Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation

Abstract

This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a pathologized, contaminated and racialized other. That ‘whiteness’, ‘purity’ and ‘national hygiene’ which was actively sought in the early 20th century functioned through both public health and immigration regulations: the practice of quarantine was the point at which these came together. Quarantine assisted in the imagining of the new island-nation as an integrated whole, and in the imagining (and literal pursuit) of its ‘whiteness’.