No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  Like plenty of other priests, I’ve been a fairly regular visitor. Sometimes I’d go to say mass. Not everyone understands that some detainees are Christian. Other times I’d go to meet Muslim detainees, people who had been held there for lengthy periods. The refugee agencies would organise it. They’d want people like me – priests – to talk about how uncharitable, how unchristian it was, to hold people for so long, without ever letting them know if they’d one day get out.

  On one occasion, I think it was in 2005, I went to meet a family that had been living in Villawood for several years. Forget about sending them home. Our authorities hadn’t been able to work out where ‘home’ was. A refugee advocate asked me to go and meet them and maybe to speak at a press conference afterwards, the idea being that I could talk about the example set by the Good Samaritan. I’ll admit to being stunned by what I found.

  Like most of the other detainees, this family had arrived on a boat. They had no passports, probably because they’d thrown them overboard. They’d crashed up against Christmas Island and one of their children had suffered quite serious injuries, clambering up the rocks to get to shore. They’d been carried up to the medical centre for a check-up, and then transferred to Villawood. They claimed to be from Afghanistan but couldn’t speak the language, or not well enough to make the claim believable. Their claim for refugee status had been denied but since they refused to say where they were actually from (probably Pakistan), how could Australia ‘send them back where they came from’?

  Those circumstances aren’t unique; there would be hundreds of people in detention in Australia right now in precisely that situation: lying about where they’re from, and refusing to take the many inducements to go home, in the hope of one day being able to make a better life, here. If that makes no sense to you, you’ve probably never been part of a family that has come here from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s the only shot you’ve got.

  I don’t say that jumping the queue is the right thing to do. I think people should wait, if they can, but this family’s case, it shocked me. There were children involved, and while the family was appealing to various courts and tribunals to be allowed to say in Australia, those children were growing up behind bars.

  The rooms they’d been given – it wasn’t exactly like a prison but it was pretty basic. The rigmarole I had to go through, just to get in to see the family, reminded me of the protocol for visiting prisoners at Long Bay. I had to apply for permission six weeks in advance. I had to supply a copy of my own passport. I was told to arrive two hours ahead of the scheduled visit, so they – the officials who then ran Villawood – could put a metal wristband around my wrist that couldn’t be taken off without a special tool. I was also stamped with an invisible stamp that could only be seen under special lights.

  Upon passing through a metal detector, I was given a full pat-down. I’d worn my clerical shirt and collar – like I said earlier, not everyone wants to see a priest who isn’t dressed like a priest, and I suppose I can understand that – but I didn’t escape the full interrogation as to what I was doing there, and who I wanted to see, and why.

  I’d taken along a bag of green grapes – somebody, maybe the refugee advocate, had told me that the children loved grapes – and although they were in a clear plastic bag, like a Coles bag, they had to go through the X-ray machine. I remember thinking, what could you possibly smuggle into a detention centre inside a grape?

  Something else I remember was that anything with any kind of alcohol was banned. I don’t mean just cakes – you couldn’t even take underarm deodorant, because of the fear that detainees might use it to make a bomb.

  The meetings with detainees took place in a small visitor’s room, attached to which was an even smaller, outdoor courtyard. Having already been through all manner of security checks to get into Villawood itself, there were another two sets of doors to pass through, before you got into that visitor’s area.

  Each of those doors was set into a wire fence: you’d pass through one, and they’d hold you in a wire cage under the baking sun for a while, before letting you through the second door.

  There seemed to be no logic attached to the amount of time you could be made to stand in that cage. It seemed to me to depend upon the number of people who were ahead of you, and the speed at which they could be processed (meaning, have the wands waved over them, like at the airport, and have all their bags hand-searched).

  That, in turn, depended on the size of the group that had to be processed ahead of you, which could be substantial. Many of the detainees at Villawood have family in Australia, and migrant families tend to be big families, and they’d all go out to visit, carrying all manner of special foods and treats, all of which had to be X-rayed and examined.

  Many of the women in the queue on the particular day I’m describing were wearing the hijab – heavy black robes and head coverings – and since it was close to thirty-five degrees that day, I can only imagine that the sweat would have been pouring off them. There were plenty of little kids in the queue, getting hot and thirsty and fidgety.

  There’s a hand-held scanner the guards use on visitors too, so it’s like when you look a bit suspect at the airport. They run it over your front and back, with your legs spread.

  All in all, it took at least an hour waiting in the heat to get into the exercise yard, which was a few metal benches in the hot sun.

  The visiting area is basically like a big classroom, with some plastic chairs and tables and a drink machine that nobody can actually use, since you’re not allowed to take money in.

  The family I was there to meet was waiting for me under the covered area. They described their journey to Australia: they’d gone from Afghanistan, they said, to Indonesia, where they had paid a people smuggler good money for their passage.

  They’d been held for a while in a ‘safe house’ waiting for conditions to be right or for enough people to be signed up to the boat. Then, when either or both of those conditions had been met, they were instructed to meet on a beach, late at night, and wait for their guide.

  He’d arrived late, when the moon was high. He told everyone to remove their shoes and wade into the water. A small boat took the group, in batches, to a larger boat, further offshore. There weren’t enough life jackets for everyone but those who complained were told to shut up or get off.

  The journey took four days. The only food was two-minute noodles and bottled water. The group had been warned that conditions might get rough but it was flat, and calm, and it seemed to them that the moon was lighting the way.

  Then, as they approached Christmas Island, the captain got off into another boat to return to Indonesia, and they were left to navigate their vessel to shore.

  None were sea captains, so they smashed into the rock face. Two people died.

  They had been told, back in Indonesia, that they would likely be taken from Christmas Island to a detention centre for ‘processing’ but they’d soon be released into the community, after which they should feel free to ‘disappear’ (take a black market job and get a false passport, so the children could go to school).

  They were quite surprised to find themselves still sitting in Villawood, four years after they’d landed. They told me a long, not quite convincing story about how they couldn’t go back to Afghanistan because some of the men in their family had already been hung to death in the back of Taliban ‘hanging trucks’ and the same fate probably awaited them.

  They said the government was offering them $2000 to give up their legal battle to stay, and to instead go home.

  I can’t say for certain what they hoped that I could do for them. I remember they complained about the quality of the food. It was tasteless, they said, and there was no variety. That surprised me a bit. One of the women in the group – a mother of one of the children – told me in perfect English, ‘We would like more variety, cuisine of Asia, Europe and every other nation! Not same menu every single week!’

  They also complained about
the quality of local TV and requested more videos for the children. They only had one, they said, a pirate copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One of the children quoted bits of it to me, and then announced that he was in fact Michelangelo (I think he’s the turtle who wears the orange mask). They also had an Aussie Rules football – a hard, plastic one – that they weren’t exactly sure what to do with.

  One of the women told me she was taking Zoloft for depression. I could certainly sympathise. I’d only spent an hour there and I was already itching to get out. I won’t deny that it was a relief to hear the voice on the loudspeaker informing me that the visitor’s hour was over. Then it was back to the long, hot queue, to get through the two sets of doors and back to civilisation.

  Chapter Twenty

  One thing I probably should have made clear earlier on – you’ve got to forgive me, I’ve never written such a long account of an event in my life – is that I didn’t meet Ali Khan in Baxter or in Villawood or anywhere else.

  What I know of him, I know from people who did meet him, and who have since talked to me.

  I’m counting Cate in that, obviously, and to some extent, Mouse.

  There was one other woman – a brave heart – who met Ali Khan when he was still in detention. She reached out to me just a few months ago. How she knew that I’d be interested I can’t tell you. Sometimes, there’s a serendipity at work that defies explanation.

  I can say that because I used to be a priest.

  Anyway, the woman’s name is Abby O’Whalan. She’s a Scot, which is one reason why I call her a brave heart. Another is that she speaks publicly about what she saw when she worked as a security guard at Villawood, and what she knows of Ali Khan.

  That’s no small matter: like everyone who has worked for one of the private security companies that run detention centres, jails and airports for the Federal government, Abby long ago signed away her right to speak her mind but, she told me, now that she’s a ‘lady of a certain age’ – she’s over sixty-five, and no longer looking for employment – she feels free to tell it as she saw it and, as she also said, bugger the consequences.

  ‘I dare them to arrest me,’ she told me, when she came to see me one afternoon in Bondi. It was late in April 2012, exactly a year after the siege. The days were getting cooler, but the farmer’s markets, traditionally held only in summer, were still on. Abby had come straight to my apartment from the market in Bondi, wearing her straw hat and carrying something I’d never seen before: purple carrots.

  ‘They were all purple before we began interfering with them,’ she told me.

  Abby started work at Villawood in 2009. It was, she said, ‘packed to the rafters’ with asylum seekers. As with Baxter, there was always somebody on a hunger strike or sewing their lips shut or climbing up on the roof to hold up a protest sign.

  ‘This shocked me but for the most part,’ she said, ‘we were told to ignore them.’

  Ali Khan didn’t stand out for possibly being albino, she told me, ‘Because nobody told us he was albino. My guess is that nobody knew! There are a lot of people in detention who look odd, to Western eyes. The women are covered up, the men have the beards and no moustaches, and they’re shuffling around in white socks and rubber sandals. You learn not to judge. You see a lot of children. That is quite shocking at first but you get used to it so quickly. I’m not proud of that fact.’

  Ali Khan wasn’t all that young by the time he got to Villawood.

  ‘We had little children in Villawood,’ Abby said. ‘Nobody really knew how old Ali Khan was, but we didn’t know how old most of them were. They don’t come with birth certificates. They come from countries that use different calendars. Some of them don’t know themselves how old they are.’

  If Ali Khan stood out at all, it was only for being ‘a bit strange’ – that was how Abby put it to me.

  ‘He was definitely mute,’ she said, ‘and I mean mute all the time. He basically never said anything to anyone. I can’t speak for when he was taken to see the doctor – that would have happened once a year – maybe he said something to her; surely she’d have asked him the odd question, but in the whole time I was at Villawood – years – I never heard him say a single word. My guess was that he didn’t speak English, and that whatever language he did speak wasn’t spoken by the people around him. Or else he wanted to keep to himself. We had been told that many of the people in detention had been through great trauma. Ali Khan was listed as being from Africa – I can’t remember what country, exactly, but I do remember that surprised me. But then, there’s white people in South Africa, aren’t there?

  ‘Not that I’m saying he looked South African. The colour of him was a bit odd. To me, he definitely looked African, as in black African, but like he’d been put through a bleach cycle. He wasn’t completely white. He definitely wasn’t black. He was off-white, or grey. And in that sense, he didn’t really fit in with any of the other groups of people we had there – the Kurds, Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians, Sri Lankans – he didn’t speak the same language as any of them, if he spoke any language at all.

  ‘There was also the hole in his head,’ she said. ‘Did you see that? You could have put your fist in it. I heard he got hit with a machete.’

  I’ve heard that, too. I still don’t know if it’s true.

  Abby told me that Ali Khan was under constant surveillance at Villawood, even while using the bathroom, but then, so was everyone.

  ‘They keep low-level lights on at night, so they can keep watching you in your sleep,’ she said. ‘I put my hand up at one team meeting one year – you know the kind of thing I mean – and asked if that wasn’t torture, never being able to sleep with the lights off, and let me tell you, that didn’t go down well.

  ‘The management’s view was basically: anything to keep the peace. As security guards, our role was basically to feed these people, give them their time in the exercise yard, and give them their medicine. To treat them like zoo animals, really. There was no sense of taking care of them. No listening to their problems, not if those problems had anything to do with where their case was at or anything like that. We basically kept them under control. Or tried to, anyway.’

  According to Abby, there were people who did try to assist the detainees, in so far as their legal rights were concerned.

  ‘There are lawyers who come in basically every day,’ she said. ‘Whole teams of them, so many I lost count. Because there’s good money in it. The government pays. The asylum seekers have a right to go to court to have their case heard. And they’ve got a right to a lawyer. And if they can’t afford a lawyer, we – Australia – have to give them one.

  ‘So you can imagine: it’s an industry.’

  I wanted Abby to explain one of the things that had troubled me: Ali Khan had been moved out of Baxter in 2006, but he wasn’t released from Villawood until February 2011. That’s five years in custody – and he’d never done anything wrong. He was never even meant to be there. Why didn’t any of those lawyers intervene on his behalf?

  ‘Right, you’d think they would, but how many of them would have known that?’ she said. ‘Like I told you before, it wasn’t our business to question the detainees. And Ali Khan never said anything. He didn’t stand up for his rights. Not that we’d have listened. They’ve all got a sob story. You can get a bit weary of hearing them. They want you to act for them but you can’t.

  ‘The other thing he had going against him was, he had no family on the outside. Most of the people we had in Villawood, they had family. And those families were well-connected. They’d bring in their own lawyers. Paid for by the government, obviously, but lawyers who had already paved the way for their brothers or mothers or uncles or cousins to come to Australia.

  ‘These were people who knew the ropes. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said 2000 people who arrived after Ali Khan got out of Villawood before he did. It’s like with anything. You have to know how to work the system.’

  It was perplexing to
me, this idea that Ali Khan could have been sitting there, an Australian citizen – albeit one who had never really lived as a free person in the community – for so many years. By rights, he should have been moved out of Baxter, never mind Villawood, within about two or three weeks of being sent there, for the simple reason that nobody had any jurisdiction to hold him. As a refugee, he should have been helped to settle in the community. We’d invited him to come! And again, he’d done nothing wrong.

  I agree with Abby: part of Ali Khan’s problem was that there was a long queue of people agitating for access to lawyers and the courts, people who could make a louder noise. Just as when he’d been in camp in Tanzania, he asked for no assistance – and so received none.

  I asked Abby how Ali Khan passed the time during the years that she knew him. She said, ‘Oh, well, like the others, he was allowed out for four hours a day to watch television or to play with a ball.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  It boggles the mind.

  ‘I don’t know whether it was because he would have blistered in the sun or what,’ Abby said. ‘One time he was taken out because the rooms were being searched and he got blistered so we were careful not to do that. But he mostly stayed in his room. He didn’t have anyone sharing with him. That was unusual but then again it wasn’t, because most people wanted to be with their own families and he had no family.

  ‘He had to come out for meals but he hardly ate anything. He was so thin,’ she said, ‘you could see the bones of his spine through his shirt. He only had the one shirt and one pair of canvas shoes. Nobody ever came with new clothes for him. I guess he must have been small when he came in and then, because he hardly ate, he stayed small.’

  I have wondered how long Ali Khan might have stayed in that strange limbo had there not been a violent protest on the roof, one that led to the re-examination of the files of all the detainees in Villawood.