The Quarantine Station, Point Nepean National Park

One branch of my family left England in the 1840s, travelling by ship of course, and settled in Adelaide. I read somewhere that the surname Honey was shared by some forty six percent of the population there in the 1850s although I don't know how accurate that is. I do know that some family members including  mothers, newborn babies and  children died at sea during the long voyage. 

In the 1840s the gold rush saw eager to be wealthy farmhands and other young workers abandon their jobs and head to the goldfields so more young men were recruited from the homeland. Such was the demand for passage that the ships were overcrowded, under resourced with food and other necessities. There was much sorrow and pain even before arrival as illnesses such as typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, fevers and so on raged through the unsanitary and confined boats.

When a ship came into port it had to fly a yellow quarantine flag if there was any illness on board.It was then boarded by the authorities, assessed, ill passengers removed and put into quarantine and the ship forced to remain at anchor for a further forty days.

Quarantine Station, Portsea, Victoria

The Quarantine Station at Portsea, was built in the early 1850s and was soon a very busy and tragic place.

The Shepherd's Hut, Quarantine Station

 In 1845 the Crown wanted this site on the Mornington Peninsula for a quarantine base so one Daniel Sullivan, who enjoyed a lease of the land, was evicted and compensated. He left behind a three room stone house with an underground dairy as well as vegetable gardens. The upper level was added as a storeroom and later, in 1897, became a dispensary and doctor's office. Much later, when the facilities became a Officer Cadet School it was used by the Regimental Sergent Major.

Impression of the jetty

Disembarking was no easy process. Some passengers died after arrival and before disembarkation and many of them were too ill  to walk and were put on trolleys. Once they were on land they were immediately sent to  separate houses for male and female, each containing seven bathrooms. Each bathroom had three sections with the first for undressing, the central part for bathing and the exit section which led to a central alley between the two buildings.

Bath houses and Boiler Room

The bathing process seems horrific."The person shall strip himself of all clothing, which shall at once be removed for disinfection. He shall then bathe himself or be bathed with the aid of a cresol soap prepared with hard water or salt water, in a warm solution of a miscible cresol disinfectant having a carbolic coefficient of ten of a strength of one ounce of disinfectant to each two gallons of warm water. The body, and especially the scalp and hair [ head and face] and other exposed parts, shall be freely lathered for five minutes; after washing off the lather, the body shall be dried with a clean [ disinfected] towel and clean [ disinfected] clothes shall then be put on."

An alternative solution for hair, scalp and beard was offered. It was made of cyllin, soft soap, ether, rectified spirits and rainwater.

Boiler

All passengers possessions and anything else from the ships had to be disinfected or fumigated. Items were placed on trolleys and railed through either one of two tunnels. Delicate items such as feathers and silks were fumigated instead of being steamed.

Fumigating chamber

Steam Chamber

Social status was maintained on land, as at sea, with separate buildings for each class of travel.

hospital 3 for steerage passengers

Life in the Quarantine hospitals was very regimented and boring. Once the patients began to recover and realised they had indeed survived, the big question for them was how long they were going to be incarcerated. Many of them were also grieving for those whom they had lost during the voyage and after.

The cookhouse

There were many deaths. Sometimes too many to bury separately. Manual labour was hard to get so there were many massed graves.

Mortuary slab

One of the saddest of the sad stories is that of the Triconderoga. This ship, carrying 811 passengers, left Liverpool on 4th August 1854. Many of the passengers were from remote villages in Scotland and many of these were the first victims of the plague that soon claimed 96 lives at sea. In the end, more than one hundred and sixty eight passengers and two crew lost their lives. Nineteen babies were born during the voyage. The plight of the passengers on arrival has been well recorded with complaints being made on both sides of the world about their treatment and the state of the ship. Once the furore died down, double decker ships were prohibited from sailing the route to Australia and New Zealand.

Triconderoga memorial

There were many other such ships arriving both before and after the Triconderoga. In 1912 one thousand three hundred passengers from one whip were quarantined with the 'flu' as were more than one hundred and twenty five thousand returning soldiers from World War 1.

In 1999 the Quarantine Station was used to house refugees from Kosovo. Once it was deemed safe, they were returned to their homeland. Even in 1999 there would have been little for them to do on the station so I hope they had access to the town a short distance away.

Hut built for two Kosovo families

As a descendent of emigrants of the 1850s I found my visit here gave me a sobering picture of what my ancestors faced just to get to this new land.