Infant deaths peak at 200 per 1000 babies in 1880s Adelaide, making 'city of stenches' worse than London's worst
Horse transport, dominating King William Street, Adelaide, in about 1884 (above) was dumping 70 tonnes of excrement and urine of the city's streets every day and created a dust as "aerial sewage".
Image by Ernest Gall,courtesy State Library of South Australia
Infant deaths in Adelaide during the 1880s peaked at just deaths 200 per 1000 babies. This was the highest rate ever recorded anywhere in Australia, in city or country. It was much higher than the overall rate for London and its most wretched slums of Whitechapel or Lambeth.
The storm created among Adelaide’s doctors, politicians and the public by this alarming figure was heightened by it coming from an outsider: Victoria’s government statistician Henry Hayter, writing in the Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Adelaide in 1878. With about 1,200 babies dying in South Australia every year, Adelaide was labelled “King Herod’s very own city” – referring to the slaughter of infants – by the local newspapers.
The situation didn’t improve for 20 years. The infant death rate for 1898 was nearly the worst ever recorded. In the very hot December 1896, 80 people died in the city and half were infants.
The city of Adelaide’s medical officer Dr John Sprod maintained in 1889 that infant “deaths due to preventable causes [is] exceedingly low.” But the three fatal Ds regarded as the “nonpreventable deaths” were diarrhoea, dentition (teething) and debility (physical weakness). But these were indeed preventable if public health factors such as ill-ventilated houses, overcrowded bedrooms, dirty feeding bottles were addressed.
In an overall sense, Adelaide wasn’t crowded with a hectare of park for every 45 people – compared to London with one hectare of park for even 2,500 or Melbourne with one for every 270.
But Adelaide was as much the “city of stenches” as the city of churches. In front of Adelaide Goal off North Terrace, in a large olive plantation, the city's excrement was dumped each night from open carts– something already abandoned elsewhere The parklands elsewhere were used as rubbish tip emitting "noxious effluvia" and breeding myriads of flies.
City streets were unsealed and macadamised with layers of graded stone – a British system that and only worked in cool wet climates. In Adelaide’s summers, the quartzite rock dust lay thick on the streets and was stirred by the slightest breeze and every passing cart. It mantled the pavements and passersby with a gritty and disgusting yellowish-grey deposit. The dust with infected with micro organisms from about 70 tonnes of dung and urine dumped on the streets every day by horse transport.
Thomas Borthwick, city’s medical officer in 1902, pointed to the dust as menace to health. “It pollutes our houses and our food with objectionable putrefactive matter ... There can be no doubt that pulmonary tuberculosis, typhoid fever and other diseases are carried in this manner. The offensive dust has been aptly termed ‘aerial sewage’.”
That aerial sewage was certainly getting into the churns of Adelaide’s milk supply that wasn’t pasteurised or chilled in bulk. Adelaide residents relied for milk on 60-plus cow keepers whose animals were kept in dirty conditions. One city councillor memorably defined the milk on sale as “an emulsion of cow dung”.