Thousands of musicians, actors, stagehands, ticket-takers, and ushers found themselves idle overnight. Given six hours’ notice, theatre impresarios in Melbourne and Sydney scrambled to cancel shows and refund tickets. The Rigo Grand Opera Company paused its season after just three performances of Rigoletto; musicians postponed recitals indefinitely. While the order allowed restaurants, churches, and outdoor venues such as racetracks to remain open if attendees wore masks, it remained silent on the question of compensation for those affected by the closures.

Muriel Starr, c.1910-13, photograph: gelatin silver, toned; on mount. (photograph by Mina Moore/State Library of Victoria H38782/1223)

For a privileged minority, the compulsory break provided an opportunity to relax and recharge. Actor Frank Harvey planted a vegetable garden and grew a quarantine moustache. Actress Muriel Starr claimed she would use her downtime to study Shakespeare, though another report found the leading lady ‘boating, bathing, camping, walking, riding, swimming, golfing, playing tennis, dozing, reading, sewing; in fact, doing everything but working’. The modish Starr visited posh Melbourne nightspots in style, heeding expert advice with ‘an elegant face mask of pink chiffon, tied with baby-ribbon – a confection she had purchased at one of the most fashionable shops’.

For the vast majority of performing artists in Australia’s two largest cities, quarantine brought anxiety and straitened financial circumstances. Theatre managers in Sydney decried the shutdown as an ‘ill-advised and drastic action [that], if anything, is likely to accentuate any lurking spirit of panic’. In Melbourne, members of the Musicians’ Union and Theatrical Employees’ Union immediately called an emergency meeting. They demanded lost wages and pledged to stand united with theatre managers in asking the government for relief.

Petitioners in Melbourne emphasised that they were not seeking handouts. Musicians preferred to ‘battle through’, their union secretary argued, ‘rather than accept the assistance the Government now offers’. Yet the Victorian minister of public health’s stance against all public performances, even those held outdoors, made this impossible. After several councils in greater Melbourne organised outdoor events, the conservative minister had ordered their suspension. Flouting this pronouncement, the Musicians’ Union Orchestra then scheduled a fundraiser at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

In Sydney, groups such as the Scarlet Gaieties, a popular music revue, were giving outdoor shows without sanction. (The group’s usual theatre, now closed, was being used as a clinic for influenza inoculations.) Back in Melbourne, tensions mounted. When they closed the theatres, experts warned that the disease spread in close proximity, advising city-dwellers to seek out ‘open air – morning, afternoon and night if possible’. Yet tightly packed racetracks and churches remained open. If track aficionados and worshipers could congregate safely in masks, why shouldn’t art-lovers gather, too? ‘Apparently the germ of pneumonic influenza is particularly bitter against the gentle pantomime patron or picture lover,’ a critic of government policy sniffed, ‘for no suggestion has ever been made that those who visit the theatres might wear a gauze mask, and thereby prevent contagion.’

With the restrictions showing little promise of abatement, mutual antagonism between workers and government officials boiled over. The health minister sent a letter to the unions proposing that Victorian hospitals could hire out-of-work artists, conscripting them into a more ‘essential’ industry, a proposition that provoked widespread anger. ‘I should like to express the thanks and gratitude of myself and others of my profession to Mr. Bowser for his kind and generous offer to turn us all into hospital wardsmen,’ actor Frank Harvey wrote in a scathing letter to The Argus. ‘I should also like to assure Mr. Bowser that if, in the event of a short-sighted, misguided Government placing him temporarily out of employment, I would be delighted to offer him the position of my dresser.’

Frustrated by what they perceived as bad-faith negotiations, performing artists pointedly argued the government owed them a debt for their recent displays of patriotism. Not only had actors and singers made wartime fundraising appeals from the stages of their now-empty theatres, but these very venues employed hundreds of recently returned soldiers. Why should the government now drag its feet in offering relief?

A new insinuation: officials used public health policy to pursue an agenda of social reform. After all, churches had remained open; had theatres, music halls and public houses been targeted to curb purportedly immoral behaviour? ‘While one might tie up his face and listen to a sermon with perfect immunity,’ an observer in The Age acidly noted, ‘it would never do to let him tie up his face and listen to a comic song.’

Protestations culminated in a rally at Flinders Park on a Sunday afternoon in late February. Nearly two thousand Melburnians attended, including members of unions representing not only musicians and theatre employees but also liquor traders. The Liberty League, a libertarian group of anti-prohibitionists formed the previous year, had called the meeting, which the Trades Hall Council chaired. ‘It was a gross anomaly that many thousands of people should be prevented from following their lawful occupations,’ said the chairman of the Trades Hall Council, ‘while restaurant keepers, drapers and others were allowed to carry on business.’ What accounted for the distinction? ‘Wowserism!’ a voice called out, referring to the reform movement against moral turpitude in all its guises.

With quarantine closures approaching four weeks, calls to reopen society gathered momentum. Infection rates had slowed, while businessmen increasingly shared artists’ economic pain. As the Medical Journal of Australia cautioned that overly zealous polices threatened ‘to cripple industries and to upset the whole social machine’, plans were announced to reopen first public houses, and then theatres and concert halls.

The Australian public had no doubt missed their evening entertainment. Yet opening night, a Monday in mid-March, featured ‘no wild rush’ of patrons. ‘Fear of the latent germ may have had something to do with it,’ suggested a commentator in Table Talk, ‘but the habit of staying at home, inculcated for six weeks, had possibly more.’ Sporadic influenza outbreaks would lead to shorter periods of quarantine over the next eighteen months. By the end of the year, authorities had approved a fund to support those workers barred from employment by compulsory closures.

Our situation today may not be, in the strictest sense of the word, ‘unprecedented’. Parallels with the past – the speed with which so many artists found their lives turned upside down, the complexity of debates over how best to balance public safety with individual rights – are striking. But the contrasts are more striking still. Virtual platforms allow many performing artists to maintain their connection with an audience, and in some cases, an income stream. With the current shutdown affecting such broad swathes of Australia’s economy, the government today has more rapidly rolled out aid programs.

One thing, though, remains uncertain. In 1919 the performing arts bounced back fairly quickly. Our current economic pain may not compare with what awaits us. The story of how we will exit this current crisis remains to be told.