From plague to plague: the art of the pandemic diary

When the body politic contracts a fever, the writing desk becomes a confessional, a ward, and sometimes a grave. Plagues have always produced diaries, not because authors sought to capitalise on misfortune, but because isolation forces an interior monologue into legible form. The page becomes the only neighbour permitted to enter the sickroom. From the bubonic horror of 1665 to the strange, screen-lit boredom of 2020, the diary has remained humanity's most honest genre for reckoning with mass death.

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722 but set six decades earlier, established the template. Written by a London saddler named H.F. who chooses to remain as the city empties, the book reads as a found document, its sentences stitched together from parish bills, household inventories, and overheard rumours. It taught later writers something essential: that the pandemic diary does not chronicle events so much as texture them, rendering an epidemic as a sequence of small domestic shocks, an overturned cart in a deserted street, a neighbour's bell that no longer rings.

Two centuries later, Albert Camus's The Plague (1947) inverted the form. Where Defoe's narrator watches from inside the cordon, Dr. Rieux refuses the consolations of heroism and simply records cases, deaths, and recoveries with bureaucratic patience. The novel is a diary without ever quite calling itself one, a chronicle that refuses the rhetoric of catastrophe. Its famous opening line announces a method rather than a moral.

The pivot from historical plague literature to contemporary pandemic writing is not as clean as it sounds. Every generation believes its plague is unprecedented, and every generation is correct in the narrow sense that the textures of dread shift with the available media. Yet the formal innovations pioneered in earlier centuries, the found document, the clinical chronicle, the epistolary confession, kept reappearing through the COVID years, often stripped of literary pretension and turned instead into Substack entries, podcast monologues, and Twitter threads that read, against their authors' wishes, like the unedited notebooks of a sick century.

The long shadow of 1665: Defoe and the birth of plague literature

Defoe's H.F. is a figure of perpetual slight embarrassment. He has no grand thesis to advance, no theological argument to lodge against the providential. He watches the dead-cart rumble past, notes that a particular apothecary has raised his prices, and on one occasion describes the strange sound of a city whose dogs have stopped barking. The diary's authority comes precisely from its refusal of authority. Where contemporary pamphlets fulminated against sin, H.F. tallies.

Scholars have long argued about how much of the Journal is fiction. Defoe was five in 1722; he could not have witnessed the events he describes. But the question of authenticity misses the point. What Defoe invented was not a memoir but a mode, a way of letting the pandemic speak through the cracks of an ordinary mind. When Melbourne's residents emerged from one of the world's longest COVID lockdowns in late 2021, the texts that resonated most were not the polemics of epidemiologists but the modest, almost embarrassed journals kept by parents describing what their children ate for dinner on day 184 of confinement.

The English tradition carried the form forward through Samuel Pepys, whose London diary of 1665, written contemporaneously rather than retrospectively, provided Defoe with much of his raw material. Pepys buried his wine in the garden, kissed strangers behind the theatre, and went to bed with the cheese. His plague entries are incidental among anxieties about money and marriage, and that incidental quality may be the diary's most durable legacy. Plague literature at its best is not about plague.

Camus's La Peste and the mid-century pandemic imagination

Camus's plague is not bacterial. The bacillus in The Plague is whatever event forces a community to confront its own capacity for banality. Dr. Rieux's unflappable case-tallying mirrors the bureaucratic indifference that the novel sees as both necessary and damning. The book became a bestseller again in March 2020, when readers in Sydney and Brisbane ransacked the shelves of Dymocks and Readings looking for a manual.

The Camus revival during COVID revealed an unexpected fact: mid-century existentialism had aged better than its critics predicted. Tarroux, the journalist who insists on filing daily bulletins from the quarantine city, anticipates the Substack essayist with unsettling accuracy. His chapters are short, ironic, and acutely aware that the act of writing itself is a form of resistance. Rieux's famous conclusion, that there are more things to admire in men than to despise, became a sentence that Australian readers, emerging from lockdowns that had strained marriages and emptied theatres, tended to underline.

This mid-century lineage also explains the curious pandemic cinema of the same era. The Seventh Seal and Panic in the Streets both used contagion as a stage for theological or civic confrontation. The pandemic diary, in this tradition, is not a private document but a public ledger, and its readers are not consumers but witnesses.

Lockdown diaries from Melbourne to Madrid

The 2020s produced their own glut. Australian writers including Charlotte Wood, whose The Weekend had eerily anticipated isolation, found themselves keeping notebooks less for posterity than for sanity. Brisbane-based essayist Trent Dalton published fragments in The Weekend Australian that became a kind of communal diary of dread, a format familiar to readers of Polish pandemic writing, where the diary essay migrated to international blogs including Games of Hunger and became a recognisable genre.

What distinguished the lockdown diary from earlier models was its multimedia promiscuity. H.F. could only write. Rieux could only write. The contemporary diarist also photographs the sourdough starter, records the Zoom argument, and posts the screenshot of the case count. The Australian market embraced the form with particular enthusiasm: independent bookshops in Fitzroy and Newtown hosted launch events for pandemic journals whose authors had never met their editors in person.

Recurring motifs in Australian lockdown diaries:

The contested five-kilometre radius as moral compass
The sourdough starter treated as household member
The Friday night Zoom drink as substitute for hospitality
The contested division of domestic labour
The daily case count read aloud at breakfast

The Melbourne lockdown of 2021, stretching past 260 cumulative days by year's end, produced a sub-genre all its own. Diary entries from Carlton and Brunswick tended toward dark humour and meticulous meal-planning. Suburban diaries from the outer fringe documented the particular loneliness of a quarter-acre block. The diaries converged on a single, often repeated realisation: that the pandemic was not a parenthesis but a window onto a social order that had always been more unequal and more fragile than the suburban façade suggested.

Music in isolation: scores for an empty world

Plagues silence music. They also inspire some of the most interior compositions of any era. Purcell wrote his funeral music for Queen Mary during a London plague outbreak. Jóhann Jóhannsson's scores for films including Sicario and Arrival carried the loneliness of vast, depopulated spaces that, after 2020, listeners found uncomfortably familiar. An extended consideration of the sound of solitude: an appreciation of Jóhann Jóhannsson's film scores captures the mood that the Icelandic composer turned into a vocation.

Australian music reflected the new condition with characteristic laconicism. Nick Cave's Ghosteen, completed during Melbourne's 2020 lockdown, abandoned the rock band format for an extended, almost liturgical meditation on loss. The album was recorded in his Brighton home, mixed in Berlin, and released without tour dates because the world that tour dates serve had temporarily ceased to exist. Perth-based composer Elena Kats-Chernin wrote solo piano cycles intended for an absent listener, premiered online to audiences who watched from kitchen tables in Surry Hills and Sandringham.

Notable Australian pandemic recordings:

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Ghosteen (2019/2020), a meditation on grief completed during lockdown
Elena Kats-Chernin, Unsent Letters, solo piano cycle streamed from a Surry Hills apartment
Paul Kelly and Charlie Owen, Please Leave Your Light On, folk sessions recorded in isolation
The Wiggles' socially distanced Social Distancing, pop rendered as public service
Big Bash League crowds replaced by recorded cheers, sport as found sound

The recording industry noticed. Streaming numbers for ambient and solo piano music rose sharply across the Australian market during 2020 and 2021, with genres that had previously occupied a small shelf at JB Hi-Fi becoming default listening for commuters who no longer commuted. The pandemic diary, in this sense, did not need to be written. It could be listened to.

The future of pandemic testimony

What remains when the masks come off? Plague literature has a long half-life: Defoe's Journal circulated for two centuries before it found its modern readership; Camus's Plague was rediscovered again and again, in 1986, in 2003, and most recently in 2020. The diaries written during COVID will follow a similar pattern. They will be ignored for a decade, then rediscovered by a generation that has forgotten the texture of the dread.

The form itself will likely evolve. Already, diarists are experimenting with mixed media, video, podcast, newsletter, and the boundaries between private confession and public performance have blurred almost beyond recovery. Australian writers, working from a market that prizes informality and mistrusts pretension, may produce some of the most distinctive examples. The diarist who keeps a notebook through the next catastrophe will have more tools than H.F., but will face the same task: to render the unsayable as something that can be read on the train home from a Sydney office, where the city outside the window is, for now, mercifully full.