Almost 185 years later, Trevor Lithgow, a biochemist at Monash University, and a student in his charge visited that same lovely stream, bent down at its bank with an empty flask attached to a broom pole, and retrieved a double shot of water. They bundled the sample into a bag and drove it back to examine at their laboratory.

There, they mixed the sample with a culture of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a rod-shaped bacteria, prevalent in nature, and one that colonises human stomachs and lines our intestines. It forms snot-like colonies, gobbling up and fermenting lactose to fuel itself. Usually, Klebsiella is harmless.

But in certain situations, Klebsiella can establish itself outside the gut – and then it becomes a threat. “You would not want to have an infection that’s driven by Klebsiella,” Lithgow says.

Klebsiella is defined by the World Health Organization as a “priority pathogen”. Some prefer to call it a “superbug”. It’s a bacteria that poses a major threat to global health because some strains have evolved to evade our most potent drugs, in a process known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR).