The novel coronavirus, now seared into our universal consciousness with the technical name of SARS-CoV-2, stalks us in every corner like a new plague. In attacking the way we breathe, when air (pneuma) is both life and spirit, this coronavirus and its variants are changing us. SARS-CoV-2, seemingly appearing out of nowhere in late 2019, eats away at the lungs of those who it chooses to kill. Unable to keep it out of our daily existence, the authorities are now resigning to the fate of universal infection, which will separate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. But sickness and death will not spare either of them when breakthrough infections and waning antibodies are scientific realities. 

The promise that those in power have given us is that through mass vaccinations, COVID-19 will become like the flu. Many will get sick; some will die; but most people are going to be okay. But in epidemiology, no one is actually sure that this situation of relative freedom, with some sacrifices of life, will be stabilised. What is certain, however, is that a global pharmaceutical governance will define our lives as we humans eke out our existence through vaccine boosters to counter our gradually fading immunity in face of the growing violence of the coronavirus mutants. Since that fateful day in late 2019, we are no longer free. Our Dasein is disease-being in the spiralling pandemic-endemic dialectics. 

Heidegger warned us never to equate being with security. Sein, in fact, is Gefahr. Through decades of being cocooned in technology, which are material extensions of our cleverness, our desires and our foibles, humans have forgotten that in olden times, the hunter also became the hunted. There has never been an absolute conquest. History always has the last laugh as the curtain falls on the stage of our vulnerability on earth. This is our fundamental ontology.

Just as there is black history to Australian history, a “yellow”, or East Asian, history needs to be told in the spirit of full unconcealment in the aletheia of truth – while at the same time being aware of the interplay between concealment and hiddenness in our primordially existential engagement with the phenomenon of truth.

As long as there is human history, the story of truth can never cease to be told.

Only a few decades after the beginning of human quarantine history in Australia at North Head in the Colony of New South Wales in 1828, an East Asian aspect became interwoven with the mainstream discourse on public health that those in power tried to keep “white” – mainly in the form of the “Chinese question”, i.e. the admissibility or otherwise of East Asians into Australia’s Identitätsraum, an entity that is imagined and referred to in speech and writing, yet at the same time thoroughly, if not primally, visceral. Race talks.

This “whiteness” continues to this day with the established discourse on the history of public health in Australia, even if the norm in academia is that this “whiteness” is a reflective critique of past racist injustices. Yet in careful readings of the products of this “white” discourse, especially by “people of colour”, intellectual blind spots can be detected here and there. After all, a complete self-transparency in aletheia is, according to phenomenological philosophy, an impossible ideal. Regardless of one’s own cultural background and genetic make-up, one can only try one’s best – the moral imperative here is to admit one’s limitations in the methodology of one’s discourse and not to wield the power-imbued yardstick of universal truth, which can exclude and suppress voices of less social power.

Australia, it is time for a resourceful cultural and racial diversity in the established canon of academic and other forms of public discourse.

Installed and revealed in Liverpool, UK, 2006, the following is the text from a commemorative plaque to Chinese mariners who once lived and worked in that important seaport city:

“To the Chinese merchant seamen who served this country well during both world wars, for those who gave their lives for this country – thank you.

“To the many Chinese merchant seamen who after both world wars were required to leave, for their wives and partners who were left in ignorance of what happened to their men, for the children who never knew their fathers, this is a small reminder of what took place. We hope nothing like it will ever happen again.

“For your memory.

“23rd January 2006.”

Here at North Head in Sydney, Australia, we do not even have a plaque to commemorate the lives of many Chinese mariners who transited through the North Head Quarantine Station and contributed to the significant maritime trade between Australia and Asia, while experiencing poor treatment in quarantine – racial segregation and inferior accommodation at the Quarters for Asiatics – and in society in general during the long years of the White Australia Policy.

Reference

Stuart Heaver, “Why did 300 Chinese fathers vanish from Liverpool in 1946 after wartime service in British merchant navy?” South China Morning Post, 4 November 2017. http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2118142/why-did-300-chinese-fathers-vanish-liverpool-1946, accessed 15 April 2018.

Professor Waldemar Haffkine’s serum, although rejected by the medical establishment in his home country of Russia, nevertheless saw great success in India when he moved there in the late 19th century to tackle the severe challenges of successive epidemics on the subcontinent.

A contemporary article, authored by William T Fee, British Consul in India, describes the Haffkine serum as follows: “In vaccination for smallpox a living germ is dealt with, whereas in plague inoculation dead seed only are injected” (Fee, 1899, p. 2047).

The dispossession of Indigenous Australians in the economic history of sustainable mutton fish (abalones) harvesting tells a twofold tale of colonisation by both British and Chinese settlers. In this aspect, Chinese immigration was, as far as Indigenous Australians were concerned, not much different in character from the British invasion in 1788 in the way it destroyed their traditional livelihood and disconnected them from the maritime environment of mutton fish harvesting. Both British and Chinese settlements were uninvited events in Australian history which saw the Aboriginals become displaced people in their own land.

Reference

Cruse, Beryl et al. Mutton Fish.

Although unrelated, social marginalisation in liminal zones of physical isolation was applied to sufferers of leprosy and mental health alike in the political design of exclusion during the late 19th century in Australia. An example of this can be found in the history of public health measures on the Moreton Bay islands near Brisbane in Queensland.