Typhoid in the Colony

Bars, Brawls, and Brothels

"In all the cases reported on the outbreak may be traced, directly or indirectly, to a lamentable neglect of the elementary laws of health."

South Australian Register, Adelaide, 25th February 1886, page 4 - Typhoid Fever

The Colony of South Australia has a number of serious public health issues, not the least of which is an outbreak of Typhoid Fever that, if unchecked, is likely to become an epidemic. Officers from the Colony's Central Board of Health and subsidiaries are struggling to contain the outbreak, but are up against fifty years of reckless dumping of filth into the Colony's waterways.
In the two months since Christmas 1885, cases have spiked with an associated 50 to 75% mortality rate. Something beyond usual circumstances is driving the high infection and mortality rates, and it isn't the weather.

Plot points/Scenes

Sessions 0 to 5 of the Whoever Owns the Land Makes the Rules roleplaying campaign are part of the Movers and Shakers subplot.

Session 6: A Pub by the Docks

Edern Grenville calls his Irregulars together for a meeting in the beer garden of the Port Dock Hotel. Here he tells them the body of a man who died of Typhoid Fever was stolen from the Dead House of the Port Adelaide Police Station a few days ago. The fine upstanding members of the South Australia Police are, after a cursory investigation, at a loss as to what happened.
The man hadn't been identified and no person had come forward to claim his body. Just another destitute drunk who would have wound up on a medical school dissection table had fate not intervened. Body snatching is a crime that doesn't sit well with Grenville and many colonists have died of typhoid, so he tasks the Irregulars with finding out where the body went.

Themes

This subplot enhances the following Antipodean Moon themes:

• the effects of drought, exposed topsoil, water shortages, and lack of clean drinking water on colonists, stock, and wildlife
• the lack of facilities and trained staff for adequate medical care.

Colonists have been treating their local water sources with utter disregard for the quality and quantity of clean drinking water available for consumption. Human filth and industrial by-products pollute the rivers and streams, so much so that regular complaints appear in the Colony of South Australia's newspapers regarding the abhorrent stench and dire condition of the Colony's natural waterways.
This threat to the good health of all has been exacerbated by chronic drought and scarce rainfall, which has led to a significant reduction in the volume of freshwater entering and flushing out the waterways. What was once a healthy system of clean water flowing from the hills in the east to the sea in the west has become a slow-moving, rancid trap for disease and misfortune.
Consequently, the number of seriously ill colonists is stretching public and private medical care providers to breaking point. In spite of many warnings from medical men regarding cleanliness, food preparation, boiling drinking water and milk, proper treatment of human waste, and not polluting the waterways, cases are rising.

Relations

Protagonists

The protagonists are lower-class individuals for whom life in the Colony of South Australia has not met their aspirations or even, often, their basic needs. The safety of the Colony's water supply is in the hands of these protagonists, battlers from very different backgrounds with only one thing in common; from time to time they accept paid assignments from Edern Grenville. When they do so as a group, they call themselves "Grenville's Irregulars".
Grenville is about to call on his Irregulars again, this time to investigate a possible body-snatching racket which may be the source of an ongoing outbreak of Typhoid Fever in the Colony.

Allies

Edern Grenville is an inquiry agent with employers in high places, a respectable new office in Adelaide, and deep pockets. He has the drive and resources to support his Irregulars through thick, thin, and a potential epidemic.

Neutrals/Bystanders

Greville's Irregulars will come into contact with many people during the course of this subplot.
Port Adelaide is both a rowdy port of call for transient sailors and a growing town of stable, at least by comparison, middle and lower-class families. Licensed premises are the focal point at which and over which these two opposing points of view clash.
Sailors want to unwind after weeks or months at sea and are in port until their money runs out, then they ship out again. Pubs provide them with alcohol, meals, and accommodation. Brothels provide them with what they've missed at sea. The high concentration of both services in Port Adelaide attests to the volume of sailors transiting through the Colony of South Australia's busiest port. One old pub with a black reputation provides alcohol, prostitutes, and opium. From time to time sailors go from this pub on the waterfront straight to the Dead House.
Families want a decent and law-abiding environment in which to work, live, and raise their children. The Port Adelaide Branch of the South Australian Purity Society, the Salvation Army, and one charismatic and vocal pastor from the Congregational Church are working to close the pubs, purveyors of alcohol, sex, and drugs. This has attracted the ire of ruthless beneficiaries of the sailors' coin. The louder the reformers protest about the state of the port, the more likely they are to suffer some unforeseen calamity.
Greville's Irregulars will have to conduct their investigation while avoiding drunken sailors, angry colonists, puritanical reformers, and those who rule Port Adelaide from back lanes and shadows.

Competitors

A diligent and faithful officer of the South Australia Police will not let the case of a missing corpse drop into the "can't be bothered" basket. He believes everyone deserves a decent burial, even an unidentified destitute drunkard who died of typhoid. This officer is spending out of hours effort on the heinous crime of body-snatching, even though his superiors have rated the case low priority.
Officers from the Port Adelaide Local Board of Health are on the lookout for typhoid and are investigating all reports of disease, open filth, and compromised sources of drinking water. They are authorised to remove infected individuals to the Quarantine Station and shut down sources of infection in the port, including pubs.

Adversaries

Publicans fear forced closure by officers of the Port Adelaide Local Board of Health, and subsequent financial ruin. Some publicans are deep in debt to creditors with brutal enforcers and very little tolerance for a reduction in income. The flow of sailors' coin points the way to the real adversaries, those who don't want a little inconvenience like a typhoid epidemic to shut down their operations.

Backdrops

Locations

This subplot commences in the Port Dock Hotel, a well-known landmark and "watering hole" in Port Adelaide located between the wharves and the railway station. Edern Grenville holds a meeting with his Irregulars in the hotel's beer garden during which he employs them to undertake a "little investigation".
From here, the Irregulars will have reason to visit licensed premises in the wider Port Adelaide area. The Licensed Victuallers Act requires publicans outside of a two-mile radius of the Port Adelaide Police Station to accept corpses pending on-site coroner's inquests. Some of these corpses may also have disappeared. Licensed premises vary from the recently built, elegant, and up-market late-Victorian pubs to the much older, dilapidated, and disreputable early Colonial pubs. Every one of these pubs is full to overflowing with the rowdy denizens of Port Adelaide.   
As colonists infected with typhoid have been found at Hindmarsh, Hahndorf, and Noarlunga, the Irregulars may have to travel to one of more of these locations to investigate the cause and spread of Typhoid Fever.

Threats

An apparent threat to the Irregulars as they carry out their task is the possibility they may run into body snatchers going about their criminal business. Said body snatchers would be well prepared to dissuade the Irregulars from interfering, permanently.
A less apparent threat is the risk of contracting typhoid in the areas the Irregulars may have to visit. Unless they are scrupulous about boiling drinking water and washing their hands, they may become victims of this contagious and life-threatening disease.

Encounters

At the Port Dock Hotel

• Molly, a nymph of the pave, located on a street corner outside the premises and touting for business
• Salvation Army officer dressed in uniform handing out copies of the "War Cry" and carrying a donation tin
• Temperance Hotel promoter standing near the Salvation Army officer and handing out printed flyers
• brewery horses, dray, and delivery men unloading barrels of beer down the chute to the cellar
• various rowdy and drunk shore-leave seamen inside the front bar of the hotel
• a gentleman off to one side of the front bar, nursing a beer and glowering at the seamen
• several labourers in the front bar also annoyed at the drunken seamen
• the publican, a big man, behind the front bar waving a large club at the seamen
• hotel staff running about the hotel with trays of beer and plates of food
• table of ships' officers in the beer garden having a meal with a shipping agent

Past Events

The Colony of South Australia was beset by poor sanitation from the very start.

A Deputation

"If something was not done, it was probable they would have an epidemic break out."

South Australian Advertiser, Adelaide, 17th January 1871, page 2

Nuisances in the City and Suburbs

By 1871, concern over air and water quality reached such a height that a deputation of Members of the Legislative Council, Members of the House of Assembly, the Mayor of Kensington and Norwood, the Adelaide Town Clerk, the Inspector of Nuisances, and other concerned colonists went to complain in person to the Mayor of Adelaide.
The abominable stench from the bone-crushing mill at Dulwich stretched 1.5 to 2.0 miles in all directions, depending on the wind. Residents, particularly children, were falling ill as a result. Rundle, Hindley, and King William Streets drained into ducts at the corner of West Terrace and Rundle Street where refuse remained, "giving off most offensive effluvia", especially on hot, sunny days. When the ducts were blocked, a stinking morass of refuse overflowed until the ducts were cleared, an action that produced an even more intense stench.
Offensive matter from Mr Burford's candle and soap factory was allowed to flow through an open drain on to the Parklands. A candle factory in Wakefield Street created an offensive smell most objectionable to residents nearby. Mr Syme & Sisson's brewery in Hindmarsh Square, a cesspit near the Rifle Butts full of nightsoil festering in the sun, and the boiling down establishment at Thebarton that could be smelt from North Adelaide were all sources of debilitating stench and potential disease about which the delegation complained.
The Mayor agreed to look into and rectify nuisances in Adelaide but could do nothing about nuisances in other councils.

Culpable Complacency

By 1883, typhoid in the Colony claimed one out of every 740 inhabitants in comparison with London's average of one out of every 3,900 inhabitants. The sanitary condition of Adelaide was nothing less than disgraceful.
The Central Board of Health, Local Boards of Health, Sanitary Inspectors, Inspectors of Nuisances, and other officers with sanitation responsibilities were accused by newspaper columnists of culpable complacency. Sanitation officers' poor performance in the field was also attributed to a lack of training from or on behalf of the Boards for whom they worked.

Typhoid Outbreak

"The London Lancet says the death rate for Typhoid throughout the Australian Colonies is far higher than in England; in Queensland, of late, being eight times as fatal."

South Australian Register, Adelaide, 20th March 1886, page 7 - An Insidious Foe

Between Christmas 1885 and mid-March 1886, fifty-two case of Typhoid Fever were reported to the Central Board of Health, more than 50% of which proved fatal. Board estimates of the true extent of deaths from typhoid raised the mortality rate to 75%. The outbreak was threatening to become an epidemic.

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Subplot

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Whoever Owns the Land Makes the Rules