Subject to Quarantine: A Narrative Analysis of COVID-19 Reporting in the Australian News Media

Quarantine as a technology of governing objects, people, and places

Mobility is the primary focus of quarantine measures by restricting individual movement. Moreover, quarantine is both temporal and spatial in nature. Quarantined people do not only have to isolate in a certain space, but also for a certain time. As such, quarantine as a social practice has the capacity to draw boundaries around places and objects assigning subjectivities to designated spaces (Bashford, 1998, 2004; Bashford and Strange, 2003). With Nikolas Rose (1996), we approach subjectification as ‘the effects of the composition and recomposition of forces, practices, and relations that strive or operate to render human beings into diverse subject forms, capable of taking themselves as the subjects of their own and others practices upon them’ (p. 171).

In Australia, quarantine is historically a significant policy site for the formation as a modern nation, the delineation of the borders around this nation state, and a national identity (Bashford, 1998; Bashford and Strange, 2003). Bashford (2004: 116) maintains that, ‘maritime quarantine measures, enabled a particular geographic imagining of Australia’, making quarantine ‘culturally and imaginatively central to [. . .] the production of Australia as a “geo-body”’. Biomedical quarantine practices have been emulated in Australian social and welfare policies targeting Indigenous peoples in a way that furthered the construction of contemporary Australia as a White nation (Staines, 2022). As a technology of governance, quarantine collapses categories such as object, people, and place (Bashford 2004), contingent on and producing complex positions in a social order for those subjected to it. Who is likely to be put under quarantine directions, in what conditions, and for what reasons is socially embedded intersecting with experiences of privilege or disadvantage.

Study design, data collection, and sample

We explore contemporary Australian quarantine narratives across maritime, residential, and hotel quarantine, affecting different demographics during the early stages of the pandemic, to trace the emergence of distinct subjectivities in the governance of COVID-19. This study was exempted from ethical review by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the university where the research was conducted. Data collection was carried out across two stages. First, we conducted a Factiva database keyword search with support from a research assistant to identify potential texts for analysis. Texts so identified were screened for salience to the objectives of this study to trace continuities and emergent subjectivities within quarantine narratives inflected by discursive constructions of Australia as a nation. Inclusion criteria were (1) published between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2020, (2) in English language, (3) online in an Australian news media outlet, and (4) making reference to (i) the disembarkation of the Ruby Princess as well as the following inquiry and/or (ii) the introduction of hotel quarantine and the inquiry into the Victorian scheme, and/or (iii) the hard lockdown of the public housing towers in Melbourne, and the following Ombudsman investigation into its human rights violations. We collated articles from national, regional, and local online news sites that reported on maritime, residential, and hotel quarantine during the early stage of the pandemic to capture the emergence of COVID-19 as a socio-political phenomenon, early responses aimed at managing outbreaks as well as the gradual establishment of routinized processes and plots.

Overall, the combined searches yielded 847 articles after removing duplicates. The first news items included in the larger sample were published on 28 January 2020 and the last on 30 December 2020. In all, 253 articles focused primarily on maritime quarantine, 115 on residential quarantine, and 479 on hotel quarantine (see Figure 1). Some articles (n = 133) additionally mentioned another type of quarantine – four articles referred to all three types of quarantine.

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Figure 1.

Number of articles across primary quarantine type March to December 2020.

For the second stage, we collated a subsample from the 847 identified articles for a narrative analysis. To do so, we first identified all articles pertaining to more than one form of quarantine (n = 133), then ordered the remaining articles chronologically and sampled every fifth text. This yielded another 144 articles. The final subsample (n = 277) includes articles from the ABC (ABC, n = 58), The Daily Telegraph (TDT, n = 17), The Guardian (G, n = 30), The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH, n = 71), The Australian (TA, n = 69), and others (n = 32). Although we made every effort to locate news stories meeting the inclusion criteria, we acknowledge that our final sample is likely incomplete. Nonetheless, we are confident that the size of the sample is sufficiently great to substantiate the findings reported below. Our assessment is based on the large degree of repetition and duplication across articles, as well as the breadth of included news sources and the diversity in experiences and perspectives we encountered in them.

Data analysis

Data were subjected to three types of narrative analysis: thematic, structural, and visual (Riessman, 2008). Thematic analysis is focussed on a narrative’s content; structural analysis explores the forms of storytelling (e.g. metaphors, formulas, and attributes); and visual analysis examines visual content alongside text. Data analysis began while screening for inclusion in the larger sample and continued as all 847 articles were read by the lead researcher using annotation and memoing to develop a thematic framework. During this stage, we also took note of key metaphors and formulas in which stories about quarantine were told. The thematic framework was then applied to the subsample (n = 277) with the support of NVivo12 software. The addition of selected photographs published as a part of news items provided opportunities for visual analysis. We use the photographs as a lens through which to interrogate and illustrate the identified themes. Finally, we revisited the extant literature on quarantine as a historically relevant subjectivising practice to interpret our findings.

Harbingers of death

Maritime quarantine initially received the most journalistic attention in the analysed period. The fate of cruise ships and their passengers caught out at sea by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications for the broader community generated a large volume of articles. The disembarkation of the Ruby Princess became the case against which other crises of containment would be measured. Attention to the ways in which the story of the Ruby Princess is told, reveals metaphors and attributes reinforcing the encroaching presence of COVID-19. Such metaphors liken cruise ships to a ‘breeding ground’ or ‘petri-dish’. Descriptors such as ‘ill-fated’, ‘virus-ridden’, or ‘disease-ridden’ elicit fear of contamination. Counter-narratives representing maritime vessels as ‘floating quarantine’ appear rarely; references to cruise ships as ‘death ship’, ‘sick ship’, or ‘Covid-ship’ are more common and conjure imagery of a modern-day plague. The association of maritime vessels with COVID-19, and in turn the proximity to disease and death was reinforced via the co-occurrence of these metaphors alongside articles reporting the growing body count linked to the Ruby Princess, for example:

A woman in her 70s who contracted the virus on the ship became the seventh coronavirus-related death in NSW. (ABC, Unknown Author, 2020a)

The above excerpt demonstrates a formula of reporting that is characteristic of the early days of the pandemic, with relatively low incidence and fatalities. Over time this formula shifts towards a proportional accounting style, evident in the examples below:

And of the 75 people who have died in Australia, 21 of those were connected to the ship’s disastrous journey to New Zealand. (ABC, Cockburn, 2020)

The notorious Ruby Princess cruise ship – Australia’s biggest single source of infection linked to seven deaths. (TA, Ritchie and Kellett, 2020)

He would be the first of many Australian cruise ship passengers to die after being diagnosed with COVID-19, including 22 who disembarked the Ruby Princess ship in Sydney. (SMH, Noyes and Ward, 2020)

As Abeysinghe and White (2010) noted in their analysis of narratives on Avian Influenza, the communication of risk happens via the use of statistics, estimated probabilities, infection rates, and death tolls. Such numbers can take on semi-magical qualities (Billig, 2021) and the symbolism with which they are imbued can be put to protecting, strengthening, or threatening social bonds (Camorrino, 2023). The last excerpt creates a sense of foreboding. This sense of foreboding owes to the mobility inscribed in maritime travel, made more salient in the coinciding of shorelines with national borders (Bashford, 1998).

This narrative structure positions cruise ships as bringing disease, suffering, and death to Australian shores. Cruise ships are identified with dangerous objects: they become harbingers of death. A photograph published alongside an article reporting on the fate of the Ruby Princess after disembarkation, visually encapsulates this point showing the vessel idling off the coast near Sydney with the Waverly Cemetery in the foreground (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

ABC, Probyn (2020); image credit AAP Joel Carrett.

The composition of the photograph emphasises the proximity with cultural symbolism of death, while employing the visual aesthetic language of a tourism catalogue: a bright day, calm seas, and a well-known landmark. However, here these visual ingredients combine to produce a sense of looming disaster. The focus on an iconic landmark is symbolically powerful in its capacity to invoke national jeopardy: the threat of COVID-19 closing in on the nation.

Importantly, the structure of the narrative centres vessels themselves as dangerous objects putting its passengers and the health of the national body at risk. There is a classed dimension to how these objects, people, and communities are represented. Passenger stories are told in a way that appeals to empathy, rather than danger:

Imagine what it’s like for the passengers, back at home, hearing how their trip unleashed a creeping trail of disease through the broader community; hearing of friends and acquaintances made during the cruise falling ill or dying. And now homicide detectives are investigating the ship and will probably want to interview them. (TA, Middap, 2020)

In contrast, some stories reflect on the impasse regarding what to do with the Ruby Princess and the crew remaining on board after all passengers had disembarked. At the time of the photograph, hundreds of crew members remained onboard and were refused disembarkation, on the grounds of infection control, but also due to their status as foreign citizens. These foreign nationals, the vast majority from low-income countries, were quarantined off Australian shores, despite the rushed disembarkation of the ship’s (by and large wealthier) passengers. As an advocate for these crew noted:

Australia had a legal and humanitarian obligation to help crew members, who are in quarantine in their cabins, by testing them, treating them and allowing them to return to their home countries. (G, Zhou, 2020)

The fate of the Diamond Princess quarantined for weeks in Japan’s Yokohama port presents an intriguing point of comparison. While the poor implementation of quarantine on that vessel was widely criticised and blamed for the spread of infection among its crew and passengers (see Pougnet et al., 2020), the deaths and human suffering ensuing after the unchecked disembarkation of Ruby Princess passengers, was regarded as a failure to impose quarantine. The handling of this situation set the tone for a later standoff in Western Australia when then-Premier Mark McGowan took a hard line towards crew on incoming vessels, reiterating the ‘disaster’ (Brown, 2020) of the Ruby Princess disembarkation. This early episode in the governance of COVID-19 foreshadows how social forces along representations of nation and class, inflect how quarantine practices are narrated to affect people differently. We interrogate these dynamics in greater depth below.

Bodies out of place

Reporting on quarantine facilities onshore leverages the ‘harbingers of death’ theme, but shifts focus from ‘dangerous objects’ (i.e. maritime vessels) towards ‘dangerous places’, located (initially) outside Australian national borders. Reporting of new incidences of COVID-19 infections inside Australia often traced back cases to a purported origin. For example:

Fresh cases of exposure being reported on the Gold Coast and New South Wales over the weekend from people returning from Iran. (G, Martin and Henriques-Gomes, 2020)

Whereas in maritime quarantine, ‘dangerous objects’ were threatening to bring the virus to Australian shores, it is now people who travel from ‘dangerous places’ into Australian communities carrying the risk of infection with them. The governance response to these perceived risks was the imposition of travel bans, at first on selected countries, like China and Iran, followed by a comprehensive ban on all international arrivals. In this context, dedicated quarantine facilities are initially positioned as sites of containment, but also gateways facilitating the return of Australians stranded overseas. Attention turns towards the dangers brought home with ‘returning travellers’ – a subject position emergent in the stories about quarantine.

The returned traveller is a complex trope, implying that these people are of Australia (i.e. one can only return to somewhere to which one belongs) while simultaneously being separate from the national body. This liminal status of being of, while being separate situates ‘returning travelers’ as bodies out of place that need to be reintegrated. This triggers a bifurcated process of quarantine as public health technology and as a ritualistic process of subjectification, which manifested in a hotel-based system subject to strict eligibility criteria and caps on numbers.

The caption that accompanied Figure 3 reads:

The first busloads of international arrivals have been taken to quarantine hotels across Sydney. (ABC, Unknown Author, 2020b)

The caps imposed on numbers allowed to enter the hotel quarantine system are significant, as international arrivals come in ‘busloads’ (Figure 3). This terminology continues a ‘swarm discourse’ that historically approximates contagion through immigration and threat to the national body (see Mendoza, 2018; Taylor and Kidgell, 2021). The preoccupation with numbers couched in a capacity narrative further justifies the governance of the returning traveller subject. Concerns with the rights of detainees and their conditions in quarantine only surface sporadically: being subjected to quarantine becomes an expression of social privilege, a means to accomplish the reabsorption into a national body, while preventing its contamination. Quarantine facilities present a spatio-temporal configuration – ‘safe zones’ in which biohazards brought back with ‘returning travelers’ from ‘dangerous places’ are contained and purged:

[People in hotel quarantine were] separated by a fence from the first lot, but again, well away from anyone in the community . . . hundreds of metres away. (ABC, Heaney, 2020)

The best way to prevent returning travellers spreading the virus amongst the wider Victorian community [. . .] hotel quarantine system was the nation’s ‘defence against importing cases from around the world’. (SMH, McCauley et al., 2020)

The plot here is one of hotel quarantine as a line of defence, at a distance from the broader community, in which ‘returning travelers’ are ritualistically purified from the threat of disease while they await their welcome back in the Australian national body. The positioning of quarantine facilities as sites of containment invoked a sense of spatial separation that permitted the governance of risk. However, the emergence of community cases linked to the Victorian hotel quarantine system posed a dramatic challenge to this plot and the ‘returned traveler’ entangled in it:

Now that shield is under pressure and cracks are appearing. It appears that failures in the system have led to the virus spreading in the community. (SMH, Unknown Author, 2020c)

The pathogen flew in with returned travellers who quarantined in the [. . .] hotels before it spread to more than 30 security guards, setting in a motion a wave that killed hundreds of people in Victoria. (SMH, Cunningham, 2020)

Notably, the Victorian hotel quarantine scheme and the inquiry into its implementation saw the proliferation of metaphors depicting boundaries as porous, using terms like ‘leakage’ or ‘cracks’. Subsequently, hotel quarantine and quarantine facilities’ representation in the news media shifted dramatically, with fewer occasions presenting the quarantine space as a ‘safe zone’ and increasingly shifting interest towards governance failures and their consequences:

Ben Ihle went through the genomic sequencing and epidemiological investigations undertaken as part of the inquiry. These had shown the movement of the virus through the barriers of quarantine was responsible for 99 per cent of the recent COVID-19 infections in Victoria. ‘On 23 May, Victoria’s COVID-19 death toll was 19 people. There were no deaths attributable to COVID infections between that date and 4 June’, he said, when the [hotel] outbreaks were beginning to gather steam. ‘As of today, the total number of COVID related deaths in Victoria is 787’, he said. This meant ‘the failure by the Hotel Quarantine Program to contain this virus is, as at today’s date, responsible for the deaths of 768 people and the infection of some 18,418 others’. (SMH, Lucas and Mills, 2020; added italics for emphasis)

This statement attributed to counsel assisting the Coate Inquiry Ben Ihle was reproduced many times across all media outlets in the sample and indicates a massive narrative shift in the use of quarantine as the governance of danger. Where national boundaries in the case of maritime quarantine coincided with Australia’s shoreline, here the boundaries protecting the community are located well and truly within the nation. As a designated space within the national body, these quarantine hotels had turned from a means to mitigate danger into dangerous objects themselves. The reporting broaches the significance of the temporal governance of space, here raising the urgency with which hotel quarantine systems were implemented as a possible explanation for ensuing breaches:

The quarantine program, dubbed Operation Soteria after the Greek goddess of rescue and safety, was initially set up in 48 hours. (SMH, Mills and Fowler, 2020)

The most common attribute with which the Hotel scheme is described is as ‘a bungled quarantine allowing the virus to run rife [posing] dangers for the nation if quarantine was botched’ (TDT, Young, 2020, emphasis added in italics). This expanded the spectrum of potential breaches beyond infectious disease control to include moral and legal transgressions. The reporting on the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry is ripe with stories about hotel detainees flouting rules, security guards asleep on the job, or political leaders uninvested in taking responsibility. In turn, the attention to breaching as a dangerous ‘doing’ that is not accidental but eventuates from acts that are narrated as incongruent with moral behaviours (Ekberg et al., 2021), set the stage for a greater emphasis on compliance. Breaches rely on the singling out of ‘dangerous people’ alongside ‘dangerous objects’, bringing into existence subjects amenable to the conduct of conduct. This is a crucial factor when considering the reporting on the lockdown of nine public housing estates in Melbourne during this second wave, as we elaborate below.

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Figure 3.

ABC, Unknown Author (2020b); image credit AAP Jeremy Piper.

Putting bodies in their (social) place

The lockdown of nine public housing estates in a deprived Melbourne neighbourhood combines elements we identified above in the context of maritime and hotel quarantine reporting. The lockdowns were described throughout all media outlets as ‘immediate’ and ‘hard’ imposing extremely strict conditions on residents with virtually no advance notice. This left some residents unable to enter their homes, for example, when returning from work, or to check on family members in need of care. First and foremost, residents affected by the measure are governed as dangerous people who in their numbers are positioned as a risk of unknown proportions:

A matter of many hundreds [of public housing residents] who have already been exposed and who may already be incubating. (ABC, Murray-Atfield, 2020a)

This swarm rhetoric combines with their positioning as capable of breaching to call for strict enforcement of compliance with quarantine rules:

Sending police rather than security guards or community workers [to locked down estates] indicated there were likely concerns of potential quarantine breaches. (ABC, Wibawa and Mann, 2020)

However, while public housing residents are also represented as capable of breaching there is an added dimension of vulnerability assigned to them:

Residents living in the flats are among the most vulnerable and heavily policed people in the state of Victoria, with a high population of new migrants, Indigenous people, people experiencing severe mental illness and people who have experienced family violence or homelessness. [. . .] given the vulnerability of many people living in the towers, to do anything else [other than lockdown] would be contrary to public health advice [. . .] it would risk an ‘explosion’ of new cases among vulnerable people living in housing estates. (G, Wahlquist and Simons, 2020)

The residents of the towers were particularly vulnerable, saying public health workers, nurses and others had been working ‘right throughout the night’ to provide food, essentials, drug and alcohol support, mental health support, family violence support, physical healthcare. (G, Visontay and Henriques-Gomes, 2020)

Public housing residents are here presented simultaneously as dangerous and in danger, leveraging vulnerability tropes percolating Australian welfare discourse (Peterie et al., 2022). As Robinson et al. (2021) noted, residents were seen as deficient by local authorities orchestrating the lockdown and were by and large excluded from the discussion of potential solutions to the problems arising from it, as they themselves were identified as part of the problem. Concurrently, there are a notable number of exceptions to the aggregated reporting of public housing residents as vulnerable and dangerous. Indeed, as the lockdown went on, stories centring individual tower residents’ community advocacy and human rights increased and added nuance to the overall media reporting. These include stories about the efforts to support testing, sharing culturally appropriate food, communication (e.g. by translating official pamphlets into various languages), and entitlements to fresh air and exercise. Concentrated in outlets such as The Guardian and ABC, these stories sit in contrast with the positioning as vulnerable:

When the lockdown happened, [resident] took it upon himself to help translate public health messages from English to the local languages, Amharic and Tigrinya. He said the Government’s initial communications that provided crucial information about infection control were in English only. (ABC, Om, 2020)

Many of the residents worked as health workers, for aid organisations, or in aged care either in Australia or other countries, [resident] said. Best practice would have been to work with them to find out what concerns people had and how residents were accessing information about the virus. They could then assist the government to target the response to the outbreaks. (G, Davey, 2020)

More so than in any other configuration of quarantine reporting, residents were interviewed and asked how they felt about the lockdown, offering relatable insights into lockdown living, challenging the deficit-heavy vulnerable subject position. However, stories of attempted breaches, violence, and frustration dominated reporting in other news sources. Here, individual residents appear as harder to contain than ‘busloads’ of returned travellers. Rather than acknowledging the immediacy of the lockdown and ensuing material and social deprivation, the trouble with quarantine is located in the purported vulnerability of the detainees and to the quarantine site. In this way, public housing residents become the weakness of the quarantine response as their vulnerability becomes synonymous with the capacity to breach, that is, to move the vulnerable/dangerous body out of its designated space. Quarantine as a practice of governance then is concerned with putting bodies in their socially allocated space (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

SMH, Hall (2020); image credit Getty Images.

We are reminded of the role of security guards in media reporting on hotel quarantine breaches:

People at the other end of the income scale helping to spread the virus and being its greatest victims. Low-paid and poorly trained hotel-quarantine guards, with precarious job security, were the human channels from supposedly quarantined travellers to the guards’ families and friends. (SMH, Gittens, 2020)

Victoria has been criticised for being too slow off the mark in drawing on ADF [Australian Defence Force] personnel, with some observers blaming the use of private contractors to manage the hotel quarantine scheme for allowing COVID-19 to spread back into the community. (ABC, Unknown Author, 2020d)

While the Coate Inquiry found no evidence for any individual security guards’ actions to have resulted in the breach of quarantine that led to COVID-19 spreading in the community, the (ultimately unresolved) question of which government official had decided to rely on private security rather than police or the ADF to enforce compliance with hotel quarantine occupied the inquiry a great deal. In media reports, security guards were depicted as a casualized and uneducated workforce often sharing living, travel, and working arrangements with little background in or appreciation for infection control. They were also described as prone to immoral practices (e.g. having sexual contact with hotel detainees, neglecting duties, or being uncooperative) that transgress quarantine boundaries:

Reports have also emerged of contractors having sexual relations with guests and families being allowed to go between rooms. (ABC, Unknown Author, 2020e)

The state’s contact tracing team had a hard job trying to track infected security guards because guards were not always ‘forthcoming’ with where they had been and second jobs they had worked. (ABC, Willingham, 2020)

The latter statement was attributed to Jenny Mikakos, then-Minister for Health in Victoria. We also see similarities in the representation of crew earlier in the pandemic as a lower socioeconomic cohort located away from the protections of the national body. These groups exemplify a proclivity to breach being associated with their standing in a classed, and more subtly also racialised, social order (see Horner and Rule, 2013 on the spatial politics of race). Dialectics of quarantine tapping into constructions of dangerous people brought into being, in turn, subject positions linked to the need for containment. The logic of the returned traveller who moves across boundaries as a staged re-entering into the healthy national body is reversed here: a space of containment has to be carved out in the midst of community. The boundaries leveraged for this are legal-jurisdictional (e.g. shorelines, borders around states), and social-relational (e.g. non-English speaking, migrant, poor, uneducated, delinquent) in nature.