Point Nepean Community Trust – Background and History

The 90-hectare Portsea Quarantine Station is a 150-year-old heritage site located at Point Nepean adjacent to the Point Nepean National Park. The Point Nepean Community Trust manages the site on behalf of the Commonwealth whose intent it is to transfer the land to the State Government for integration into the national park by mid 2009.

This has been a big year for the Trust. On June 16, the Federal Treasurer, made an official visit to the site to announce $27 million in extra funding and Point Nepean’s (including the Quarantine Station) addition to the National Heritage List. The extra funds guarantee the site an exciting and sustainable future and will enable the Trust to proceed with restoring heritage buildings, accommodating the world class National Centre for Marine and Coastal Conservation and a raft of infrastructure works and other projects that will prepare the Quarantine Station for access and more extensive public use.

With its addition to the NHL, Point Nepean is officially a national treasure becoming one of only 30 such sites in Australia and one of only six in Victoria. Others include the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Ballarat’s Eureka Garden and the Royal Exhibition Building.

Portsea Quarantine Station/Norris Barracks - A Short History

The site now managed by the Point Nepean Community Trust on behalf of the Commonwealth Government resonates with a haunting sense of isolation, mystery and tranquillity that belies its significant many-layered past.

Witness to waves of discovery, settlement, migration and the threats of war and disease, it has at times played host to hundreds of people and assumed the vitality of a small village. Today these imaginings of the past are inspired by breathtaking natural surroundings and heritage buildings in a setting far removed from the bustle of everyday life.

The Boonwurrung people, traditional owners of this and neighbouring lands around Port Phillip Bay, were the first to walk the coastal stretch of Point Nepean that curves to form one arm of The Heads.

Now distinguished and easily recognisable from the sea by the towering chimney of the former Quarantine Station boiler room, the land to those entering The Heads in the early 1800s (including Matthew Flinders) is said to have resembled a grassy field.

A pastoralist called Hobson settled there in 1837 and in 1840 the land passed to Daniel Sullivan whose descendants still live in the area. A shepherd’s hut built in 1845 and believed to be one of Victoria’s earliest remaining buildings, is a reminder of those times and occupies a small rise above the parade ground, constructed when the Army arrived on the site in 1952.

Settlers arriving from Tasmania were attracted to the area and quickly found producing lime to be far more profitable than farming. Limestone, formed from marine animal deposits, was much prized by the new colony’s burgeoning building industry and evidence of lime burning kilns remain on the site.

By the early 1850s, gold was discovered and shiploads of migrants began pouring through The Heads soon revealing the colony’s inadequate quarantine arrangements. These were forcibly addressed in November 1852 with the arrival of the clipper Ticonderoga, a third of whose crew and passengers were either dead from typhus or infected with it.

A temporary hospital was built at Point Nepean and the Quarantine Station officially gazetted in 1854. Buildings including five two-storey limestone hospital blocks were built during the 1850s with more amenities added over the next 100 years.

In 1912, a record 1295 passengers from one ship were quarantined there. During the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic some 128,000 travellers were examined, mostly soldiers returning from World War 1. There was a flurry of activity once more associated with post World War 2 immigration, but between 19523 and 1967 only 12 people were quarantined and the station officially closed in 1980.

The Portsea Quarantine station is the second oldest permanent quarantine facility after Sydney’s North Head (1832), but is in far better condition. Portsea’s oldest purpose built buildings pre-date the oldest quarantine facilities at North Head by 16 years. As a relatively complete 1850s to 1870s complex, they offer crucial insights into quarantine practices and philosophies during a period of mass immigration. These were among the outstanding features of national heritage value cited when the Portsea Quarantine Station was included in Point Nepean’s addition to the National Heritage List in June 2006.

The Quarantine Station was designed to protect Victoria from disease - at least of the imported kind. By the late nineteenth century foreign invasion posed another threat and Point Nepean’s position at the entry to The Heads and Melbourne’s gateway ensured it’s importance to defence. Defence installations were designed initially to protect Melbourne from a raid by Russian ships out of Vladivostok and construction commenced in 1882. With a Defence Department presence well entrenched, an Officer Cadet School opened on the Quarantine Station site in 1952 and operated until 1987. During this time many hundreds of young men, and later women, went through the rigorous training at OCS Portsea and graduated as Second Lieutenants into the Australian Army.

In 1987 the School of Army Health relocated to Portsea from Healesville and renamed the area Norris Barracks in honour of Sir Frank Kingsley Norris, Director General of the Medical Services of the Australian Military Forces from 1948-1955. The School of Army Health was both military and civilian and conducted annual courses for officers and soldiers ranging from 15 days to three months in health and military related subjects. It was a popular location for military conferences and as a posting with many military families who enjoyed the environment and resisted being sent elsewhere.

In 1998, the Army left and, but for about nine months in 1999 when Kosovar refugees occupied the site, the Quarantine Station has been vacant and in basic caretaker mode.

The Point Nepean Community Trust

The Trust was established on 10 June 2004 with $5 million of Commonwealth funding to manage the site until its transfer to the State Government in 2009. The Commonwealth also allocated $9.7 million of operational funding over seven years to establish a National Centre for Marine and Coastal Conservation under the auspices of the Australian Maritime College (Launceston). And the Commonwealth secured $10 in philanthropic funding to establish a respite centre for the families of children with disabilities on the site.

The objects of the Trust are to protect, conserve, present and manage the land for the benefit of all Australians, consistent with the land becoming an integrated national park whilst providing public access consistent with the preservation, conservation and enjoyment of the land.

The Trust Deed ensures no commercial development of the land, preservation of all heritage buildings and the natural environment, guaranteed public access and consultation, application of state and local planning laws and management of the land in accordance with the vision and key aspects of the Point Nepean Community Draft Master Plan (2002).

These visions and key aspects also included ensuring that the future uses of the land are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable, that the land’s cultural, historical and natural environment heritage values are conserved, preserved and maintained and that knowledge, understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of the land’s indigenous and European culture and history are fostered and developed.

The Trust is managed by a small team of permanent staff and consultants, which answers to a Board of Trustees chaired by Simon McKeon.

www.pointnepeantrust.org