When rats ruled The Rocks and fear stalked the streets of Sydney

The year was 1900 and public enemy number one in Sydney was the rat. Plague infects rats and is transmitted to humans by fleas. But that wasn’t known at the beginning of the outbreak.

In mid-January lorry driver Arthur Payne collected goods from the docks at Darling Harbour. Thirteen ships arrived from overseas “plague ports” and infected rats on board jumped ship. The plague began to spread among the local city rats and their fleas.

Ratcatchers caught vast numbers of rats during the plague.Credit: NSW State Archives

Payne was soon seized with giddiness and headache. His temperature reached 40.5 degrees, his pulse raced.

Two days later doctors found near his Achilles’ tendon a purplish red wound about 3 mm in diameter. He may have been bitten by a flea. The 33-year-old was the first in Sydney to be diagnosed with the bubonic plague. He survived.

The following month sailmaker Captain James Ridley Dudley was less fortunate and became the first victim of the plague. His wife maintained he had been misdiagnosed.

The panic then took off, particularly around the crowded port suburbs of Sydney. A commemorative plaque in Ferry Lane in The Rocks marks the site of the outbreak of plague in 1900. It states that during cleansing operations much dilapidated housing in the area was demolished. Between January and August 1900, the year before Federation, some 3030 contracted bubonic plague and 103 died.

Cleansing of drains in Sydney during the plague in 1900.Credit: State Library NSW

The National Museum Australia states that the disease is caused by the bacterium Yersina pestis. The bacterium firstly infects the rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopsis), which then infects its host, usually the black rat (rattus rattus). The fleas move from the rats to humans who, once bitten, become infected.

Emotions ran high as the precise mechanism for the spread was investigated. Sounds familiar? Philippa Nicole Barr, the author of a just-published book named Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague is aware that comparisons will be made to the early days of COVID.

“Actions such as fumigating city sewers and demolishing properties did not always have their basis in confident public health strategy and were often reactive, aiming to manage the emotions of the public rather than the public health,” says Barr, research officer in the school of history at the Australian National University.

She said in the early stage of an outbreak with a new pathogen, the result will be changing ideas of how it is caused and changing ideas of how to manage it.

Author Philippa Nicole Barr in Ferry Lane, Millers Point, where the first case of the plague was diagnosed.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“It took months for the World Health Organisation to announce COVID was an airborne pathogen,” she said. “Some of the tactics that they were using during the plague would have actually been more relevant to COVID because they were trying to purify the air.

She cites the case of one letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in May 1900 saying fear and avoidance had far too great an impact on the city: “Many ladies are positively afraid to go to town, and in some cases I know of hardly care to go outside their own door for fear of knocking against someone who had the plague and thus contracting it.”

Barr writes: “In his letter, this concerned Sydney citizen was arguing for a new education campaign, not one that promoted fear and avoidance, but one that allayed it. He advocated for emotion to be diffused, for effects to be mediated, by a new awareness and education regarding the certainty of the threat. Emotion remained politically important and useful, however, throughout the event.”

She quotes research in the 1980s which said a handful of plague or smallpox cases in a large city may be regarded as an epidemic simply because of the emotional reaction engendered by the disease.

“It was because of the proliferation of symbolism and emotion, rather than real threat, that the 1900 plague provoked by far the most extreme institutional response among the public of any nineteenth-century epidemic,” she said.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.