Pandemic history ignored by state premiers

If we’ve learnt anything about the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that history may not repeat but it does have a habit of popping its head up and asking: “Remember me?”

The history of Australian government is characterised often by good intentions marred by parochialism and petty power struggles that serendipitously leads to reasonable if not ideal outcomes.

A century ago, states began closing their borders as the Spanish Influenza pandemic kicked off in earnest in Australia.

Being an enormous island at the bottom of the world, Australia had the benefit of watching the pandemic unfold almost everywhere else and sensibly decided to take steps to diminish its impact on what was then our four million population.

Kansas City may have been ground zero for the Spanish flu pandemic. It certainly wasn’t Spain. More than likely US servicemen entered Europe with one strain of the flu only for it to mutate into something more infectious and deadly.

The pandemic merely assumed its Castellano nomenclature because it infected the Spanish monarch, King Alfonso XIII early.

He survived it and was probably lucky to do so. The Spanish Royal Family genealogical chart was more stick than tree and the monarchy was subject to the same level of inbreeding we see in French bulldogs today. Many of Alfonso’s countrymen and women dropped like nine pins. A lot did not get up. The influenza strain scaled the borders into war torn France and then into England not long afterwards and it was away.

A century later and we still can’t be certain what kicked off a pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people, more than double the number of deaths, military and civilian, from World War I.

And then it all went to hell

Back in Australia, great meetings between powerful figures from the states and the Commonwealth took place. Seven days’ quarantine was required for anyone entering the country, including many returning servicemen from Europe. With several ceremonial strokes of the pen, the states happily ceded control for the national management of the pandemic to the Commonwealth. An agreement was signed in Melbourne in November 1918, just weeks after armistice, giving the Commonwealth the capacity to close state borders based on reports of outbreaks from the states’ Chief Medical Officers.

The country was ready. All things being equal, we could not have been better prepared.

And then it all went to hell in a moment.

Border wars, Spanish flu style

In January 1919, a soldier was diagnosed with Spanish flu in Sydney and, as was required under the November agreement, New South Wales notified the Commonwealth and the state was proclaimed infected. The problem was the soldier had travelled by train from Melbourne but as the Victorians had not informed the Commonwealth, New South Wales angrily closed the borders and sent its own wallopers to prevent any crossing of the Murray.

The agreement was hurled into the bin, the feds were sidelined and from then on it was every state for itself.

Queensland closed its borders. Where crossings of the Tweed were permitted it came at a price and travellers including soldiers wanting to return home were required to quarantine in camps and enjoy the Queensland sun banged up while enduring enforced injections and ten minute stints three times a day in a respiratory chamber.

Belatedly and with little apparent embarrassment, the Queensland government knocked up a women’s toilet on the camp six weeks after opening for business. Ah, Queensland. Beautiful one day, a urine soaked hell hole the next.

It probably made sense to isolate Tasmania which subsequently suffered relatively few infections and just 171 deaths. But the Tasmanians were unhappy with iso and many protested insisting that quarantine of travellers across the Bass Strait be reduced from seven days to four. Tasmania may have been spared a big death toll but suffered grave economic hardship from a lack of trade and tourism.

The South Australian government shut its borders and ad hoc camps were established that the state refused to even acknowledge let alone ensure decent accommodations.

When NSW put the shutters up, Western Australia was cut off from the rest of the country at least by rail amid the predictable calls for succession.

There and in the Northern Territory, death rates in remote indigenous communities from Spanish Influenza were as high as one in two.

Across the country, returned servicemen were denied their homecoming parades. Family reunions were delayed which set many servicemen to seething. After what they had endured on the Western Front, who could blame them? Many jumped quarantine, only to find churches, theatres and worst of all, pubs shut.

Months later, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland remained closed.

If this reads is a routine rerun of history by the states that’s not quite right because Victoria did not impose any restrictions on its people.

The People’s Republic of Victoria

Wearing face masks was encouraged but not mandated and there were no restrictions on travel interstate which wasn’t of much use because the borders were closed by wallopers from other states.

This flies in the face of the People’s Republic of Victoria today where one might expect one day to see a large wall traversing the Murray visible from the lunar surface.

But here’s the thing, immunologists with the benefit of 100 years of hindsight will tell you that state border closures on the mainland made no difference to the spread of Spanish Influenza in 1918-19.

Of course, there was no air travel and clearly less traffic crossing state borders than there would be now but the fact remains, the states ignored expert opinion then and did as they pleased, driven more by a sort of Sheffield Shield of hollow boasts and bitter recriminations which infected our history then and taints our present now.

It might be that the COVID-19 track and trace programs the states have in place are limited by the old jurisdictional bun fights which really would be a case of history repeating. If so, they should say so rather than deflect questions with specious reasoning and contradictory medical opinion.

In the end, Australia suffered 13,000 deaths from Spanish Influenza. The toll was low, almost negligible compared with the great cost to the nation of the staggering casualty rates from the battlefields in western Europe in what was then referred to as The Great War.

Just as then it is difficult to understand now why state premiers pulled the drawbridges up. It is even harder to figure why they remain up today. What we do know is our state premiers don’t bother too much with history.

This column was first published in The Australian on 23 May 2020.