Luxury eco-resort brings old quarantine centre back to life - with its Chinese ghost

Sydney

Whatever horrors await the inbound visitor at Sydney's sometimes chaotic international airport pale into insignificance compared with those once endured by shipboard migrants sent to the city's infamous quarantine station.

Between the 1830s and its closure in 1984, more than 13,000 people carrying (or suspected of carrying) infectious diseases were interned in the beautiful yet melancholy place at the mouth of Sydney Harbour.

The unwilling guests stayed for days, weeks or months. Others died and were buried on a hill within sight of the city they never knew.

A few weeks ago the old quarantine station - renamed Q Station - reopened as a luxury A$17 million (HK$127.36 million) eco-resort, complete with conference facilities, restaurant and a soon-to-open 'destination spa'. Today's well-heeled inmates stay in tastefully decorated rooms equipped with queen-size beds, plasma televisions and modern en suite bathrooms.

To their credit, the company running Sydney's newest tourist attraction has not attempted to gloss over the institution's lurid history - quite the reverse. Apart from retaining much of the original infrastructure (including the barrack-like wooden accommodation blocks and grim hospital wing), Q Station runs a graphic re-enactment of camp life in the old laundry, plus spine-tingling 'paranormal' tours.

A museum, located near the wharf where inmates came ashore, uses photographs, historical objects and personal belongings to tell the story of those who passed through the quarantine station - a sunnier, but no less disturbing version of New York's Ellis Island.