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.

Despite the illusion of race as demonstrated by the science of genetics, culture as a way of life endures as a powerful marker of identity, which is often confused with the superficial appearance of race. Given that the North Head Quarantine Station operated for 72 years under the aegis of the White Australia Policy, affecting the lives of three generations of people, the question of race, or rather the demarcation and discrimination that the past Australian approach and mentality demanded on the basis of it, was engraved deeply in personal as well as collective memories of the site.

Even before Australia’s racially restrictive immigration act in the past came into effect in 1901, the lack of scientific understanding of communicable diseases, which were frightfully fatal in the cases of smallpox and bubonic plague, were sourced to the racial and the cultural other such as the Chinese, simply because China, the land of one of the oldest civilisations on earth, itself struggled with the challenges and the horrors of these two ancient diseases in the longevity of its history. Syllogistically, the same argument could have been applied to the motherland of the British Empire, the English Isles, which almost disappeared under the onslaughts of the plague during the 14th century, and which with its conquerors and settlers brought the scourge of smallpox upon indigenous Australians who perished in demographically disastrous numbers, thus allowing further inroads of British colonialism into the Australian terrain. But prejudice has an inbuilt immunity to logic for it to be what it is – in all its insidious glory under the protective cover of advancing colonialism. Unscientific prejudice in Australia’s past public health management of deadly communicable diseases had the real power, despite its nonsensical discourse, to segregate, to stigmatise, to humiliate, to scapegoat. In our current age when mental health is only just beginning to receive a respectful socio-cultural understanding, the legacy of psychological traumas carried by the Chinese and other non-European survivors of smallpox or bubonic plague from North Head and other Australian quarantine stations can only be conceived as thoroughly weighty in the silence of their eventual passing in time and in the absence of their autobiographies and biographies.

There is a published photo of the former Stables of the North Head Quarantine Station in the two-page spread of the 3 February 1900 issue of Australian town and country journal. Called the Front line of defence, it portrays Australia’s deep anxiety about the arising of the bubonic plague in Sydney, an age-old disease that once threatened to destroy European civilisation during the 14th century. In England, for example, over a third of the population died of the plague between ?

In Jean Duncan Foley’s In quarantine, the only authoritative book on the North Head Quarantine Station to have come out so far, it is mentioned on page ? that experiments on vaccines against the plague were carried out at the former Stables, with horses as the subjects. It is important to remember that discovery of vaccine against any deadly infectious disease of the time, such as bubonic plague and smallpox, was a question of national importance that triggered competition among the medical scientists of different countries. On top of the reality of nationalism in vaccine development – regardless of the fact it is for the common good of humanity -, it is not difficult to imagine that biosecurity played a great role in these experiments.