Australia's plague archive

There are historical contexts to help us think through the COVID-19 epidemic. These histories contradict the often-repeated claim that the present pandemic is unprecedented. This essay looks at one such outbreak of disease in Australia’s past so as to identify precedents – emotional and otherwise – to COVID-19. The disease in this instance is bubonic plague, which occurred throughout Australia, but especially on the east coast, between 1900 and 1908. The plague outbreak was relatively mild: 1215 individuals were reported as infected, and 467 of those died. Infection numbers were relatively low, but the mortality rate was very high. While estimates of the COVID-19 mortality rate range between 1 per cent and 4 per cent, the mortality rate for bubonic plague in Australia was more than 38 per cent.