How could we forget?
“The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence; the past is a place of learning, not a place of living.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart


........................Thursday 20 February 1919
..HOW IT GOT PAST.
....QUARANTINE BLAMED.
Influenza does not arise; it travels.
It reached the United States by crossing the 'Atlantic, and it would seem that
it might, have been kept out.
This is, in fact, the editorial opinion of the 'Scientific American,' which under the
heading 'A Carelessly Guarded Gate,' charges that the laxity of port authorities on
the eastern coast is responsible for an invasion that has caused more deaths
among peaceful citizens than the deadly weapons of the enemy, have effected on
the front of battle.
'Instead of establishing a rigid quarantine, the authorities
seemed to have ignored the infectious character of the disease
and placed its victims in the open wards of hospitals,
where it quickly, spread.
This all took place in the land of Gorgas, whose people can tame
a fever-infected swamp one day and then calmly take disease to their
own bosoms the next.'
Says the paper named above:—
EXTRA CARE NECESSARY.
"There is a growing conviction that
the sudden invasion of the United
States by that 'European' epidemic
known as Spanish influenza, - and the
speed with which it has spread through-
out the country, are due to the laxity
with which the port authorities along
the Atlantic seaboard have carried out
their duties.
'If ever there was a period when the
quarantine laws for guarding the ports
of the United States against the entrance of
disease should have been enforced with redoubled vigilance,
it was during the summer and autumn of the
present year, when, it was known that
a highly infectious and fatal disease was
sweeping through Europe like a scourge
of the Middle Ages.
'In view of the imminence and deadly
character of the disease, we had every
reason to expect that the Federal authorities
would set a double guard at our
ports of entry, and instruct our quarantine
official to take every possible preventative
measure against the landing, not
merely of influenza patients, but of
every passenger who had been exposed
during tho ocean voyage, to infection.
....EXCUSES VALUELESS.
'Nor can any carelessness be excused
on the ground that influenza has never
been classed with the deadly diseases,
such as yellow fever or the bubonic plague.
While such an excuse might be valid for the
layman, it cannot be allowed in the case of the
expert professional men, whose duty it is to
enforce the quarantine laws of the country,
for they know full well that this was no ordinary
epidemic of influenza or grip. The medical records
of Europe were available; and the most cursory
reading of the data that have appeared in the
medical journals (to go no further than that)
should have revealed to those men that here was
a disease the exclusion of which from America,
called for the most exacting and rigid enforcement
of the quarantine laws.
'The obvious thing to have done when the
first ship with influenza patients on board cast anchor
at a quarantine station, was to isolate that ship,
with every soul on board, until the slightest
possibility of carrying infection ashore had been removed.
The rigid precautions that would be taken,
if an arriving ship had yellow fever
patients aboard, should surely have been
taken in the case, of this deadly scourge.
... INFECTING HOSPITALS.
'But what are the facts? Incredible
as it may seem, influenza cases by the
score and, for all we know, by the hundred,
were taken ashore and placed in
the general wards of the hospitals.
Fellow passengers of the Patients, who
must inevitably have been exposed to
infection, and must many of them have
been carrying the disease, were allowed
to go their several ways throughout
the land.
'Was ever official fatuity stretched
to greater lengths than this?
When once the ships company had scattered,
whether to spread the infection among fellow
patients in a general hospital, or among the
unsuspecting and un-warned citizens in home,
office, passenger-car or theatre; the
mischief was done. But even when the plague
burst forth in all its wide-spread malignity,
both New York and the country at large seemed
slow to awaken to the enormity of the peril.

Only here and there did the authorities act with
swift and effective measures, closing
schools, theatres, and public meeting places.
It is certainly a disconcerting fact that, at the
very time when the country had organised itself, through
the Red Cross and other famous organisations, to fight
disease and prevent suffering, we should be smitten with
a visitation which caused more casualties and deaths in
the homeland than occurred among our troops in the
great world war

SOURCE: TROVE- National Library of Australia 1919-1921
Videos of spanish flu epidemic 1918

The photograph below from The Health Museum of South Australia
shows some of the people interred at the Jubilee Oval, adjacent to
the Torrens River in Adelaide South Australia.
Six ladies and two girls seated in the grounds of the Jubilee Oval.
Handwritten notes on the back of the photo read “Passengers who
were required to be in isolation after arriving from Melbourne by
train 1919 – influenza pandemic”.
The influenza pandemic or Spanish Flu originally started in 1918
and was brought to Australia by soldiers returning from WWI. When
the flu came to Australia, the states tried to combat it by closing
state borders and setting up quarantine camps.
On the 8th of February, South Australia was officially declared infected.
To treat those infected, the Jubilee Oval and Exhibition Building
was converted to an Isolation Hospital.
When the state borders were closed, many South Australians found
themselves stranded in Victoria.
On the 26th February, non-infected South Australians were transported
by train from Melbourne to Adelaide and deposited at the Jubilee Oval,
which had be set up with over 10 military tents and room for another
500 people in the buildings. They were released on the 4th March.