Julie Sprigg, Perth
The Port Hedland Immigration Reception and Processing Centre is set to be mothballed by the end of June. All 52 detainees will be moved to South Australia's Baxter detention centre.
Thirty-three detainees were moved in two groups beginning on May 15. The detainees were shocked that they had been given only a few days to prepare themselves to leave the centre that was their place of residence for up to five years. All of the detainees are long-term, their stay in immigration detention ranging between two years and eight months to six years.
For many of the Port Headland detainees, Baxter will be their third detention centre, having been previously moved from the squalor of the Curtin centre.
Refugee-rights campaigners say that transfer of detainees from Port Hedland to Baxter has added to the detainees' generally severe demoralisation.
While the government claims that Baxter has a higher degree of "amenity", an article in the May 22 New Zealand Herald gives a much truer picture of the grim reality of Australia's maximum security refugee prison.
"By any grim measure", the NZ Herald reported, "Baxter Detention Centre is a chilling sight, surrounded by barbed wire and towering electric fences humming with 9000 volts.
"No life can be seen from the outside: all buildings face inwards, and there is only the long, lonely road that winds out from Port Augusta at the remote apex of South Australia's Spencer Gulf, past mangrove swamps and into the vast plain that vanishes into the distant Flinders Range.
"If it is sobering from the outside, it is so much more when the gates slide shut behind the asylum-seekers sent there under Australia's policy of mandatory detention."
"It is like a prison here", one inmate said. "There is a fear in us when we see the cameras everywhere and the doors are all electronically opened. They only gave us a room with a toilet inside, like an ensuite ... It is only a land with grass and all around us there are rooms that other people live in. We can see only the sky and the grass."
The 24 hour camera surveillance, the restrictive small compounds and the electrified fences at Baxter all contribute to a deliberately oppressive environment. Baxter is a custom-built facility designed to break detainees psychologically, to the point where they will give up all hope and accept repatriation to dangerous and often life threatening situations.
The night prior to the first group's removal, 20 extra guards dressed in riot gear were brought into the Port Hedland centre. All recreational activities were cancelled, the communal dining and recreational hall was closed and detainees were served meals in their rooms. At least one detainee was placed into isolation to "prevent trouble".
Upon reaching Baxter, the new arrivals have been kept in isolation. They were given no access to television, radio or any form of recreational activities. All personal CDs and tapes that have been transferred from Port Hedland are being screened by guards. According to one guard, this is because "they might have instructions on how to make a bomb on them".
From Green Left Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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