(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Post-COVID: the federal government returns to political primacy, old political fights pick up where they left off, and conservatives revert to austerity budgets.

Well they’re the big takeaways from the first (and still best) piece of journalism on the impact of pandemics on modern society: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a social deep dive into London’s 1665 plague, the first great work of literary journalism in the English language by one of the founders of the craft.

Different disease, of course, with higher reproduction numbers and deaths (Reff and CFR) — as we understand things now. Still the best look-back at “what just happened” in a pandemic, inventing journalism on the run, bringing together data, anecdotes and a social understanding of urban networks. It rhymes with our experience and points to what’s likely to happen next.

Diseases entrench poverty

Pandemics are diseases of the poor and of poorer parts of cities, spread through supply chains. (In 1665 London, as in 2020 Melbourne, through meatworks; as in 2021 Sydney, through incoming freight.) Classes experience them differently: in 1665 the rich left for their country estates; in 2021 rich-lister Lachlan Murdoch moved his family to Sydney’s eastern suburbs while we work from home relying on distribution workers to bring us things.

It’s disconcerting that 300 years ago, a jobbing journalist was better able to capture that difference than most journalists today, partly due to journalistic passion replacement by cool objectivity as the price paid for the influence of mass media. And partly due to our focus on lockdowns, which the middle class endure while the pandemic hits those who live in 12 of Sydney’s local government areas or Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where journalists, by and large, don’t.

The pivot to austerity

London’s 1665 working class relied on charity, particularly the royal charity standing in for 2020’s JobKeeper/JobSeeker and 2021’s disaster payments. Here’s a warning: once the worst was over, Defoe wrote that “all the sluices of general charity were now shut” and “the distress of those that were poor was very great indeed”.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has already made one attempt to turn off the sluices, winding up JobKeeper and JobSeeker and dragging his feet in the current wave. The Morrison government is eager to get past COVID (and the election) to return to “debt-and-deficits” moral panic to drive fiscal consolidation.

As things improve, people stop listening

Sydney and Melbourne are at that stage of Defoe’s plague where as case numbers fall (then due to herd immunity, now to vaccination) that: “People … took to such a precipitant courage and grew so entirely regardless of themselves … that they made no more of the plague than of an ordinary fever.” 

Enter 17th century physicians Kerry Chant and Brett Sutton: “The physicians oppos’d this thoughtless humour of the people with all their might, and gave out printed directions … advising the people to continue to use still the utmost caution … notwithstanding the decrease of the distemper.”

However, as we see on our television screens: “It was all to no purpose … They were impenetrable by any new terrors, and would not be persuaded but that the bitterness of death was pass’d.”

A hint, too, for the no COVID states’ borders: they stay closed much longer than the impatience of the recovering cities.

Political power shakes but doesn’t shift

And here, in Defoe’s 300-year-old book, is our Prime Minister Scott Morrison: “The court concern’d themselves so little, and that little they did was of so small import, that I do not see it of much moment to mention any part of it here.”

The lord mayor, on the other hand, was “continually in the streets, and at places of the greatest danger”. Dan Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian press conference-style, he “had a low gallery built on purpose in his hall, where he stood … when any complaint came to be heard”.

As soon as the danger was passed, however, the court moved back to the city and, as the nursery rhyme tells us, within a year had its breakthrough hose-holding moment when “the grand old duke of york” marched his men up and down to fight the Great Fire of London.

About that next bottle of wine…

Here’s the last warning: not me, says Defoe, but plenty kept “the spirits always high and hot with cordials and wine … and so became a sot for all his life after”.