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Published: March 5th 2014
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Sunday 16th February, 2014. Quarantine Station & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW, Australia
It was a really grotty day so we needed to think of something to do that would be inside. Armed with our umbrellas we caught the bus into town and then a ferry to Manly. Today was the final of the Australian Surfing Championships - and it was chucking it down! Nevertheless we made our way to the beach to watch the action. It was awful weather and we were getting a bit wet. We decided to give it a miss and go and do something out of the rain.
So we caught a bus to the Quarantine Station which Rachel had told us about. When we arrived we were surprised to discover that it is now a hotel, conference centre and restaurant complex called (surprise surprise) the Q-Station Hotel. We went into reception and were informed that there was a visitor centre, that it was free to get in and that there was a complementary shuttle bust that would take us down there. Good job too as it was about a 10 minute drive!!
From the 1830s to 1984 migrant ships arriving
in Sydney with suspected contagious disease anchored inside North Head and off-loaded passengers and crew into quarantine to protect local residents from the threat of infection. After several weeks most passengers were released to settle as Australian residents. Some passengers experienced a first class resort, making new friends and sharing dreams of a bright new future. For others it was a far more frightening experience of disempowerment, disease and death. Chosen in 1832 as the ideal site for the development of a quarantine facility, due to its isolation, deep anchorage options and proximity to the entrance to Sydney Harbour, the site reflects the evolving cultural landscape of colonial Australia, as well as demonstrating the impact of changing social
attitudes and scientific and medical developments. Thousands of individually carved stone engravings on site, also record the diverse cultural and social backgrounds of quarantined passengers, mapping the station’s use from its early beginnings until its closure for quarantine purposes in 1984.
When the Quarantine Station was first established it was a makeshift and uncomfortable place to be. In 1835, 230 passengers and crew were housed in six bell tents and two larger tents. By 1837, 295 healthy people were crowded into
36 tents in the heat of summer. A wharf and four or five buildings were eventually erected, but the buildings themselves proved to be insufficient - people still had to sleep in tents. The operation was still relatively inefficient.
In 1847 immigration increased again and more buildings including kitchens, bathrooms and a hospital were constructed. By 1853 the Quarantine Station could accommodate 150 people, however, it received one thousand passengers at a time and a new building expansion was required. (This is the reason we needed a shuttle bus to get to the visitor centre - the site is huge!). In the 1860s to 1870s the world economy slowed down, slowing immigration and the need for quarantine operations and associated maintenance.
Due to the lack of maintenance when the 1881 Smallpox epidemic hit Sydney and resulted in local residents being quarantined, complaints about run down facilities and draconian processes resulted in a Royal Commission. The impact of improved medical science, immunisation, and
quarantine procedures in the 20th century is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the fact that although post-WWII immigration was vastly greater than earlier intakes, the number of ships and planes quarantined plummeted proportionately. Sydney received nearly
700,000 assisted immigrants between 1946 and 1980, nearly double the number it had received between 1831 and 1940, yet only four ships were quarantined in that period, and at least one of those was a tanker. The only large quarantine after the refurbishment was of 29 cholera suspects from an aircraft in 1972. The last ship to be quarantined was the tanker Sakaki Maru in 1973, whose crew was landed for a short period while a suspected infection was found not to be a quarantinable disease. After that time the only people admitted to the
Station for quarantine were airline passengers who arrived without adequate vaccination certificates (78 people in 1975).
The North Head Quarantine Station is now a series of heritage listed buildings on the north side of Sydney Harbour at North Head, near Manly. It is also located in the Sydney Harbour NP. In the 1960s and 70s, the Officer then in charge of the Quarantine Station, Herb
Lavaring BEM (1917-1998), took it upon himself to preserve and compile a museum of artifacts and other range of items of note and significance to the station's operations, including domestic implements, medical instruments, and a diverse range of hand
tools for tasks ranging from blacksmithing to building construction. Lavaring collected these materials over the period 1963-1975, and also commenced restoration work on the diverse range of rock carvings and headstones from the major burial grounds. The items collected by Lavaring were preserved and many have since found their way into State and Federal collections, including the National Museum in Canberra where a muzzle loading rifle and a set of manacles are preserved (the latter being used to ensure that no one left the station without medical
clearance).
We arrived at the visitor centre and were able to view what remained of his collection. Ships were quarantined if they were carrying diseases such as plague, typhus, measels etc. The standard of accommodation afforded to quarantined passengers depended on their ticket. If they were first class they had a private room, if they were steerage they were in dorms with bunk beds. The quality of their meals and the dinner services etc also reflected the passenger's class of travel. The Quarantine Station is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of former staff and patients, with many paranormal occurrences reported throughout the site. Ghost tours are on offer in the evening.
By the time we had finished at the visitor centre (which, we felt, was a bit repetitive) the rain had worsened. It was hammering it down. We didn't fancy making our way back to Manly in this weather so we waited for a regular ferry which would take us to Watson's Bay. From here we knew we could get back to Circular Quay.
Once back at Circular Quay the rain was still not relenting. So we decided to visit the Museum for Contemporary Art which, at least, is inside and out of the wet. It was actually very interesting with many varied types of art from sculputres, light fittings, bronze casts, traditional, modern and aboriginal paintings. There were too many to mention in this blog but we will talk of some of our favourites.
The first one was called L to R Manster (Wolf man) 1986, Manster (the picture of Dorian Grey) 1986 by Maria Kozic. These two pictures looked exactly like their title until you walked past them and looked at them from the opposite side. Then you found yourself looking at two completely different pictures although physically they were the same entity. The works had been
painted on slats which stuck out from the canvass. Both sides of the slats had been painted on which allowed the artist to create four completely different works of art depending on where you stood when you looked at them - amazing.
"We call them Pirates Out Here" 2006 by Daniel Boyd is based on a painting by the Australian artis Emanuel Phillips Fox - "The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bat 1770, commissioned in 1902 (currently held in the National Gallery of Victoria). Boyd reproduces Fox's painting from an Aboriginal perspective, and portrays Cook's landing as an act of piracy. The traces of somke on the horizon mark aboriginal inhabitancy of the land, contradicting the doctrine of terra nullius, the legal justification for British colonisation. Portraits of Boyd's friends and relatives can be seen in the figures of the ship's crew.
There was a strange untitled work (2006) by Stephen Birch .This work depicts an unusal confrontation between a life sized model of the superhero Spiderman and a worm-like bearded figure, whose head sits on an arm-like neck - weird.
There were many other great pieces (see photos). We finished by going to the
Sculpture Gallery on the top floor. This is an outside space and it was still raining. We took a look at the murky view from the top and then returned to Circular Quay. Instead of catching the bus back to Rozelle we caught the ferry to Balmain East. We had some good views of the bridge and opera house through the murk and also were able to take a close look at Lunar Park which is some kind of theme park. Once at Balmain East the bus arrived almost immediately and took us back to Rozelle.
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