"All the people in Newcastle, all on the train wore these face-masks": The Spanish flu pandemic in Les Murray's "Fredy Neptune" (1999)

In Les Murray's 1999 verse novel "Fredy Neptune", Fred Boettcher returns to his native Australia from the Eastern Mediterranean theater where he has drifted around during World War One: "Coming home, I walked into a masquerade. / All the people in Newcastle, all on the train wore these face-masks / of white cotton gauze, some dirtied with tobacco and words. / I had to, too." Murray wrote in the 1990s of Boettcher's return, eight decades earlier, to a country requiring face makes during the "Spanish flu" pandemic. According to Wikipedia, the first wave of the pandemic reached Australia in July 1918; the third, much more deadly wave arrived in January 1919. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 December 2022)