Malarial

Meanderings

By Judy Tudor

ONE of the strangest discoveries made by Territorian evacuees since they came South semi-permanently, and Australians became malaria conscious, is the importance that is attached, by the uninitiated, to this infuriating, but grossly exaggerated, piece of Tropicana- Tout medaille a son rovers —and so’s malaria!

I was first introduced to the advan tages thereof on board the “Macdhui” away back in 1936, approximately half an

Note: This amusing article was put into type early in 1944 and, in due course, submitted to the Censor. That Lord High Executioner, highly excited, for bade us to publish even one word of it.

The Censor is gone. Here is the article, exactly as he “wiped” it. You are invited to read it, and find the parts which would have given useful information to the prowling Nips.—Ed. “PIM.”

hour after leaving Sydney shores en route for my new and promised land. A cyclonic disturbance had “approached from the north” and grey seas and greyer skies met off the coast of New South Wales in a tumult of broken waves that sent the wallowing, ever-vibrating “Mac dhm into more soul and body stirring gyrations than I had imagined any ship could endure without sinking.

Ninety per cent, of the passengers promptly disappeared; and I with them.

Thirty-six hours later, in Brisbane, we emerged—lemon yellow, pale green, or <toty white, according to type. But of th °se people. I alone had been sea sick. All the rest had had fever.

At various times during the same voy a£e travel companions had dropped pff at inconvenient (convenient to them) intervals. “I can feel a dose of fever ° n ' they would say; and that was that—final and absolute. They were excused from subsequent proceedings. I perceived, too, that not only was it a desirable complaint to have up one’s sleeve (or lurking in one’s spleen, or wherever it does lurk, waiting the com mands of master or circumstance) but it of the Great Initiated —the Old Hands.

I burned with a fervent desire to become, swiftly and without fuss or bother, an Old Hand. a S en tleman who spent most of his time reading on deck.

He was a District Officer, heading for a ritoryP OSt mmy pros P ec tlve line of Ter t wF snd5 nd nonsense!” he roared, when I asked him timidly whether one caught ™ alana <l ui te easily. “These people S fter « themselves— the rpp-nVnriv Take **, ve grains of quinine ra?,f la f Iy ’ evcry day » and you bave no worry * Fve been here 15 years, 3nd I have never had a sign of it.”

Tilteen years and never a sign! “Good -f t h 2 u g h t. looking at him with a l6d » horror> “ The man must be was wrong about the five grains per day and don’t worry! I took my five grams with slavish precision, but it

availed me nothing. Within three months, as far as fever was concerned, I had been initiated into the ranks of the Old Hands.

As time went on, I passed through the stages of (a) being acutely aware of my interesting condition; (b) wondering if I were going to die of any complication such as cerebral malaria or blackwater; and finally reached (c) the stage of all good Territorians, where you have given up worrying about it (except when you have an attack) and accept the fact that if there is a malarial parasite with your name on it, well you’re for it; if there Is not—why worry!

MALARIA, having been headlined since the New Guinea campaign, natur ally has assumed new significance m the eyes of mainland Australians.

“Did you catch malaria?” they ask, in the same tones as they would employ to ask if you had ever been the inmate of a mad-house or a member of a leper

colony. One fair lady of whom we have heard, whose son has been returned to her suffering from tinea, tropical ulcers and some sort of pa ralvtic aftermath of scrub typhus, still remarks to her ma£r“ lg aP ‘° mb ' “ But

“the 2 the W °^

search further than the decree of the p 9We r s-that-be that evacuated planters wishing to return to Papua must first

prove that they are free of malaria. To do this they must go to one of Sydney’s crowded hospitals and have a blood-test. . .. , .

I still have vivid memories of once, in Salamaua, having a needle shoved into me for that very purpose. I had all the other symptoms of fever, but two hours

later the doctor returned to say, “I can’t find a darned thing—but that doesn’t prove very much- Sometimes you can’t.”

But maybe they have whipped up the blood-testing since then.

Another (apparent) delusion under which I have laboured all this time, is that a blood-test gives a positive reaction only when one is actually suffering from an attack of malaria; and at all other times the reaction is as negative as though one had been no nearer the jungle than King’s Cross.

ANY planter who is in the unenviable position of having to make applica tion to return to what, after all, he regards as his country, is probably over 45 years of age, and probably has cared for himself in New Guinea for many years. What, then, frightens the authori ties?

That he will infect someone else? That hardly seems important, when there are probably half a million natives suffering from malaria in the two New Guinea Territories.

That he will become a charge on the country? Neither does that make much sense: he may show a ctean bill of health in Sydney, but if he is met by an anophele mosquito on his return to his plantation, he might well be suffering the worst attack of fever in his history within a week or 10 days.

The Army has not found a sure-fire cure for it. Malaria, like murder, will out —and it does. I met a soldier down from New Guinea on leave some weeks ago.

Nope—he didn’t get malaria: he took atebrin. He went on up the country and one day, as he was walking down the street of his home town, the whole place went into a steep slide, and then a tail spin. The local Army medico knew noth ing of malaria, so he tipld the lad cautiously to take two atebrin tablets, at suitable intervals, no more, and put him on a train for the nearest military hos pital. There our Army-medicated soldier had as pretty an attack of fever as any I have seen happen in the New Guinea bush, without benefit of military or any one else.

Malaria is an extremely debilitating disease: it has some mighty unpleasant complications; it lowers the efficiency, mental and physical; at times it induces a despondency bordering on the suicidal.

But notwithstanding these things, men and women have gone forth into fever ridden spots for countless generations; and, in spite of the worst anopheles could do, have done a good job- It is not suggested that a fever-ridden world is a pleasant place, or that the military authorities are wrong in the pre cautions they take in respect of personnel.

An army white-anted with malarial lethargy would be small use to anyone.

But the fact remains that with malaria, as other complaints, it is often a matter of mind over body, and the old dyed-in the-wool Territorian was of the mental make-up that accepted fever along with the other drawbacks of the life he chose to lead; and, although he counted it a curse, and did what he could about it, he was content to take that in preference to some of the corresponding plagues of civilisation.

By the same token, the basic desire of Territorians these days is that they will soon be permitted to indulge in their fever, and anything else their brand of existence includes, without the sanction of official flim-flam and red-tape. If there is any new cure for fever, most of them will “give it a go." If there is not, they’ll Joe content to take New Guinea “as is.”