Materialising Contagion: An Archaeology of Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station

Abstract

North Head Quarantine Station was established in the 1830s as a means to protect the population of Sydney, Australia, from the threat of communicable diseases such as plague, smallpox, cholera and typhus. The practice of maritime quarantine in Sydney throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with radical changes in the way that disease transmission was understood, as earlier ideas such as noxious ‘miasmas’ bound to localities were supplanted by modern germ theory. The Quarantine Station bore witness to these transitions, and as such is an ideal case study through which to explore the archaeological signature of evolving understandings of – and responses to – disease. Within the archaeological literature, disease is primarily accessed and configured through human remains. The present research builds on this scholarship by considering the ways in which objects and places, as well as people, have been materially transformed via their historical associations with infection. This project examines how disease has been materialised at quarantine sites, and remains interpretable through the archaeological assemblage. Drawing on relational concepts including DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage theory, my research adopts a multiscalar approach, beginning with an examination of the landscape of North Head and the ways in which disease has been located and controlled within it. The discussion then moves to the level of the collection, drawing out the taphonomic processes that have brought objects into and out of association with the institution. Finally, individual objects are interrogated in order to evaluate the direct relationships between object and disease – as objects that reveal or erase disease, or objects that are themselves diseased. These scales are then drawn together to consider what constitutes an archaeology of quarantine, and the role of disease within this institutional assemblage.