AustLit

'My grandfather was born in a pestilential year. Surviving the influenza pandemic that struck Australia in 1919, pa's mother called him the luckiest baby in town. Great-grandma Frances's own father had died from influenza in an earlier regional outbreak in the foothills of Australia's Snowy Mountains, so she likely felt the threat to her baby especially acutely. But 1919 was something extraordinary, an experience that, much like the war it followed, marked those generations who survived it. Months of border closures, quarantines, hospitals, anxiety, sickness arid death understandably helped 1919 enter Australian popular memory as the year of the 'Spanish flu'. No wonder Frances made sure her son understood his good fortune.' (Introduction)