Richard Trembath reviews Philippa Nicole Barr’s Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague*, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). ISSN 2632-1068 (online)
I was unaware of the Cambridge Element series until I accepted the offer of reviewing this recent addition to their program. Having taught for many years in university courses based on the conjunction of ecology, disease and history, a new work on the first occurrence of bubonic plague in Australia that we know of was irresistible. It might be useful to think of Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague as a non-fictional novella: sixty-two pages of text, then an impressive list of references.
Within the volume’s narrow constraints, this is a detailed study of a truly frightening epidemic. After all, bubonic plague is the Big One. In turn-of-the-century Sydney, people knew well that when the Black Death visited Eurasia in the middle of the 14th century, at least thirty to fifty percent of the unwilling recipients succumbed. The precise percentage wasn’t known, it isn’t known now, but the final figure may well be closer to the higher estimate. Historians stress that endemic disease – gastroenteritis, childhood infections, smallpox, consumption and so forth – took more lives on a regular basis – but plague locked up cities, caused kings and courts to flee to country retreats, and gave us lasting images and descriptions of just how foul death can be. Although the author conflates Governor William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, with the Premier, William Lyne, she is right to note just how ominous the New South Wales government considered the plague to be.
This book is based on an extensive cross-disciplinary study drawing on cultural history, the histories of the emotions and the senses, social theory, and research into the public records of the time. It effectively conveys the sense of dread that the presence of plague in the community evoked. The fear was justified. The outbreak in Sydney in 1900 resulted in 303 cases with a death toll of 103, almost exactly 33% of the victims. As the first casualties occurred in locations and industries adjacent to, or associated with, the docks, and spread through the poorer areas of the inner city, it is not surprising that Sydney’s inhabitants shunned, where possible, the most affected districts. I think that it is an overstatement, however, for the author to say that ‘Sydney was completely deserted’.[i] The next page reports the presence of children in Elizabeth Street and near Hunter Street, and on page 22, we have a reference to a ‘woman from the poorer classes living in the city’ and her neighbours are mentioned as well. Government and services had to continue, though movement to and from Sydney was restricted, and the urban poor had few options but to stay where they lived and worked.
By 1900 the zoonotic basis of plague had been established, at least in scientific and public health circles. The rat was known to be a vector which resulted in mass destruction of that animal where possible. Some of the most dramatic pictures of Sydney at this time show piles of slaughtered rats at the feet of their destroyers. On the other hand, the role of the flea, as the broker between rats and humans, was not fully known at the time. Germ theory was accepted science but as the author cogently argues, when comparing Sydney with New York, ‘a sense of miasmatic dread did not evaporate with germ theory; it was reinforced by better understanding of the presence of microbes and how they caused disease’.[ii] Miasma as a medical concept was starting to be seen as a medieval relic in 1900, a belief from a pre-scientific age, but smells—‘odours’ is the author’s preferred term—were still associated with infectious disease and were regarded as evidence that particular locations were danger spots. Thus, decayed buildings were demolished, and their inhabitants quarantined, while fumigation of premises was widely practiced despite leading medical authorities such as the redoubtable John Ashburton Thompson, President of the NSW Board of Health, arguing that human to human transmission was not an issue. The author notes that:
Fumigation did little to prevent plague. Yet the transformation of the odours of organic cargo from ships, horse manure, and leaking sewerage into the acrid odours of sulphur and formalin allayed anxiety and disgust throughout the city of Sydney.[iii]
And, as the author also points out, such measures encouraged some long overdue public health reform. The community adjusted to additional restrictions on its behaviour, and trust in experts was enhanced.
The associated topics of ‘odour’ and ‘disgust’ occupy much of this monograph. As might be gleaned from the quote above, the author adopts a relativist position towards ‘objects of disgust’ and what odours we resile from. She argues that our perception of offensive smells and revolting materials is affected profoundly by the social and historical context. Originally, I thought this was too free an approach, but on second thoughts I think that there is merit in that position. To take just one example, the close presence of human excrement is not something we like much, and we are trained from childhood to eliminate bacterial transfer from such. Yet, some societies used their waste matter to fertilise their fields and grow their food. Similarly, a recent account of what life was like in the late Roman Empire emphasises just how horrible we would find the widespread disability, deformity, smell and appearance of our fellow citizens and those occupying the same bed.[1]
The author’s analysis of these issues is aimed at a specialist market. Some of the theoretical sections, under headings such as ‘1.6 The Ontology of Disgust Objects’, ‘1.5 Plasticity of Disgust’ and ‘3. The Symbolism of Dirt in Discursive Responses to Plague’, might well make difficult reading for the non-specialist reader. The prose is dense, as evidenced by this sentence:
Uncertainty in the provenance, ecology, treatment or prevention of contagious or non-contagious diseases can compel the use of the emotional and affective power of symbolism to authorise hypotheses and conjecture.
The book concludes with a paragraph which makes comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic. The author claims that the bureaucracy and the medical establishment dealing with COVID are ‘flying blind . . . uncertain . . .and the decisions they make are informed by emotions, assumptions, and symbols.’ I am not sure I agree. In 2020, just as in 1900, they were not flying blind, they were making quick decisions in a crisis based on the best science available.
[1] Paul Stephenson, New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East, AD 395-700, Profile Books, London, 2023, pp. 19-25
[i] p. 20
[ii] p. 53
[iii] p. 48
* Part of the Elements in Histories of Emotion and the Senses series.
