AustLit

'In her Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001), Geraldine Brooks offers important insights on quarantine, of which the COVID-19 generation desperately needs lessons. There is very little about COVID-19 that is unprecedented, and Brooks shows consonances between COVID-19 experiences on the one hand and events that happened three and a half centuries ago on the other. These are things that could as easily have happened this week as I write, things that demand recognition or risk repetition. As with much quarantine literature, one of the things Year of Wonders reveals is that there is little about the COVID-19 pandemic that is new, with the exception of its truly global nature. The 2020 fascination with the seemingly unprecedented nature of COVID-19 produced misleading and untrue evaluations of our historical experience with viruses. Indeed, a great deal of what the world is facing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is well within our repertoire of experiences. Despite the fact that quarantine is something that humanity has experienced many times, even before having firm understandings of the microbial mechanisms that underpin the transmission of viruses, quarantine was a part of these experiences, and resistance to quarantine has seemed as predictable as sunrises.'(Publication abstract)

'There are important connections between human and nonhuman animals in quarantine that have implications for biosecurity laws and the loss of biodiversity in Australia. The laws typically function as thinly disguised quarantine legislation and are wide-sweeping, manifestly averse to biodiversity, and mostly supportive of the primary animal agriculture industries of cattle and sheep farming. The undeclared and evident hostility to biodiversity that the laws represent is increasing, not reducing the risk of pandemics. Zoonosis, or the transfer of a disease from a nonhuman to human animal, triggers pandemics, and diseased animals are rife in animal agriculture, in other areas of food production where nonhuman animals are trafficked, and in rural and other outback environments where animal agriculture interests are eroding or deeply compromising biodiversity. Reducing the phenomenon of humans in quarantine means questioning animal agriculture and the biosecurity laws that support it. This kind of questioning appears in aesthetic responses to animal agriculture and the ecophobic, speciesist, and anthropocentric contours of that agriculture. The crime thriller film Mystery Road, directed by First Nations Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen, represents that questioning. Subtly but powerfully, the film castigates animal agriculture’s targeting of wild dog and other wild animal populations for eradication and cows and sheep and other industrially farmed animals for reduction to lumps of meat. This targeting foments antagonisms between biosecurity and biodiversity, legitimizes the practices of quarantining many animals for much of their lives, and paves the way for humans serving time in quarantine.' (Publication abstract)