In Les Murray's 1999 verse novel "Fredy Neptune", Fred Boettcher returns to his native Australia from the Eastern Mediterranean theater where he has drifted around during World War One: "Coming home, I walked into a masquerade. / All the people in Newcastle, all on the train wore these face-masks / of white cotton gauze, some dirtied with tobacco and words. / I had to, too." Murray wrote in the 1990s of Boettcher's return, eight decades earlier, to a country requiring face makes during the "Spanish flu" pandemic. According to Wikipedia, the first wave of the pandemic reached Australia in July 1918; the third, much more deadly wave arrived in January 1919. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 December 2022)
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