by John Wells
When I was looking for information on the Walhalla cricket ground story I came across the terrible story of the death of Sarah Hanks.
She died of smallpox on March 23, 1869. The legends have it that it is her isolated grave near the track up to the cricket ground, and there is an historical plaque to say so, but there are reasons to doubt this.
Sarah Hanks was born Sarah Jones on August 18, 1846. She grew up in the Fitzroy area, and in 1867 she was living in a boarding house in La Trobe Street, coincidentally near one of the hot spots of the 1868-69 smallpox outbreaks. She met a miner from Walhalla, William Hanks, who is said to have had a young son, and they were married in Fitzroy on February 19 1869. I have no idea of the little bloke’s mother’s name or status, but he did not appear in any formal records.
Both sets of parents were alive and present on the happy day and no-one could have had any inkling that tragedy was very close. Both listed Fitzroy as their address but William also listed Stringer’s Creek. He spent 17 days in Fitzroy with his bride and then they took a coach up the very rough track to Shady Creek. That put them northeast of Warragul and due north of Traralgon. Here they seem to have switched to horseback. The whole journey took three days.
They had their honeymoon in the Grand Junction Hotel but on March 15 she developed a rash which led her to see Dr Hadden, who decided she had smallpox. His partner, Doctor Boone, confirmed this.
Smallpox was a much-feared disease with a high mortality rate, and so when Sarah was diagnosed panic hit the tight little community, with Stringer’s Creek its only water source and with it having already suffered a cholera outbreak, the news of Sarah’s affliction spread like wildfire. There were bout 700 people living almost on top of each other.
The first tragedy of this was that it seems her smallpox might have been a bad case of chickenpox, still a serious ailment for adults back then, but nowhere near as dangerous as smallpox.
What followed seems extraordinary.
The Grand Junction was placed under police guard, and other police were sent to find an isolated cottage that could become a smallpox ‘hospital. The Britannia diggings a short way north of the town were by now deserted, and there were several cottages still in reasonable repair.
William Hanks, quarantined in the hotel, heard of the plan to take Sarah away to the Britannia diggings and he was having none of it. He and Sarah escaped through a window and made it to William’s own cottage. They were located almost immediately, but not before a swarm of angry miners had prepared to attack the hotel.
The magistrate then ruled that Hanks’ cottage must be quarantined, and an eight feet high fence was built around it. There were two small sheds built on the fenceline, one inside the wall and the other outside, with a gate between them. Those entering the cottage area had to undress in the outer shed, hop through the fence and dress in clean clothes stored there, reversing the process on the way out.
The only ‘nurse’ that could be found to help was Mary Kybred, an elderly widow (though she is reported to have had a nine-year-old son) who was now a fossicker for old but who had worked in a London hospital, though not, apparently, as a nurse.
Sarah declined rapidly, even with Mary Kybred and William nursing her as best they could. Her screams could be heard well outside the compound. On March 23 she died, and that brought a whole new set of problems.
No-one wanted her buried near the town. Indeed, they did not want her body even carried through the town. Four volunteers were found to take Sarah to a specially-deep grave on a hilltop north of the town. There was no Minister, and no service. When she had been buried they stripped off all their clothing and bathed with carbolic, the disinfectant of the day. A strong wooden fence was built around the grave to seal it off.
William Hanks and Mary Kybred (no word of the mystery boy) were then forcibly moved to the Britannia diggings and placed under strict quarantine for six weeks, under a constant police guard. After six weeks it became obvious they had not been infected, and they were released. In the meantime the Hanks cottage was burned down, with everything in it.
The town committee that had been overseeing all this then decided to pay William Hanks 75 pounds and to build him a new cottage. They also gave Mary Kybred a ticket to Tasmania, costing 20 pounds. Neither William nor Mary stayed in the community, and why would they?
Residents were asked to get themselves vaccinated and they were mostly very anxious to do so. Here was an effort to make the vaccinations compulsory for the Chinese, most of whom were growing food for Walhalla in small plots along the creek. They were singled out and many believed they were the vectors of the disease, though it was quite apparent they’d nothing to do with it.
Now, the total terror the town felt might well have been entirely unnecessary. We’ll come back to Dr Hadden, but the symptoms of smallpox and chickenpox were very similar (I’m using the past tense because, at least officially, smallpox has been eradicated from this world). Hadden trained as an apothecary in Ireland but passed himself off as a doctor on the Castlemaine goldfields.
He was gaoled after a woman in childbirth was found dead, with the baby dead in her womb and the ‘doctor’ asleep on the same bed, fully intoxicated. He did three years of hard labour for manslaughter and neglect, but when he came to Walhalla he was again practising as a doctor.
With his three-year sentence completed in 1858 there comes an eight year period in which we know not where he was but in 1866 he was in Walhalla as Dr Hadden. He did not live long after the Hanks tragedy. Sarah died on March 23, 1869. Hadden died on May 29, 1869, only two months later.
He had boarded a coach to come back to Walhalla, in a very intoxicated state, and soon fell asleep. The other passengers became worried about him, with good reason, because he was dead. The rather casual medical procedures of the day led to his death being listed as “unknown”.
Did Sarah Hanks die of smallpox or chickenpox, which was dangerous enough at the time? Could she have been saved with competent medical care? Were the people in the community justified in their attitude to the family? And, lastly, is that anomalous mark on the track to the cricket ground really her grave?