Dr Wu Lien-teh, a Penang-born Cambridge medical alumnus of Chinese ethnicity who rose to prominence through his innovative public health efforts, based in Harbin, northern China, against a pandemic of pneumonic plague in Manchuria and Mongolia between December 1910 and March 1911, was the Director of National Quarantine Service in China between the years 1931 and 1937. In that plague outbreak, which originated among marmot hunters in Eastern Siberia, there were 60,000 deaths with no survivals, and public buildings including temples were used as temporary quarantine stations (Wu, 2007, p. 68).

Dr Wu’s delivery of the Fifth George Ernest Morrison Lecture in Ethnology in Canberra on 2 September 1935 was mentioned in a Broken Hill newspaper (Barrier miner, 4 September 1935, p. 3), when he defended the quality of Chinese residents in Australia as superior to the commonly held Australian perception of them as being no better than vegetable growers and laundry operators and workers. Dr Wu’s lecture is published in its entirety in the Australian National University journal East Asian history in December 2007 (Wu, 2007, pp. 61-77).

At the time of Dr Wu’s Morrison Lecture, he noted that there were only 20,000 Chinese residing in Australia; their numbers had been steadily declining since 1881, when there were 38,533 Chinese, of whom only 259 were women (Wu, 2007, p. 75). The speaker did not criticise directly the White Australia Policy. Instead he appeared to express greater pride in the professional and academic achievements of Australian-born Chinese men and women than in the sudden fortunes of the Chinese gold diggers (Wu, 2007, p. 75).

Due to the Sino-Japanese War, Dr Wu returned to Penang in 1937 and practised benevolent medicine there until his death at the age of 81 on 21 January 1960.

White Australia Policy, which began in 1901 through the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act, did not cause Australia to cease diplomatic and trade relations with China, which until October 1911 had its last imperial dynasty, that of Qing. Most notable was the warmly received visit of Commissioner Hwang Hon Cheng (family name in Cantonese pronunciation is Wong) to all States in Australia except Western Australia between late October 1906 and January 1907. As reported in a Tasmanian newspaper, Commissioner Hwang’s visit was given a grand welcome by the Chinese community, and it had the strategic plan of establishing the office of Qing consul-general in Melbourne, whose expenses would be substantially covered by the local Chinese residents (The Mercury, 28 May 1907, p. 8). In the same news article it was also mentioned that apart from mainland Australia, Commissioner Hwang also visited Tasmania, New Zealand and the Dutch East Indies.

In other words, the Immigration Restriction Act was not intended as a political offensive against China, but was instituted as a means of socio-economic control of Australian society. It was basically a question of sovereignty, given the real impact of a rapid, swelling and uncontrolled demographic shift during the Gold Rush years of mid- to late 19th century. However, the success of Commissioner Hwang’s visit caused some Australian politicians to make public statements that the Immigration Restriction Act should be revised if Australia were to benefit from trade relations with China.

Racial restrictions in immigration to Australia were polarised between the needs of social hegemony and those of economic expediency, both of which were considered by politicians and businessmen to be essential to the nation building of the young Federation. Among ordinary Australians, however, the main concern was to maintain and to develop an European society that would necessarily regard Asian cultures from the populous north as alien and incompatible. Such cultural concern is still very much alive today in postwar Australia transformed by multiculturalism, given that Australia as a Western democracy would cease to exist if non-European values were ever to gain ascendancy over traditional European norms and institutions through a radical demographic displacement of white Australians. If Australia were to one day become an Asian majority nation, whether it would still be able to continue with the Westminster system in its true spirit would be very doubtful indeed.

In January 1930 Li Ming Yen was appointed Consul-General by China’s Foreign Minister Wang. The Consulate-General would be based in Melbourne (Chronicle, 23 January 1930, p. 46).

Because of the institutionalised racism against non-Europeans in Australian quarantine policy in the past, Asian heritage and history are relegated to the region of contested ground at the site of the former North Head Quarantine Station. In its current incarnation as Q Station since April 2008, which is a hotel entity with a museum inside the former Luggage Store (A15-17) at the old wharf on Spring Cove, there is a complete absence of memorialisation of past non-European presence on site. This state of affairs is in total contrast to the active and respectful memorialisation of Chinese heritage and history at the former Angel Island Immigration Station, which once served as a major quarantine station to protect the San Francisco community from dangerous infectious diseases. However, as any critical analysis of its history will show, Angel Island was also used as an institutional tool to assert the white supremacy of American society between 1910 and 1940.

At North Head, not to name white supremacy for what it is through memorialisation of past racist injustice is to allow its spectre to linger in the continued life of the site, even if the Quarantine Station now only exists as an aesthetic reduction of its former self as a public health institution of great national significance.

In its essence, public health operates according to the moral conviction and the ethical principle that the well-being of a community is more important than the needs, desires and comfort of an individual. In ontological terms, the interests of Mitdasein prevail over Dasein as an individuated being. Indeed for Dasein to exist, Mitdasein has to be first protected from devastating agents of death such as smallpox and bubonic plague. There are no individuals without community; and there are no communities without humanity. Hence quarantine is about preservation of humanity; its directions and operations have direct impact on the destiny of human civilisation. Reduced to the contingency of the infected body, Dasein‘s Geist faces a severe threat in the form of incapacitation through delirious suffering, with death already lurking around the corner to snuff out the weakened flame of life of the seriously sick without warning. With the darkening of the lumen naturale of the human Geist in a deadly illness such as smallpox, philosophy capitulates. If the afterlife is true, Geist, whether interpreted as mind or spirit, perhaps cannot wait for its final release from the fatally diseased body into an unknown freedom. There is a reason why a lofty philosophical word in the German language such as Geist can also mean “ghost”, which denotes conscious existence after the physical body.

The Third Class Precinct is positioned between the First Cemetery in the gully below and the Second Cemetery on the hill behind. In fact the Third Class Precinct was built in the late 1830s – then called the Healthy Ground – on the side of a hill facing west and overlooking Spring Cove. The west, which is where the sun sets, is associated with death in many cultures. Hence not only the quarantine cemeteries – and that includes the Third Cemetery on top of the same hill in what is now part of the North Head Sanctuary -, but the entire site of the Quarantine Station is appropriately positioned facing west given that it cannot escape the reality of the death in its historic role in isolating and curing life-threatening infectious diseases.

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.

The historical events in southeastern China and in the outlying island of Taiwan across the strait from that part of China caused Chinese understanding of quarantine to be frontier-related. In other words, quarantine serves the political purpose of stabilising the chaos and the at times deadly conflicts of frontier life. Given this history, it comes as no surprise that a leading journal on quarantine in today’s China is called Chinese journal of frontier health and quarantine, because the historicity of the Chinese understanding and interpretation of quarantine is founded upon the two concepts in the journal title being linked together.

Space, or the spatiality of being, has no meaning unless it is understood as place – space as existence for Dasein. In quarantine, the Dasein of internees takes on a sense of urgency in its thrownness (Geworfenheit) in the extraordinary being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) that the quarantined state of being demands of them in the form of spatio-temporal regimentation. In the history of Australian quarantine as it relates to immigration, this regimentation was never purely medical, but was determined also by the contemporary politics of class, gender and race. 

In the history of the North Head Quarantine Station, oppression of internees by the health system of the time varied in degrees at different localities on site. It was not this or that locality in quarantine that determined the degree of oppression, but the type of internees isolated in a particular locality. In other words, human typology went hand in hand with quarantine locality, but the relation between the two was arbitrarily determined by the health authorities, who organised space in the physical environment of the quarantine station based on historical precedents, which inevitably involved trial and error, and contemporary expediency and policy demands.

With the advent of the White Australia Policy since 1901, the question of race entered into quarantine administration. National health, which quarantine was supposed to protect, also became a matter of racial hygiene. The scientific basis of quarantine became ideologically eroded by the irrationality of racism.