Trying to define the meaning of community in his home region, the hill country of Texas, President Lyndon Johnson concluded that: "there, people care when you're sick and cry when you die". Johnson's was not a bad marker for civility and compassion in the time of coronavirus. We sometimes celebrate our Australian community a bit mawkishly, whether when extolling Vegemite, singing "I Am Australian" or watching any other team beat Collingwood. Life in Texas' hill country was too raw for any such soft sentimentality.

A homely, heart-felt aphorism like LBJ's might serve us better than reading about plagues past. In fiction as in history, those stories are melancholy, miserable cautionary tales. No dragons are slain, no heroes created. No solace is offered to the better angels of our nature. As with 9/11, an unexpected catastrophe can show us just how thin and brittle the veneer of civilisation actually is.

Let us start with Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens (430BC). In his dry, knowing way (he recovered from the disease), Thucydides informs us that no device of men was of any help and that victims' sufferings "were greater than human nature can bear". "Fear of the gods or laws of men" dissipated, while "immediate pleasure and profit" subsumed any other pursuit. Athenians even tossed their family's corpses onto others' funeral pyres. Thucydides is so grim as to leave a reader wondering for a moment whether Margaret Thatcher had a point in declaring that "there is no such thing as society".

Moving on to the Black Death (1347), Boccaccio warns us that the uninfected took "a single cruel decision, namely to avoid and escape the sick and all their possessions". Charms and amulets were of no avail, while resort to drunkenness and debauchery (especially in the Pope's town of Avignon) failed to postpone the evil day. As the chronicler, Froissart, noted, "a third of the world died". None of our virus tracking charts assists us to imagine horror on that scale.

Absent social distancing, then as now, proximity to those affected posed the gravest threat. Working in a shelter feeding the homeless in Brussels taught me that nobody is really beyond your reach - but now they are. Defoe's diary of the 1665 London plague underlines a related issue, the strain of self-isolation: "I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither". Even with the salves of respirators and ICUs, we still find ourselves challenged to sustain a sense of community when all the usual bonds of community - faith, footy, Anzac marches, sausage sizzles, meals together - are prohibited.

The South African writer, Andre Brink, published a riff on the folly of trying to wall yourself in and contagion out (The Wall of the Plague, 1984). For Brink, selfish, arrogant cynics who vainly walled themselves in were comparable with whites walled in behind apartheid in South Africa. Generously, Brink resolved that the remedy for both groups was to treat them as sick people who needed to be healed with love and patience. After release from Robben Island, Nelson Mandela would have insisted on the same cure. Happily, our only such remedial action might be to shame those hoarding toilet paper.

The most celebrated plague text, now in great demand at bookshops, remains Albert Camus' The Plague (1947). Camus' novel was published only two years after the destruction of the most cohesive, coherent and wicked community in history, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft. The memory of that monstrosity suffuses every page of Camus' story.

"A dead rat lying in the middle of the landing", "with a gout of blood, like a red flower, on its tapering muzzle", here warns of impending disaster as did rumours of an odd 'flu in Wuhan at the turn of the year. A few weeks of official denials, buck-passing and fiddling with statistics are as familiar - and as futile - as the reliance on charms and amulets which Boccaccio ridiculed. As Camus drolly observes, "stupidity has a knack of getting its way".

Camus' Algerians stubbornly hang out to the "thought that everything still was possible to them" and "fancied themselves free" as their neighbours fell ill. They too would be flocking to Bondi Beach or wishing the football season had not been suspended. Then the gates of the town are locked, all correspondence with the outside world forbidden, and the locals abandoned to "drastic, clear-cut deprivation". At this stage the plague remains a bogey man or a bad dream; "a pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure". They are stranded, the people of Oran, without Zoom, smartphones, Skype for business or any idea of life beyond the walls.

We have not succumbed to casual sex and hard drinking as did survivors of the Black Death (or some Londoners during the Blitz). Some of us have heeded Camus' recommendations for mastering disaster, which emphasise love, service and understanding as cardinal virtues. Nobody stood in the streets of Oran to applaud Camus' laconic doctor hero, but they should have.

As for the sick, Camus maintains that they wrapped "themselves up in their malady with a sort of bemused hostility". Now those ill among us might demand more sympathy, even if Camus' "Isolation Camp" looks a bit like a nightmare version of a nursing home in lock-down. On our good days, we might hope that Australia is still small and insular enough for us to care when our compatriots are sick and cry when they die.