Point Nepean Quarantine Station

One of the most fascinating periods of Australian history is free for you to explore in the beautiful Point Nepean National Park at the southernmost tip of the Mornington Peninsula.

Lined by a stunning narrow beach for a midday dip, landscaped with lovely wooded paths, it is hard to imagine the suffering that occurred when 305 infected ships landed here. Read on to learn about this exquisite day trip destination from Melbourne, nestled in a stunning National Park along Port Phillip Bay.

Do it yourself or take a day tour, this comprehensive post gives you all the information you need to see a beautiful and extraordinarily interesting (and sad) part of early Australian history and culture.

Take a Day Trip to the Quarantine Station in the Mornington Peninsula’s Point Nepean National Park

The large site is beautifully preserved. There are almost 50 heritage buildings and you can wander through many of them.

Each building has its own artifacts and there are extensive signboards telling you about the sad and spooky history of the Quarantine Station. There’s a shuttle bus around the site and you can hire bikes and e-bikes or bring your own. With great parking, it’s easy to explore the Quarantine Station.

It’s also possible to include the Point Nepean Quarantine Station on a day tour from Melbourne and the very best tours are below. In addition to regular tours of the Port Nepean Quarantine Station, there are also Ghost Tours that explore the quarantine hauntings and ghost stories.

• Point Nepean National Park location: Ochiltree Rd, Portsea VIC
• Quarantine Station location: Coleman Rd, Portsea VIC

What is Quarantine?

I first visited the Quarantine Station just before the COVID-19 Pandemic, in the month before Australia shut its borders for almost 2 years. Back then, a Quarantine Station was a weird idea, a remnant of our past. But we all know about quarantine now!

According to the Point Nepean Quarantine Station, the definition of quarantine is:

The principle of preventing the spread of infectious disease by which people, baggage…likely to be infected or coming form an infected place are isolated at frontiers or ports until their harmlessness has been proven…

The word ‘quarantine’ gives away the period of time people were isolated – 40 days. These days people are quarantined until no longer in an infectious stage, meaning quarantine times are much shorter.

Quarantine in Australia followed these international guidelines. The quarantine definition only applied to the plague, cholera, relapsing fever, smallpox, typhus fever, and yellow fever.

Read on to discover how awful it would have been to have come to Australia all the way from England on a diseased ship!

The History of Quarantine at Port Nepean Quarantine Station

In 1852 the  SS Ticonderoga arrived from Liverpool, England. Onboard were 300 people suffering from measles, typhus, and dysentery.

The SS Ticonderoga was the first ship to be quarantined at Point Nepean. A Quarantine Station and cemetery were established to accommodate the passengers.

Only two years later, another cemetery needed to be established. The last person buried in the cemetery was in 1926.

Each year more buildings were added to the site, including a hospital, bathhouses, and quarantine jetty. Industrial disinfecting equipment for infected clothing was also housed at the Quarantine Station.

All of these buildings erected on the site and their equipment are wonderfully preserved and a fun self-guided destination.

Lepers, Consumptives, Cemeteries, and Crematoriums

In 1864, the Victorian armed forces began constructing defensive fortifications at Point Nepean.

The Quarantine Station was also a hive of building activity. A Leper’s Station, a Consumptive Camp, and an Isolation Hospital were created.

Up until the turn of the century, the Quarantine Station expanded and became more orderly. This included the building of a crematorium in 1892 for leprosy patients.

The map above is a map of the Quarantine Station in 1920 that shows the position of the leper colony and consumptive wards relative to the main areas of the Station.

There was something for everyone – one hospital was upgraded into a facility for the ‘first-class’ passengers.

The image above is of the first-class dining area.

This was a time when passengers would alight from ships in very ill health and many subsequently perished.

Heaton’s Monument stands on the site of the original beach cemetery. The cemetery was created to bury the passengers who died from the SS Ticonderoga in 1852.

It had to be moved as bodies would be washed up by the rough seas. Heaton’s Monument records the names of the 100 people buried in the original beach cemetery.

Spanish Flu and the World Wars

The first half of the twentieth century saw Australia become adept at housing quarantined passengers.

Flying the yellow “Q” Quarantine Flag, ships would wait in Port Phillip Bay. The Flag meant:

My ship is ‘suspect’

I have had cases of infectious diseases more than five days ago, or there has been unusual mortality among the rats on board my ship

Spanish flu (influenza) killed between 50 and 100 million people globally and came to Australia in 1919. One-third of all Australians contracted the disease. Approximately 15,000 Australians died in the first year that the Spanish flu arrived in the country.

It’s no wonder the Point Nepean Quarantine Station housed so many passengers from ships carrying the Spanish flu. 125,000 people were tested at the Quarantine Station in 1918-1919 for Spanish flu. They were mainly soldiers returning home from World War I.

The Australian Defence Forces were billeted at the Quarantine Station in World War II as the demand for Quarantine areas decreased with medical advances making them less necessary.

The Military Years and the Kosovars

After the end of the Second World War, the Australian military decided to hold on to the Point Nepean National Park.

In 1952 an Officer Cadet School was established and shared the Quarantine Station site. From 1963 the Army built facilities for accommodation and training. In 1985 a School of Army Health was opened at the site.

These buildings, now abandoned, contrast with the cream brick and wood buildings of the earlier phases of Quarantine Station builds.

The Quarantine Station stopped operating in 1978 and was closed in 1980. But then, in 1999, Australia granted 400 Kosovar Albanians temporary protection as part of Operation Safe Haven.

These 400 refugees had fled the Kosovar region of the former Yugoslavia and the Quarantine Station once again housed people fleeing suffering.

In 2009 the Quarantine Station was handed over to the Victorian Government and it became part of the Point Nepean National Park.

Point Nepean Quarantine Station Map

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

Is the Quarantine Station haunted? You’ll only find out if you take one of the Point Nepean ghost tours.

The Point Nepean Quarantine Station ghost is believed to be that of  Adeline Eliza Satchwell. Adeline was 83 when she died in 1943.

The Quarantine Station tours can be taken as regular tours of the facilities during the day, or as a ghost tour at night. Both are offered by the Nepean Historical Society located in nearby Sorrento.

On the quarantine station ghost tour not only will you look through some very creepy buildings with no one for miles around you, but you will also hear about the Quarantine Station Ghost Stories!

You can book these tours on the Nepean Historical Society’s website: Nepean Historical Society

Point Nepean National Park

Get orientated and learn all about Point Nepean Park at the Point Nepean Information Centre.

Here you can pick up a Point Nepean National Park Map and see the locations and timetable for the hop-on-hop-off-again Point Nepean Shuttle Bus.

The official Point Nepean Map can be downloaded here.