Qualla: Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites

Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom N Hulse, CC BY-SA 4.0. Joe Eggmolesse was seven years old when the police came for him. The year was 1945, the diagnosis was leprosy, and the boy was taken from his family and carried north to a small island in the Palm group off the Queensland coast. He would be held there for the next ten years. Aboriginal patients like him were not permitted in the passenger carriages that white travellers used; they came on goods and cattle trains, some in handcuffs, leg irons, or with chains around their necks. This is the history of Fantome Island, known to its traditional owners as Eumilli, where for nearly half a century the state sent people to be isolated, and where far too many of them died.

Image: Tom N Hulse | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites: The Logic of Removal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, the Queensland government held sweeping power over the lives of Aboriginal people, including where they could live and whether they could be detained. From 1928, Fantome Island held a lock hospital fo...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites: Life Behind the Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Twenty-two kilometres of sea separated Fantome Island from the mainland near Ingham, and that water did the work of a prison wall. Patients lived in small huts, little more than twelve by fifteen feet, sweltering in the heat and offering scant shelter when the tropical rain came....

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites: The Ones Who Stayed

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. There is a cemetery on Fantome Island with around 120 marked graves, and the true number of dead is harder to know. In the lock hospital alone, dozens died in single years. Some patients transferred from the earlier Peel Island lazaret were dead within five years of arriving. For...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Fantome Island Lock Hospital and Lazaret Sites: Ruins and Remembrance

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The lazaret closed on 3 August 1973. Within weeks the Health Department burned the complex, and over the following months most of what remained was destroyed; the great water tanks were dismantled the next year. Today the island is uninhabited, and only ruins and that quiet cemet...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0