In 1923, the year when SS Taiyuan, owned by China Navigation Company, was quarantined at the North Head Quarantine Station for smallpox, there was a royal commission into the state of mental health facilities in New South Wales.

The hermeneutics of quarantine involves a study of how public health policies during the times of maritime quarantine were experienced by individuals as Dasein mired in the challenges to meaningfulness in daily life in the prolonged temporality of isolation and segregation, and often of deprivation, as imposed on them by the quarantine regulations of the countries of their destination. In (Maglen, 2006, 333), this divide between the successful application of quarantine policy and the unheimlich experience of quarantined individuals is highlighted in a historical analysis of quarantine station practices, both official and anomalous, in the states of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, where the British public health policy of using quarantine as the first line of defence against infectious diseases, coming mainly from outside the national boundary of the island continent of Australia, was implemented with force.