Convenient Histories
We recently spent a day visiting Maldon, a historic village in Central Victoria. It’s Main Street comprises a higgledy-piggledy mix of old shops, coffee and tea rooms, together with several places selling memorabilia, souvenirs and, improbably, even a Christmas shop. There are antiques for sale, as well as fresh produce and organic bread, books on the area, and a garage with petrol pumps that look like leftovers from another era. It is one key area in the rich history of Australia, reaching back to the early 19th Century. The week we were there, Melbourne had eased further restrictions on travel, as the fourth wave of infections from the coronavirus had declined, and Maldon was busy. As we were driving towards the town, we stopped to look over an old gold dredger at Porcupine, one of the many sites in the surrounding goldfields where miners found nuggets more than 150 years ago, and where dredging and mining continued well into the 20th Century. .
Looking a little deeper, however, a rather different picture emerges. There were empty shops, and others operating in premises with ‘For Sale’ or ‘For Lease’ signs in the windows. Some of those antiques scarcely deserved the name . A dearth of information about the history of the area, poorly signposted walks, and even the absence of information about the Porcupine dredger offered a silent testimony to a forgotten past. It is easy to understand. The last two years have seen less visitors; less money for Maldon to spend; less information about its history providing less of a draw to visit the town (or to come back again). I couldn’t help hearing snippets of conversations among the locals about the dearth of visiting ‘Melbournites’ (as Melbournians are called up here), and the threat of further business closures. If the visitors were enjoying their first week of freedom to leave Melbourne, the locals were more concerned about the end of the visitor season. The way I saw it, there was every sign Maldon was slowly dying.
I don’t mean the town will collapse. There are still sheep farms and machinery plants around the area. Visitors will keep coming to enjoy an old world village and shop for keepsakes. Some might drive up the road to look at that old dredger, before it finally rusts away. Some will take a walk along part of the network of goldfield tracks. There will be newcomers wanting to start a business in the village. Buying bread and pickles from an enterprising young man, I realised his base was actually in another town. He’d set up a pop-up stall to sell what he’d brought, carefully judged so that by early afternoon, he was almost sold out. Pop-ups thriving in the midst of elegant yet crumbling old buildings; Maldon appears to be in danger of becoming another ‘been there, done that’ stop on a whirlwind drive around the area. Right now, it is caught in a nasty downward spiral, less income for the town reducing expenditure on information and upkeep of its attractions.
However, in a different way the fate of Maldon is a reflection of another issue, the simplification of history, and the erosion of our roots to the past. For this part of Australia, the process has been clear for years. Maldon, Porcupine, Bendigo’s Golden Gully, and so many other places were at the centre of the world for a few extraordinary years, but what remains from that past is both superficial and misleading, largely fenced in collapsed mine shafts, hillocks of tailings, and stories of the ‘big finds’, the few large and valuable nuggets discovered in the 1860s. What we don’t read about are the thousands of miners, often close to starving, working in the heat or in the cloying winter mud, dozens, one on top of another, but each desperately searching for gold. We don’t see the disease, the misery, the dead men and animals, the faces of despair. We don’t see nights outside a lean-to bar, the drinking, the fighting, the faces of hopelessness, the misery from dashed dreams or abuse.
If some parts of that history history have almost faded away, some others do linger on. One aspect with continuing vitality concerns protests, especially by working people agains the government. Back in the gold rush days, Bendigo was to witness the Red Ribbon Rebellion. This was an 1853 claim by the Anti-Gold Licence Association, objecting to the fee of 30 shillings a month the Victorian Colonial Government required for a license to dig for gold. In 1853, the Association wanted it reduced to 10 shillings (or no fee at all). Miners supported the Association’s resolution, and when it was sent to Governor La Trobe, they wore a red ribbon around their hats to make their views clear. The protests worried the government, and the military appeared at the Bendigo gold fields, with shots fired in August. La Trobe listened, agreed to their demands, and planned to abolish the licence system and replace it with an export duty and a small registration fee. However, the Victorian Legislative Council rejected La Trobe’s proposals and his promise to the miners was ignored. That response ensured the licence system remained a bone of contention for the miners, who saw it as a huge imposition on their already miserable livelihoods.
Famously, this led the miners in Ballarat to take part in the Eureka Rebellion in 1854, seeking to overturn the colonial authority of the UK. This was the culmination of month’s of protests over the cost of licences, as well as taxation introduced without any political representation, and more generally to what was seen as the coercive actions of the government, the police and the military. A Ballarat Reform League was established, and as tensions rose, it built a crude stockade. The Battle of Eureka Stockade took place on 3 December 1854. Despite resistance, the stockade was demolished, and some 20 or more miners killed. The revolt failed, but when the miners were tried in Melbourne, public support led to their release and the introduction of some electoral reforms, in particular agreement to providing representation for male colonists in the Victorian parliament. Today, many see the battle at Eureka as the ‘birth of democracy’ in Australia, and the miner’s flag a symbol for protestors against the government, especially for unionists, along with others who simply want the government out of their lives. The Eureka flag is frequently put forward as an alternative to the ‘British’ Australian flag, (it has a Union Jack in the upper left quadrant).
By the 21st Century, much has been forgotten and the story of gold in Australia is frequently reduced to dreams of finding large nuggets, photographing rusting machinery and poppet heads, and a fuzzy understanding of the Eureka stockade and its flag. Old news? Let’s move forward to more recent history, the pandemic. Not the coronavirus pandemic, but the ‘Spanish’ Influenza pandemic in Australia, which ran from 1918 to1919, brilliantly dissected by Humphrey McQueen in Social Policy In Australia, (Castello, 1976). The Spanish influenza wasn’t Spanish of course, but got its name because the King of Spain was one of the first victims. In fact, its most likely point of origin was the Americas. Whatever the source, some 30-60m died out of a world population of 1,800m, around one death for every 30-60 people. In comparison COVID-19 has affected 180m so far, with 4m deaths, in a world population of 7.87bn; around one death for every 2000 people – although it is far from over in many parts of the world, and infection and death rates will certainly go higher.
Influenza was well known, of course, but it was the appearance of a virulent strain in the middle of 1918 that launched the devastation. By the time the Spanish flu was expected to reach Australia, the government had plans in place to quarantine ships with infected crew or passengers for 7 days. Not one to hide his light under a bushel, in June 1919, the Director of Quarantine, Dr Cumpston, was convinced the previous 12 moths of isolation measures had prevented this strain appearing in Australia. We will never know what happened, whether a local strain suddenly changed, or, more likely, the quarantine was broken many times over the course of the year, but, he was wrong. By the end of 1918, Australia was in the early stages of a pandemic, and vituperative wrangling was already ruining agreements between the Sates and the Commonwealth on containment measures.
It would be illuminating, discouraging and probably rather dispiriting to summarise all the failures and confusions. As one example, Victoria refused to admit it had any cases for two weeks, by which time infections resulting from travel between Victoria and New South Wales were rapidly growing. New South Wales closed its border to Victoria (bolting the stable door after the horse had escaped?), and all agreements with the Commonwealth were dropped. With every State going their own way, the range of restrictions went from Tasmania imposing a strict quarantine and ban on all travel (they were to have the lowest infection rate) to Victoria refusing to put any bans on travel at all. It is hard now to imagine the situation over the crucial months from the middle of 1918 to late in 1919. As McQueen put it, any sense of a federation disappeared and for any traveller, “Border posts stood in his way—it was as if the European system of passports had invaded Australia along with the flu. On a range of domestic matters the Commonwealth of Australia passed into recess.”
What about a cure? With limited understanding of its cause, there were dozens of self-proclaimed doctors’ treatments: McQueen notes “one advocated sweating powders to artificially induce a crisis whilst a colleague attained the same result with daily hot baths. From California came news of a Melbourne-trained doctor who had successfully treated 2,500 cases with a regime of rest, fresh-air, castor oil, mustard plasters, sweatings, good food and no medicine. A mixture of menthol, eucalypt oil, camphor, oil of cinnamon and spirits of chloroform was recommended as a prophylactic.” Were it not so tragic, you might smile at another comment in McQueen’s survey. “That sizeable section of the population who accepted the efficaciousness of Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills as an internal precaution against influenza were unlikely to follow the final admonishment in Dr Morse’s advertisements and send for a doctor—firstly, because doctors were increasingly unavailable, secondly, because they might chance upon a venereal infection, and thirdly, because they could do little more than recommend the abandonment of Root Pills in favour of Heenzo and Bovril.’
Can you imagine what the two most divisive issues were? Wearing a mask and inoculation. For every doctor recommending wearing masks to stop germs spreading, others saw the masks as breeding grounds for infection as well as “sapping the community’s ‘vital force’”. As for inoculation, while there was eventually widespread support for inoculation (supposedly Melbourne’s socialites reputedly arranged `inoculation parties’ where the guests “got the needle” in turn to slow music, and a prize was awarded ‘to the shapeliest arm’), there were strongly-felt pockets of resistance to jabs, aggravated by the rare appearance of impure batches of serum which were said to have caused occasional mass fatalities. Schools closed through the country for much of 1919, while hospitals were rapidly overwhelmed with patients, and supplementary facilities were required. There were fights over the eligibility of various groups to work in hospitals, and unions got into the act, fighting over regulations restricting movement, entitlements and trade. Despite all the strategies tried by governments, people kept dying, and the death rate was highest in New South Wales the state where compulsion was most extensive. Overall, Australia was lucky, with a mortality rate of 233 per 100,000, compared to 430 in England. The numbers don’t convey the sense of terror, largely the result of how the pandemic was reported in the press. The Medical Journal accused the daily papers of ‘fanning the flame of panic’ to the point where ‘the social machine stops under the siege of fear’. Um, does this all sound rather familiar?
Have history’s lessons have been ignored? Hearing today’s newscasts, we learn about events as if this is the first time such things have occurred. Here we are, just over 100 years after the Spanish influenza of 1918-19, confronting the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 as if it’s all new. The comparison between the two is revealing, about history and about what we choose to remember.
First, what did we learn from one hundred years earlier? Did we recognise that Australia can’t isolate itself from the world? This was the first issue we confronted when I ran an emergency preparedness simulation a few years ago. We used a pandemic in one 3-day exercise, and the participants were forced to recognise Australia’s inability to isolate right from the start of the exercise. Did Australia quickly stock up on vaccines from the beginning? No, because the number of cases was low – to begin with. We are still dangerously vulnerable, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world. Did we effectively coordinate activities between the States and the Commonwealth? Of course not: too much political mileage to be made by pointing to the mistakes made by others. Did we ensure that masks, distancing, and all the other necessary protective measures were enforced for the benefit of the community? In part, but the country kept succumbing, once again, to the loud voices of business and the trumpeting of scientific luddites.
When it comes to what we choose to remember, the story is equally disappointing. The past has become a backdrop on which we project current issues and concerns, made malleable and rendered largely meaningless. In part, this is the false attraction of ‘stories set in the past’. They are dress up games for adults. Funny clothes, strange hair-dos, upstairs and downstairs, aristocrats and hardworking people: this is a world of simplified dichotomies on which we can play out today’s tensions and indulge in fantasies of what goes on behind the scenes. However, they are also an excellent way to displace action on current challenges by focussing on what it was like back then. We can see women exploited or abused, and frown over our Victorian forebears. We feel sympathy for the oppressed, for lesbians and gay men of the past. We can share anger with the miserable lives of workers, the downtrodden colonial oppressed, the children, each group the victims of some form of past domination. We can do all that, and then slide past the same issues today. Convenient histories to simplify the past. They detach us from current realities, ignoring what can be learnt from back then about today’s issues Lessons from the past would be really inconvenient.
