The 1918 influenza pandemic

It is clear that no matter how the second wave developed in New Zealand, it was many times more deadly than any previous influenza outbreaks. No other event has killed so many New Zealanders in so short a space of time. While the First World War claimed the lives of more than 18,000 New Zealand soldiers over a four-year period, the second wave of the 1918 influenza epidemic killed almost 8600 people in less than two months.

Influenza in institutions

Death did not occur evenly throughout the country. Some communities were decimated; others escaped largely unscathed.

Maori suffered heavily: their overall rate of death was 42.3 per thousand people, seven times that of Europeans. In one community, Mangatawhiri in the Waikato, about 50 out of 200 local Maori died. Whina Cooper recalled similar suffering at Panguru, Hokianga:

Everyone was sick, no one to help, they were dying one after the other. My father was very, very sick then. He was the first to die. I couldn't do anything for him. I remember we put him in a coffin, like a box. There were many others, you could see them on the roads, on the sledges, the ones that are able to drag them away, dragged them away to the cemetery. No time for tangis.

But there was an exception. Mortality amongst Maori on the East Coast of the North Island was, according to historian Geoffrey Rice, ‘much less than expected in comparison with other North Island districts’. This may have been because they had received partial immunity from the first wave which was reportedly widespread in the district during August and September.

The overall rate of death for Europeans was 5.8 per thousand people. But in some communities it was well above the national average. 

Featherston military camp

The most striking of these was in the isolated coalmining district of Nightcaps and Wairio in Western Southland. Its rate of 45.9 deaths per thousand people rivalled that of many Maori communities.

Geoffrey Rice notes that ‘the only places where the mortality showed any uniformity were the military camps’. He describes them as ‘by far the most dangerous places to be in 1918’. At the Featherston and Trentham camps the rates were 22.6 and 23.5 deaths per thousand people respectively.

Rice comments that even the best answers of the variations in mortality rates ‘must remain to some extent speculative’, but concludes that:

The underlying cause of extreme variations in deaths was almost certainly the quirky nature of the patterns of partial immunity left by the mild first wave, together with the unpredictable behaviour of a virulent and rapidly mutating virus.

See also: death rates in suburbs and counties of the North Island and South Island