A ‘Black Wednesday’ Night in Sydney.

Southern Cross, Volume 9, Issue 53, 22 March 1902, Page 3

A ‘Black Wednesday ’ Night in Sydney.

WITH APOLOGIES TO LIFE.

We live and learn—sometimes something in regard to ourselves Had anyone told Sydney five years ago that five years hence it would be indulging in a day of humiliation and prayer for rain, as it did on the 26th February, he might or might not have been believed, according to the temperament of the city at the time. Had he, however, told the same celebrated community that five years hence it would turn universal ratcatcher in the face of the deadly peril of plague from these rodents, as it did on the night of the sth inst., he would have been laughed to scorn, and have been described as ‘ ratty ’ himself. Yet, even as misfortune makes strange bed-fellows, so does it make strange bed-clothes, aud thus we see an appeal on behalf of the Municipal Council of Sydney for a simultaneous descent on rats of that city, and the patrol cart of the authorities doing the round in advance, door to door, distributing poison to every householder who will take it. The whole thing is grotesque, in a way pathetic, and is, in the light of past experiences with this dreaded disease, weird and uncanny in the extreme. The call to arms of the citizens may or may not be responded to—we have yet to see if three volunteer rat-catchers are as good as one pressed one —and is chiefly valuable, one should think, as a suggestion of what should be done, not on a single night, but on night after night for an entire month. And the patrol cart distributing poison gratuitously house to house, is highly reminiscent of another and more awful cart which is told of by De Foe in the ‘ Great Plague of London,’ when the carter worked with a lantern and a muffler over his mouth, which latter he removed occasionally to utter the cry— ‘ Bring out your dead.’ Also, it is suggestive of something in relation to the Poisons Act, which, apparently the authorities have

suspended in the belief that better a ratless city than anything, even if purchased at the price of a few corpses of human beings, who, finding the poison more useful than Hamlet’s imaginary bodkin, cheated the rodents of their last meal by taking it themselves. Apart from all this is the suspicion that the authorities have made the most serious question associated with the plague a problematical one, to be decided by the community at large in quite a voluntary way. The best experts on the matter declare that the cleansing of the premises is good, but the killing of the rats best of all, and the Health Department of Sydney has said, ‘ Kill the rats, and you kill the plague.’ Does it not seem like approaching the difficult sideways when the authorities, while they make the cleansing of prescribed areas compulsory, leave the killing ot the rats to voluntary effort, and the work is about the most distasteful possibly to imagine P