Details of an outbreak of deadly Spanish Flu aboard the Australian troopship HMAT Boonah in 1918 are revealed in the latest edition of Progenitor , journal of the Genealogical Society of the Northern Territory (GSNT).
With more than 900 soldiers aboard , the ship left Adelaide on October 22 bound for the war ; on arriving at Durban , South Africa, word came through of the Armistice , so arrangements were made for the ship to return home .
While tied up in Durban , stevedores , some unknowingly infected with Spanish Flu , loaded supplies and slept aboard the ship . Five days on the return voyage , during rough seas and cold weather , the troops in close confinement , flu symptoms began to appear .
The first casualty was Sergeant Arthur Charles Thwaites who jumped overboard on the night of December 9 , a Court of Enquiry found that he committed suicide most likely as a result of being delirious from the flu .
When the ship arrived in Fremantle on December 12, more than 300 cases had been reported , authorities refused permission for the soldiers to disembark because of the fear about the raging global pandemic , not then evident in WA .
Eventually nearly 300 sick men were taken to the quarantine station at Woodman Point , south of Fremantle . There were three deaths the first day at the station . The situation continued to deteriorate with more deaths and more than 20 nursing and medical staff becoming infected. By December 20, there were more than 600 soldiers at the station .
The magazine account says conditions for those still aboard the ship were believed to be deplorable . Public outrage grew against refusal of the immigration authorities to bring all troops ashore , the ship described as a " disease stricken cubby-hole of a floating hell. " There were threats to storm the ship and bring the sick men to shore .
After nine days of "acrimony" , despite quarantine restrictions , the ship sailed east , another 17 cases discovered between Albany and Adelaide , the remainder disembarked at Torrens Island quarantine station .
A total of 27 soldiers and four nurses died at Woodman Island and were buried there .
One of those aboard the ship was Vernon Lionel Marsh , born in Darwin , who apparently put up his age , making out he was over 18 , to enlist; he survived the ordeal aboard HMAT Boonah and signed up for WWll . At one stage he managed the Memorial Club in Alice Springs in the early l950s .
The Boonah Tragedy , by Ian Darroch , was published in 2004 . The Boonah was sold to a German company in 1925 and torpedoed by a British submarine in WWll. The article , by Garey Neenan , says Spanish Flu infected about 500 million people between January 1918 and December 1920 , leading to 50-100 million deaths , or about four per cent of the world's population .
