Death of Angels

This could have been the headline of a Brisbane newspaper in 1905 if not for the sacrifice of two Maryborough nurses.

In the port town of Maryborough, Queensland a family of poverty-stricken children dies from and unknown but highly contagious disease. By the time it was diagnosed as being the deadliest of all plagues, the airborne Pneumonic Plague, it had claimed the lives of five children, a good Samaritan neighbour and two nurses within a matter of days.

The Health Department of Queensland sent specialized plague nurses from Brisbane to escort the Maryborough nurses by train to the Colmslie Plague Hospital in Brisbane. Knowing that they had now contracted the air borne disease that would spread to the train passengers and the Brisbane population, Nurse Cecelia Bauer and Nurse Rose Wiles refused. They locked themselves in a ward and rejected assistance from the plague nurses.

The disease died out with them, but their bravery and sacrifice has been rewarded with obscurity.

This novel brings us into the modern-day events where pneumonic plague is one of the major bio-terrorism threats. So little is known about this disease that political and medical research is being carried out around the globe.

In this story a fictitious military doctor representing one of these groups arrives in Maryborough to secretly harvest DNA samples from the human remnants of the pneumonic plague victims. Seeing the event through the eyes of a local amateur historian, he becomes a champion for the public recognition of these two angels of mercy.