Bell, Pamela. Of Global Appearance, Exploring the diverse layers and fragments of the Quarantine Station, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, 2001, ill. (catalogue)

Exploring the diverse layers and fragments of the Quarantine Station

Manly Art Gallery and Museum

31 August – 30 September 2001

“Of Global Appearance” is based on an artist’s interpretation of the experiences, memories and fate of migrants, refugees and Australian residents who, due to their contact with infectious diseases, were isolates at the North Head Quarantine Station during its years of operation from 1828 to 1984. People of many nationalities stayed for varying lengths of time at the Quarantine Station. This multicultural aspect is a key emphasis in the exhibition and one which has not to date been extensively documented or researched in either an artistic or historical format. The Quarantine Station, the infections diseases which it isolated, and medical history provide the context for this exhibition, however, the curator/artist, Nathalie Hartog has concentrated on the memories of the quarantined individuals, not so much for their medical significance, but as a “leaping off” point to sample some of the lives and experiences of this multicultural group, who, through misadventure, began their lives in Australia in this unusual way. Nathalie Hartog is interested in the nexus between art and language as a means of communication. The exhibition is letter based and conceived in the form of artists’ sketchbooks, both actual and metaphorical. Artist’s prints, frottages, photographs, letters, artist’s books, historical artefacts and video are used to evoke aspects of the lives of people who were detained and to explore layers of meaning which the artists finds in their reminiscences.

Although aspects of the North Head Quarantine Station have not previously been interpreted though art, its institutional history has been extensively documented. North Head was the first marine quarantine station in Australia, established initially for isolation of convict and immigrant ships carrying infectious diseases including smallpox, cholera, typhoid fever, plague and leprosy. The Quarantine Station was also used to control epidemics in Sydney, of smallpox in 1881 and 1913 and plague in 1900, as well as the pandemic of Spanish influenza of 1918-19. Influenza victims also included returning World War I soldiers and Italian Reservists who had fought for the Allies. Over the decades, the Quarantine Station accommodated passengers on ships carrying the yellow “infection” flag and occasionally also air travellers. In the Station’s final years of operation many of the diseases requiring quarantine were no longer a threat due to advances in medical science. The Station was then used to house people evacuated from Darwin following the ravages of Cyclone Tracy in 1974, as emergency accommodation for Vietnamese orphans rescued by the Australian Government in 1975, and in 1977 as quarters for Asian boat people. The detention of illegal immigrants at the Quarantine Station over a period of twenty years also continued in the 1970s.

Memories and impressions of the Quarantine Station in the nineteenth-century have been compiled through research in, for example, the National Archives, family histories, record searches and contacts with other researches to produce a group of screenprints, drypoints, etchings, intaglio prints and monotypes, the subjects of which include ghostly figures, copies in script of documentation, symbols which relate to scars on the bodies of the sufferers, and other significant abstract signs. Colour and density of the print and the various print media which produce different reactions on the print surface are also seen by the artists as an analogy of the migrants’ journeys.

Another source of material is the Quarantine Station site and buildings, which have inspired many of the works in the exhibition. For example the artist has made delicate frottages executed in compressed black ink on mulberry paper. The images are taken direct from buildings and artifacts in the grounds. Some of these artworks relate to washing and disinfecting clothes and washing the body which were key aspects of treatment at the Station. Faint, evanescent traces of the walls of the buildings, the diagonal markings of the drip trays for blood under the cadavers, the textures of the walls of the shower block and meat safe areas, and imprints from laundry equipment all evoke aspects of life at the Station, but the frottages also stand alone as independent artworks. The nature of these ephemeral prints belies the solidity of the actual artifacts, now no longer in use and therefore perhaps themselves relegated to a ghostly existence. A suggestion of what life was like at the Quarantine Station is further conveyed by a group of artifacts formerly used at the Station and loaned for the exhibition, including domestic, medical and marine artifacts. A series of photographs showing patients’ symptoms and other subjects suggest that being at the Quarantine Station was very serious for many, and fatal for some.

Other more recent background material for the exhibition was sourced through an assiduous program of contacting people from a multicultural background who had spent time at the Quarantine Station and who were willing to contribute information. Persons interested in this project of documenting the memories of people who experienced the Quarantine Station were asked to write to the artist, telling her where they came from, on which ship they travelled, why they came to Australia, what impression the Quarantine Station made on them, what happened to them after leaving the Quarantine Station, and what their life is like now. They were also asked to send the artist a photograph, drawing or picture to illustrate their letter. Experiences of those detained at the Quarantine Station varied of course, some people even enjoyed life at the Station, and some regarded they stay as merely an insignificant part of the migration process. The diverse replies were all of great interest, many of them were poignant. One letter of special interest was from a former Vietnamese orphan, who wrote:
“I am now 25 years old and have since returned to Vietnam for a holiday with a different agenda. Returning and searching for my natural parents was an important chapter in my life. I did not find my family, but I did find the culture from which I was born into. Through all that the journey reinforced to me the culture of which I feel most strongly part of…Here!”

Another letter revealed that at the times the choice of people to be sent to the Quarantine Station was arbitrary. During the 1950s foot and mouth disease scare, not all passengers on ships suspected of carrying the disease could be sent to the Quarantine Station, so a representative sample only was selected from passengers who were butchers, farmers and others who may have had contact with the disease, while the other passengers remained on the ship or went their various ways. A solicitor who acted for clients who overstayed their visas, and therefore were sent to the Quarantine Station, wrote that “the whole atmosphere was very relaxed… not like anything we hear about Woomera… the people who overstayed their visas were mostly British.”

Letters received by the artist provided the basis for her analogical interpretation of the journeys of these people. This material is presented in the form of books, accessible for viewers to read at the exhibition. The artist’s stated concentration on language as a component of her art practice makes the books of the migrants’ journeys the major component of the exhibition and links them to the overall exhibition concept. The artist has bound all the correspondence she received into twelve artist’s books, collated in date order of experiences. Many books also contain drawings and other graphic material and all are bound in loose leaf, so that more material can be added. Each book has a cover made by the artist, seven covers are printed with the “A”, and seven with the letter “B”. This now obsolete system was used to register passengers, A” denoting Alien and “B” for British. The artist sees a parallel between these books and artists’ sketchbooks. The books of journeys are only brief sketches of the lives of people who have been associated with the Quarantine Station. They cannot present the full story of the lies of these people. They merely remind the viewer of what happened, just as an artist makes brief drawings for a finished artwork in a sketchbook. Enlarged copies of some of the letters also hang as part of the exhibition. Exhibition viewers are able to contribute their own reminiscences of the Quarantine Station throughout and after the exhibition. In this way, the exhibition itself becomes part of his huge research project.

Nathalie Hartog conceived the idea for the exhibition, curated it and produced all the original artwork which is in her words an analogy for the journey people went through when they migrated to Australia. Of global Appearance is an exhibition of subtlety and many layers of meaning. In its presentation of the artist’s concept of what happened to people during and after their encounters with the Quarantine Station, it is one step toward revealing a previously unrecorded aspect of Australia’s multicultural society.

Pamela Bell
Jean Duncan Foley, In Quarantine, A history of Sydney’s Quarantine Station 1828-1984, 1995, Kangaroo Press, Sydney