Manly Quarantine Station: Why book a North Head Q Station tour?

Take a Manly Quarantine Station tour on the North Head of Sydney Harbour, and you’ll see terrifying shower blocks and inhalation chambers. But more importantly, you get to learn how new arrivals to Australia were treated between 1832 and 1984.

The shower block at the Manly Quarantine Station is gigantic, and feels industrial. This was the nice one, for first class passengers only, with barriers erected for privacy. The steerage passengers wouldn’t get such treats. They’d just be herded through and forced to scrub publicly in water infused with heavy doses of carbolic acid.

The Sydney Quarantine Station tour guide says: “Some people coming here had come from the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. They would see people going into this huge shower block, smell the awful unnatural smell of the carbolic acid, and then not see the people again because they left through the back.

“It was like they had been sent back to what they had escaped from.”

Wildlife at Manly Quarantine Station

The Quarantine Station on Sydney Harbour’s North Head, walkable from the Manly Ferry terminal, is a remarkable place. Bandicoots, kookaburras and cockatoos pretty much have the run of the place, the harbour views are exceptional and most of the old buildings there have been cleverly converted into hotel rooms. But the place brims with history.

This is Australia’s equivalent of Ellis Island in New York. It’s the place where first convicts and then free-settling immigrants would have to pass through before starting their new life. The North Head Quarantine Station was open between 1832 and 1984.

Sydney’s not necessarily a destination immediately associated with history, but the city has it in spades. The story of fleets of convicts being shipped to an unknown, unexplored land on the other side of the world is staggering. Explore the tale of how that far-flung prison slowly morphed into one of the wealthiest nations on earth through a series of Sydney heritage buildings. These include the Hyde Park Barracks, Elizabeth Farm and the Quarantine Station.

Sydney Quarantine Station tour: A history lesson

In the Sydney Quarantine Station, only one person on a ship needed to be sick for everyone else on it to be quarantined. Most people staying here were healthy when they disembarked. But they had to stay healthy for 21 days. They could be in for 20 days, then come down with the mild sniffles – something hard to avoid in the overcrowded conditions. The clock was reset. It’d be another 21 days before they could rejoin the wider world.

The burden of proof was on the passenger, who had to prove he or she was free of disease. This usually involved being methodically checked over for smallpox rashes and other such indignities.

In 1918, there was panic over the Spanish influenza pandemic. The solution was to send 40 people at a time into an ‘inhalation chamber’. To all intents and purposes, it’s an empty room that would be pumped full of steam laced with zinc sulphate. It was designed to cleanse the throat and airways. But given that zinc sulphate is now used as an emetic, it’s no surprise to learn that the treatment made more people sick than it cured.

Autoclaves in the North Head Quarantine Station

Another building contains the autoclaves. They’re huge, industrial oven-like machines, connected to the boilerhouse by pipes. Steam would come through. Then trolleys full of luggage, bedding and other belongings would be dumped inside for a high temperature steaming. Given that a lot of the luggage was essentially cardboard, many people had vital documents, photographs and clothing destroyed.

Only about 580 boats ever came here. The idea was to not let disease on board at the point of embarkation in the first place. There are no accurate numbers for the number of people who stayed at the Quarantine Station. But it is known that at least 572 died here. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a lot of ghost stories. And during the evening ghost tours, that shower block is the creepiest place of the lot.

Two hour history walking tours of the Sydney Quarantine Station on North Head cost $35 per person. Other places to get a good idea of immigration history in Australia include the Immigration Museum in Melbourne and the Bonegilla Migrant Experience in Wodonga, Victoria.

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