What we know as the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital was also used by the A.I.F. during the latter years of the First World War and while the appellation was rarely used, it was officially No. 5 Infectious Diseases Hospital.
What is not clear is when the A.I.F. started to use the hospital and just what its official status was – with one exception (and that where the cause of death is somewhat clouded), all of the six men died in 1918 after the Hospital Board reluctantly agreed to accept a small number of cases of cerebro-spinal meningitis.
The hospital was in civilian clothes properly known as the Queen’s Memorial Infectious Diseases Hospital (officially renamed as simply Fairfield in 1948).
Some histories of the site suggest that Queen Victoria asked that funds raised during the Jubilee celebrations of her 60th year on the throne in 1897 be used to help the sick.
Some £16,000 was raised by municipal levies in that year and the Victorian colonial Government granted 15 acres of land at Yarra Bend for the hospital, considered an ideal site isolated by the Yarra to the east and south and Merri Creek to the west. A Lunatic Asylum had existed nearby since the 1860s, the location selected for much the same reasons.
The hospital opened in 1904 with the funds for operations drawn from the Melbourne, Fitzroy, Brunswick Coburg, Richmond and St. Kilda councils. Each of these councils contributed to the upkeep of the hospital and had representatives on the Hospital Board, with ratepayers from their district entitled to be treated free of charge.
Other councils were required to pay for any of their residents who needed the use of the hospital (admission procedures required a written order from the Town Clerk of the municipality where the patient resided).
This arrangement caused something of a public outcry as one of the first six patients was a boy living in Northcote within a mile of the hospital who had contracted diphtheria and whose admission was delayed, some critics claiming that the Town Clerk of Northcote refused to agree to his admission as it was not clear who was to pay for the boy’s hospital fees.
An order for the boy’s admission was subsequently issued with the Town Clerk demanding an indemnity form be signed by his parents and doctor to reimburse the Council from any expenses and the boy was immediately removed to the hospital after a delay of five hours and operated on, but to no avail, the lad dying at 10 o’clock the same night.
(Northcote Council vainly tried to defend the actions of the Town Clerk, claiming that although the hospital had opened, the necessary forms for admission had not been received until after its previous meeting of the Council and that he had no power to act, two councillors in fact suggesting the matter was a ruse to force the Council to become a contributor to the financing of the facility).
Further public disquiet about the running of the hospital resulted in an inquiry being held in 1912 and an Act of Parliament was introduced in 1914 to establish a Board of Management and to have all councils contribute to the running of the hospital as well as providing funding from the State Government.
The Board was expanded in 1915 to include Northcote and Preston and minutes of Council meetings suggest Northcote’s share of the upkeep was £33 per quarter; Preston’s are noted alternatively as £12 or £15 while plans were also announced for a £25,000 upgrade of the facility (ultimately over £75,000 was spent).
In October of that year, the Board opposed suggestions that the hospital should accommodate cases of cerebro-spinal meningitis that had reached alarming proportions; it was noted that the Government and some 30 councils then comprised the Board. This was later overturned with the Government allowing special cases to be admitted with the proviso that patients could only be transported to in the hospital’s own ambulances.
Oddly enough, all the deaths, both of servicemen and civilians noted at the hospital are recorded in Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages under Clifton Hill rather than Fairfield.
