Twenty paper flags dyed with boneseed flowers

Installed in various locations surrounding the Gatekeepers Cottage, Port Nepean Quarantine Station.

Bunurong Country

The Calling Ground; it feels poetic just within its name. It’s situated out the front of the Gatekeepers Cottage where I’m staying. When this place was a quarantine station back in the 1900’s, there were two fences 40 feet apart. It’s a place where the sick people, the people in quarantine, could walk down and meet up with their friends and family and community members who were in the healthy side, and call to each other across the grounds and check in.

The Port Nepean Quarantine Station is a major symbol of colonisation and the impacts of migration on human health. Ships arriving from England to supply immigrants for the booming goldfields carried diseases such as typhus, scarlet fever, cholera, smallpox and measles. People and their luggage were isolated, fumigated and treated, hundreds died and were buried here.

The yellow ’Quebee’ flag was historically used to signal quarantine for arriving ships. I noticed on my arrival many yellow flowers in the landscape, and on further research found they were invasive weeds- boneseed, gazania, cape ivy and clover. To me, their yellow flowers became a symbol of colonisation of the landscape and impacts of human migration on ecological health.

Twenty flags, taking their shape from a symbolic Quebee flag at the Police Point lookout, are coloured with boneseed flowers, each representing an invasive species found in the area.