Remarkable people on both sides of the wire

July 20, 2007
Issue 

Acting from the Heart: Australian advocates for asylum seekers tell their stories

Edited by Sarah Mares & Louise Newman

Finch Publishing, 2007

256 pages, $24.95

Without any fanfare the Howard government is spending $500 million on a high tech, 800-bed prison on Christmas Island that will be Australia's newest detention centre, complete with facilities for babies and infants. The Labor Party is offering no objection to its construction. Despite superficial appearances, the rights of asylum seekers and refugees have not been secured, and a book like Acting From the Heart should be read by any person who cares about human rights in this country.

For now the detention centres are almost empty, partly because of the government's retreat last year from the strict implementation of its policy of mandatory detention. A much smaller number of asylum seekers are making their way to this country. But not so long ago there were many hundreds imprisoned in immigration detention centres — men, women and children, many in remote sites, far from public scrutiny.

Their every act of protest was met with violence from the private prison management authorities. They were clubbed, beaten, and knocked down by water cannon. Resisters were thrown into isolation, or moved to other detention centres far from their friends.

Some were driven to self harm or suicide. And in the middle of all this were imprisoned children (2184 just between 1999 and 2003). Acting From the Heart evokes those times in an anthology of remarkable personal accounts written by decent people confronted with a great crime: this country's imprisonment and abuse of asylum seekers.

Most of the contributors to Acting From the Heart describe themselves as "advocates", a term that covers many roles: volunteer case worker, friend, surrogate family member and activist for changes to policy. Many of their stories begin with the writer visiting a detention centre to provide some outside human contact for an isolated detainee, or through letters and phone calls to victims of "offshore processing" on Nauru.

After initial social awkwardness people communicate across cultural differences and the lives and fates of the narrators and detainees become intertwined. The advocate's life is an emotional roller-coaster ride as he or she comes into direct contact with detainees and see the cruel reality of mandatory detention.

They talk of the bizarre disconnect between their workaday world of friends and family, and the world of ruthless arbitrary power, which is the reality for asylum seekers. As Diane Gosden puts it, "To move between the immigration detention centres and the Australian life outside was almost schizophrenic".

Moya Turner describes a visit to Villawood detention centre where, in the compound next to the visitors area, she saw a helpless woman subdued by guards and dragged off to a room to be drugged before deportation to China. She says she never saw such a look of terror, not even in her years working as a nurse in palliative care.

The advocates work in the face of indifference or hostility from the broader public. Journalist Jacqui Everitt describes an argument with a friend, just after Everitt had secured important film footage of an incident in a detention centre that screened on Lateline. Her friend told her, "I agree with the government. We don't want these queue jumpers here … I don't have to see these people … and I don't want to …" At that moment Everitt and her friend represented the whole of our divided Australia.

Acting From the Heart has stories within stories. As the writers tell their own stories we glimpse the lives of the asylum seekers they have befriended, and whose fate they care about: a woman collapsing breathless on opening the letter that informs her of her deportation; a young man who becomes an artist on Nauru to keep himself sane, but who succumbs to unrelenting government pressure and accepts return to Afghanistan; a man skips with joy on his release from detention, but then slides into depression when faced with the reality of living from hand to mouth on a temporary protection visa; the men already living in Australia when their wives and children drowned on the SIEVX; a three year old girl is released from Villawood after spending her whole life in detention. We meet these people, and many others struggling against inhumane treatment to retain their own humanity.

Of course we do meet people whose refugee claims are ultimately accepted, and who go on to start new lives in this country. Not every story is a story of defeat, but they are all stories about abuse and needless suffering.

The sixth anniversary of the terrible events around the Tampa draws close, and the final work is being done on the new Christmas Island detention centre. Plainly the struggle for the rights of asylum seekers is not over. Unfortunately now, and in the future, we still need people like those who tell their stories in this book. Read Acting From the Heart to see what an inspiring reservoir of courage and common decency we can draw on in that struggle.

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