Quarantine Stories Episode 1: Learning from the past

Q Station, which runs the former North Head Quarantine Station in Manly as a hotel and heritage site, made this six-minute film in June 2020 as the first of a Quarantine Stories history series — timed, as the guide Jill points out, for a moment when the whole world was learning about isolation and social distancing.

She sketches the basics: the colony’s fear of cholera, typhus and other diseases arriving from overseas, the quarantine law of 1832, and the station’s use from the following year until 1984, during which more than 580 vessels were held there and 572 people were buried in its three cemeteries. Most of the film is spent with the site’s extraordinary primary source — the roughly 1,600 inscriptions that quarantined passengers carved into the soft sandstone. She reads the two left by the RMS Niagara, which arrived in October 1918 as the first ship quarantined in Australia with Spanish flu, honouring a nurse and a medical student who cared for up to a hundred patients, and ends with a Chinese inscription describing fear, helpless doctors and unbearable grief.

This is the best antidote to the ghost tours that Q Station is now known for. The stories its guides tell after dark — figures in doorways, presences in the Gravedigger’s Cottage — draw their power from the real people this film introduces: passengers who were landed, disinfected and confined, often by class and, in practice, by race, and some of whom never left. The inscriptions record their own words, which no ghost story can improve on.

Treat the figures as the guide’s; official histories give slightly different totals for people quarantined at the station, but agree on the 572 recorded deaths. The station closed in 1984 and is now part of Sydney Harbour National Park, on land with a long Aboriginal history that predates the colony.