworld passageway which the
Herald
had visited twenty-five years earlier and found as alien as the forbidden city of Peking. The
Herald
had been worried then by the prospect of some wild revolutionary fervour seizing the minds of the masses huddled within. They had been so completely cut off from ‘the confident gospels of prosperity and order', so thoroughly debased by their miserable circumstances, that even this conservative broadsheet admitted they owed no loyalty to a system which thrived on their misery. Apprehensively entering the home of a cab driver named Ryan, they discovered him with his wife and three children in a room below the stairs. There were no windows to let through a breeze and consequently the atmosphere was dominated by the piles of human excrement which lay on the floor. Ryan and his wife were both drunk, the latter sitting on a wooden box with a child in her arms, mother and child completely naked. As the inspectors entered the room she simply drew up an old skirt from amongst the dung piles and held it against herself. The rest of the furniture consisted of a broken chair and a table on which a few cups and glasses lay beside a rum bottle. The couple were too drunk to answer any questions so Smith's men pressed on. Upstairs they found heaps of old rags and what might have been a mattress but was now just a ‘bundle of rotten flock and rags' with two women sleeping on it. An expedition into the kitchen was cut short by hundreds of fleas which suddenly swarmed over them. Their strait-laced Victorian minds reeled at such deviance. Wedded to the mythology of the times which emphasised the benefits of hard work, abstinence and submission to the strictures of a rigid hierarchy, they could only wonder, like many before them, at the evils which would germinate in such an environment. In the end, however, it was not a revolutionary malady but a physical one which came roaring out of these crowded, filthy slums. After decades of neglect and wanton folly in the high offices of the city, nature took its course. On 19 January 1900, the plague arrived in Sydney.

 

That Friday dawned bright and hard over a city which had sprawled out across two hundred and fifty square kilometres and which was climbing towards a population of half a million people. The sandstone basin which had lain empty and undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years was rapidly filling up. As the sun swept gently over Port Jackson's heavily wooded northern shores, a thin wiry man made his way from Ferry Lane in the Rocks down to the wharves and warehouses of Darling Harbour. Ferry Lane was, and still is, just a paper cut in the massive sandstone ridge overlooking Walsh Bay, and at that time 10 Ferry Lane – four rooms, an attic and a basement – was home to Arthur Payne, a thirty-three-year-old wagon driver of fair complexion and nervous temperament. Like many of the lower class he still lived within walking distance of his workplace, unable or unwilling to meet the price for a train or tram ride from the suburbs.

Arthur had suffered no serious illnesses in the years leading up his appointment with history, so we can only guess at his reaction to being seized by dizziness, a headache and a sharp pain in his stomach as he manoeuvred a van through the city around about lunchtime on that very hot Friday. He was shaken badly enough to lie down for a spell when he reached the warehouse he'd been heading for, although he was not so badly affected that he couldn't finish his shift. Later that afternoon, still racked by gut cramps and a headache, he noticed a small lump high up on his left thigh, near his groin. He left work about an hour before sundown and, on reaching home, drank some castor oil, vomited prodigiously and took to his bed. There he lay, thirsty and feverish, with his head pounding and pain spiking through his stomach, while the lump in his groin ached continuously. The city's medical authorities, alarmed by the spread of plague in nearby Pacific ports, had been waiting for just such a case. The Board of Health's chief medical officer and president, Doctor John Ashburton Thompson, personally examined Payne three days after he had swooned at the reins of his wagon. He found a worrying mark just near the Achilles' tendon, ‘a circular spot about 3 mm in diameter', coloured a dark, angry red. ‘This observation,' he wrote, ‘suggested that the infection had been communicated by puncture at this spot, and that the inoculation was most likely to have been effected there – at a part of the foot which was well covered by the boot the patient wore – by an insect, namely, by a flea.'

For Thompson, a world authority on leprosy who had fought an outbreak of dengue fever in Queensland and typhoid in Leichhardt, this was the moment of detonation. Sydney's slums, as Professor Smith's committee had discovered, were swarming with fleas, many of them resident upon the bodies of millions of giant, happy, well-nourished rats. The collapse of the inner city's wharf districts' sanitation systems had provided an almost perfect environment for the mass production of these rodents. In describing their favoured hangouts Dr Thompson also described the conditions more than 100 000 people like Arthur Payne lived in. Rats prosper and breed in the dark and intricate recesses of ill-constructed or decaying buildings, he wrote. They burrow and play in warm piles of household refuse; in basements, cellars and storerooms where rotten flooring sits just above the natural soil; in stables and in dung heaps. They can always be seen at night in lanes and alleys, however well-paved, hunting for food in discarded refuse. They sneak inside the home through holes and gaps. Or they just march in through open doors and windows. They are attracted by heaps of lumber and organic refuse which, rumbled Thompson, are too often allowed by local authorities to grow like topsy in backyards and vacant lots. They always live amongst legions of fleas and bugs ‘for dirt, decay, darkness and filth favour them at least as much as they favour the presence of rats …'. And they threatened the occupants of every dwelling nearby, whether in good order or not. For while the plague took some of its victims from the sort of premises Thompson described, it fell on even more homes which were kept in a good and fair state but which were doomed by unsanitary methods of connection to the sewers, or even by simple proximity to them.

Despite Thompson's own confidence, the theory that fleas transmitted the plague bacillus was not widely adhered to in 1900. In fact in some circles it was considered kind of out there with the flat-earthers and moon-of-cheese crowd. Rats were acknowledged carriers of the plague, but the juggernaut of Victorian science hadn't quite made up its mind whether the illness travelled by air, water or simple touch. Thompson, however, was as sure of the flea's role as he could be, and he thought that the city's best long-term defence lay not in the wholesale slaughter of rats – although this was important – but in attacking the man-made conditions which allowed them to flourish.

In spite of Thompson's best efforts, the attack was a little slow in starting. The city's medical practitioners were asked to immediately report any cases of plague or anything even resembling plague. During an inspection of the wharves on St Valentine's Day, a customs officer reported finding an unusually large number of dead rats around Huddart, Parker and Co's facility on the eastern side of Darling Harbour. Seven rats were seized there and found to be infected. The following day Dr WG Armstrong, one of Thompson's colleagues, inspected the wharves and told the owners to start cleaning them up and destroying the vermin. Nearly a month later, when Thompson himself toured the area, he found that little or nothing had been done. The wharf owners were told to get their shit together or they'd be quarantined. In fact the medical men wanted to evacuate the whole area, but it was the focal point of colonial trade and closing it would have been like shutting down all of Sydney's docks and airports for a couple of months today.

While the city's commercial, political and medical interests contended over their response to Payne's infection, the plague spread; nine cases in the first three weeks, then twenty-two in the next fortnight. By the sixth week the epidemic was established and would rage until August. Two thirds of the 303 victims went down in those last two months. The disease struck quickly, the infected falling from good health to severe illness within an hour. Chills, shivering and acute headaches announced the arrival, sometimes in company with intense pain in the back and lower abdomen, sometimes followed by them. Victims first vomited up all the contents of their stomachs, then continued heaving a green or blue bile. Their faces flushed, their eyes suffused, they often began to feel an aching or pricking in the lymph glands. Constipation set in, if they were lucky. If diarrhoea ensued it was almost always a very bad sign. Sometimes the most moderate onset was rapidly fatal. One man simply lost his appetite for a day or so. He went to the office where he worked as a clerk, left for home at midday with a fit of colic and had turned up his toes by ten that night. Another man rose at six, had breakfast, washed, dressed, sat by his kitchen fire and was found dead at 9.30 a.m.

If they made it into the second day, the patient's symptoms became manifest and gradually more intense. More often than not, unlike Payne, they couldn't raise themselves from their beds. Their eyes closed over, their complexions grew pallid or livid or, in a few severe cases, sallow or yellowish, while they emitted a peculiar smell. A thick white coating covered the tongue. The skin grew hot and dry or, in the worst cases, cold and damp. Their temperature rocketed, pulse quickened, speech blurred, some passed into coma while ‘in others, more commonly, delirium commenced' with a furious excitement and they had to be restrained as they struggled to flee their beds, tortured by delusions and sleeplessness. By this stage, for many, their beds consisted of a cot on the hot, bleak shores of North Head, where the government had established a quarantine station. There victims and their contacts were strictly isolated from each other. Contacts bathed and changed their clothes and were detained for five days. Convalescents were discharged when they'd had a normal temperature for ten days, provided they had no unhealed sores.