From the 1830s to the 1950s (when air travel to Australia largely replaced sea travel), all vessels, cargo, crew and passengers entering Australia were subject to quarantine. Like other forms of administrative incarceration, this involved spatial segregation and confinement from the rest of the Australian community. Originally determined by each colony, the policy was brought under federal jurisdiction with the Quarantine Act 1908. One important aspect was how notions of hygiene, pollution and public health functioned to classify certain categories of people as a threat to the Australian community. In the era of the White Australia Policy, ideas of cleanliness corresponded with ideas of whiteness.

Like Aboriginal reserves, quarantine stations are an example of administrative detention used for many decades and throughout Australia. While Aboriginal reserves were a method of maintaining boundaries between groups already living in Australia, quarantine was primarily about controlling and regulating the entry of people from the outside. As such, quarantine stations functioned as the threshold to the newly federated nation. By far the majority of people in quarantine were eventually allowed to enter, but only after they had demonstrably met the requirements for entry. Quarantine was therefore one means by which the government could regulate entry into the country and ensure exclusion when it was deemed necessary.

Just as the healthy and sick received different treatment, so too were people treated differently because of their race or class. These often shaped one’s experience of quarantine, determining different levels of medical treatment, access to facilities and, ultimately, the possibility of entering Australia.^[30] People of particular racial backgrounds were considered more likely to carry contagious diseases and were subsequently treated differently in quarantine. Krista Maglen explains that before the smallpox pandemic of 1881, Asian ports were not regarded as a potentially dangerous source of disease. In contrast, vessels from England, where smallpox was always present, were checked thoroughly. In 1881, Australian health authorities determined that the smallpox pandemic affecting hundreds of people in Sydney had originated in China. From this time, ships, cargo and people of Asian origin became the key targets of quarantine, and ideas of race and of Asia as a source of disease began to inform medical theory and policy.^[31] Such ideas also supported more widespread derogatory stereotypes about the Chinese in Australia.^[32]

Quarantine, like Aboriginal reserves, played an important role in the formation of Australia as a new, federated nation. In particular, it contributed to the symbolic ‘imagining’ of the new nation.^[33] Geographically, the quarantine boundaries outlined the boundaries of the nation. With regard to population, quarantine identified particular races as a threat to the nation and provided a mechanism for their exclusion.