Exhibit A: First Reports
This article from the Evening News reports on the initial suspected smallpox case at On Chong’s household. In it there is reference to the “recently-quarantined Brisbane." This refers to the SS Brisbane, a cargo ship that was quarantined in April after one of its Chinese passengers was suspected of carrying smallpox. The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate reported on this incident bluntly (if somewhat turgidly), reassuring its readership that “the authorities will doubtless take due care that to the evil of increased heathen population is not added to to the worst of diseases.”¹
Interestingly, five years prior in December 1876, the SS Brisbane had been quarantined at the station at North Head after two cases of smallpox were discovered onboard. Its ‘patient zero’ then was a ‘lascar’ - an Arabic militiaman from Aden. More than half of the Brisbane’s 85 crew and 21 passengers were Chinese then, and another 18 were lascars. By 1878 the maritime unions had started advocating against the employment of any such ‘Asiatics’.² Not merely due to the threat of disease, but more so because they represented cheap competition for employment. Still, incidents like those with the Brisbane exposed the fallacy of the belief that Australia was safe from infectious diseases because it was an isolated island. Animosity was naturally directed towards ships carrying Chinese passengers or arriving from China - in both instances, the Brisbane was sailing from Hong Kong, and this augmented beliefs that the Chinese were harbingers of infectious disease. Soon, China and Chinese ports were all deemed places of infection, whilst all ships arriving from China were automatically quarantined.
The article also mentions quarantine procedures employed by health authorities. Initially, if a positive diagnosis was confirmed, all persons in the premises containing the patient who were willing would be vaccinated and a yellow flag would be raised, signalling the disease’s presence.³ Alternatively, patients could be taken to the North Head Quarantine Station. This was not compulsory, except in “a few cases where it was deemed to be in the community interest to remove the patients.”⁴ One such incident involved Won Ping of Waterloo, who was only successfully removed after “long poles were brought into use.”⁵ This further compounded the demonisation of the Chinese, where images of authorities using violence against suspected Chinese smallpox victims circulated and helped legitimise violent practices against the Chinese more generally.
Finally, whilst this particular article is careful to note the possibility that On Chong’s child was only infected with “chicken-pox”, and that the quarantining of the Brisbane the previous month was mere “coincidence”, such measured language did little to quell the confirmation of pre-existing biases amongst many in the colony. In fact, a more cynical argument could be made that the mere mention of both On Chong and the Brisbane was an instance of 'dog-whistling' deliberately designed to appeal to common anti-Chinese sentiments in the Evening News' readership. The reference to On Chong directly implicates his household as the source of a possible smallpox outbreak. Meanwhile, recalling the Brisbane reaffirms the belief that if On Chong's child was indeed afflicted with smallpox, it would not be an isolated incident, but another example of a trait (susceptibility to disease) inherently tied to Chinese people more broadly. It is possible that many readers ignored these caveats entirely. Indeed, the existence of such biases is evident in the headline of the article immediately below the one exhibited; "the anti-Chinese movement" continued to grow throughout the early 1880s. This growth was accelerated by the smallpox outbreak.
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¹ “Chinese and Smallpox,” Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, April 25, 1881.
² Peter Hobbins, “Union Jack or Yellow Jack? Smallpox, Sailors, Settlers and Sovereignty,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45.3 (2017): 396-7.
³ P.H. Curson, Times of Crisis: Epidemics in Sydney 1788-1900 (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1985), 104.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ “Smallpox in Sydney,” Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, June 21, 1881.
