10


THE BOAT JOURNEY FROM INDONESIA

The early stages of our voyage of a lifetime, as we motored through the tranquil bay, were uneventful. The sea was calm, with just a gentle breeze.

While our initiation to the boat journey was reassuringly easy, it didn’t stay that way for long. As anyone who’s experienced ocean sailing would know, conditions change dramatically the instant you leave the shelter of a harbour or bay.

Within minutes of reaching the open seas, the waters became choppy and people started vomiting. Not only that, because of the crowding they were vomiting over each other. And, naturally enough, as soon as one person threw up, a chain reaction followed among the others.

That set the tone. But it got much worse.

Few of the asylum-seekers had seen the ocean before, let alone been on a boat. A large proportion of them were from the rural heartland of Iraq and Iran, where the whole notion of the sea is a completely unknown concept. So this was a hugely confronting introduction to the art of ocean sailing. Our little fishing boat was like a twig in Sydney Harbour. We were completely at the mercy of the elements. It felt like we’d been thrown into the middle of a shipwreck movie set with panicked shouting and jostling and cries of ‘Allahu Akbar! [God is great!]’ from many of the refugees.

Not long after the vomiting spread, some passengers, probably those most incapacitated by seasickness, started losing bladder control. The awful blended stench of vomit and urine began wafting through the boat.

Refugees who had survived trauma, conflict and, in some cases, torture in their own countries were now suffering even more indignities. They were covered in their own and other people’s urine and vomit. I had never seen anything like this. It was squalid, degrading and, as though the danger of the voyage wasn’t enough, a serious health hazard.

And at the age of twenty-seven, and with only two years’ paltry experience since I had qualified as a doctor, I felt solely responsible for the survival and wellbeing of them all. Including three women in the late stages of pregnancy. With basic medical supplies I had ordered to cater for fifty people, not 150. Clearly it would be a miracle if we all survived.

After a few hours, I assumed we had reached international waters. I noticed a large, grey ship—which looked, at least to my nautically uneducated eyes, like a naval patrol boat following us. A dinghy was launched from the larger ship and drew alongside the fishing boat. As we bobbed about the ocean, the captain of the fishing boat—the man who we believed was responsible for steering us to safety—simply stepped into the dinghy and headed off to the safety and security of the ship.

The captain’s action was hardly a vote of confidence in our prospects, and left our tiny, overcrowded, creaking boat under the command of two teenagers, with no obvious qualifications or merit, let alone authority.

It was some consolation when an Iraqi stepped up and announced he had served in the navy and would do what he could. He was no master mariner—but at least he was an adult!

Now, we were on our own. The ill-fated boat was battling the elements, its little engine, built for nothing more boisterous than the waters directly off the Indonesian coast, chugging and complaining in a constant battle with the increasingly angry ocean waves crashing against the hull. The accompanying soundtrack was the chilling noise of people moaning and throwing up as the result of chronic seasickness and weakly calling out for medical assistance. The only sounds from the motley collection of passengers were of strain and suffering. On top of that was the tense and unpredictable atmosphere on board. One of my biggest fears was the passengers themselves. I was convinced some of them came from extremely dangerous backgrounds, where life was a cheap commodity. To my mind, at least a couple were potential, if not actual, murderers. They were intimidating and menacing. If a serious argument had broken out, as nearly happened a number of times, I felt sure they would not hesitate to throw someone overboard. Where we came from, human life is worth as much as the bullet that ends it.

The weather didn’t help. It was the wet season in the tropics. Soon it started raining—a constant, heavy, steady rain. And it continued that way for hours. All through the night and into the morning. Very quickly, people on the top deck who weren’t under cover were soaked. They were completely exposed to the elements and were lying haphazardly on top of each other. Around ten or fifteen were comatose, others were simply vomiting where they lay. Below deck, the refugees were gasping for air in the space normally reserved for storing fish. And there was the added complication of diesel fumes from the engine.

With the rain, came the wind. The sea was rough, like a roller-coaster. We could see the bow of the boat crashing down into the waves and then riding up high again.

On board, conditions were rapidly worsening, with the refugees becoming weaker and weaker from dehydration. I was doing a constant round of the boat, in a lot of places having to step over bodies lying in my way and incapable of moving. I used every one of my saline drips and lines within the first twelve hours of the voyage. And there was still no indication of how long we would be at sea. From then on, it was a question of doing everything I could to keep people alive with virtually no resources.

My travelling companions Hussein and Ali were helping me in every way possible. They had absolutely no medical background, but were contributing as best they could. Most of the people on board appeared to have given up caring.

The mullah had brought his family with him: his wife, two daughters and two sons. The elder of his daughters was one of the three heavily pregnant women on board. After a few hours of lurching up and down and side to side on the ocean, she became seriously sick and needed a saline drip to keep her hydrated. She was in the covered deck area at the back of the boat, which was in her favour, because it was probably the most protected spot.

When I told her I would be putting her on a saline drip, she pushed her forearm towards me, still covered in clothing. I asked her to pull up her sleeve so I could find a suitable vein in her forearm to insert the needle. She refused. This was obviously because of her religious beliefs and a desire to retain her modesty, but her life and the life of her unborn child were at stake and I thought it was ridiculous. I asked her what unholy things I could possibly be thinking about her forearm in those circumstances. But she persistently refused to pull up her sleeve.

It wasn’t until the mullah, who had been trying to organise and comfort other people on board, acknowledged her parlous state and intervened that I was able to treat her. He reassured her that I was a doctor and it was all right for me to see her forearm. At that point, she pulled up her sleeve and I inserted the drip into a vein. But because of the rocking of the boat, I fell on top of her in an unintentionally provocative manner. It drew gasps of horror from everyone who saw it.

There was no stand to secure the bag of saline solution, even if it could be secured on the rollicking deck, so someone had to hold it up at all times to maintain the flow of life-preserving fluid. Once the mullah’s daughter was on the drip, her condition stabilised. But it was an extremely close call. I don’t dare to think what would have happened if any of the pregnant women had gone into labour on board the fishing boat. There were absolutely no facilities, not even adequate clean water. I fear it could have been a story with a tragic ending.

The other two pregnant women were also in a bad way and needed anti-emetic injections—drugs effective against vomiting and nausea—which I’d reserved especially for them. One of them was part of a family with three generations of women on board—the grandmother who was probably in her sixties, the mother who I guess was in her thirties and very pregnant, plus the daughter who was about fourteen. They were all nearly comatose from vomiting and dehydration.

I was one of only about ten people who weren’t routinely vomiting. I think I was simply too busy to feel seasick.

There were two men in their forties who were particularly ill. One was in a coma, and I seriously thought either or both of them could die at sea. Fortunately, they both survived.

The mullah’s answer to the unfolding human catastrophe was to order the people on board to start breaking down their Turbahs—small tablets made of soil or clay from Kerbala, which is reputed to have been mixed with the blood of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein, who died in battle there. The Turbahs are normally used in prayer, but now the mullah was suggesting that the token gesture of throwing the soil into the sea would calm the waves. His followers did as he instructed. But, despite their actions, I don’t recall the surge and swell of the ocean subsiding in the slightest!

Along the way, one of the passengers went around telling people: ‘If you have a passport, now’s the time to tear it up and throw it overboard. And do the same with any other identification documents.’

No one ever explained who gave the order or why, but as the rumour spread the majority of people, including me, followed the instruction. Our resistance was low and, by that stage, most of us simply followed orders. On reflection, it wasn’t a smart move—a passport could have helped significantly in establishing our identity later on.

Because of the conditions, none of us had any idea how, when or where this nightmare was going to end. It may sound ridiculous, but my main fear was that we would completely miss our target destination, Christmas Island, and sail straight to the South Pole!

Before we sailed, we’d been told the aim was to reach Christmas Island in about thirty to forty hours. The back-up plan, however unlikely it now sounds, was that if we hadn’t found the island within three days, we should turn the boat east and sooner or later, we’d run into the west coast of Australia. But God alone knows where!

At one point, someone shouted, ‘Sharks!’ And, believe it or not, amid the medical disaster on the fishing boat, everyone strained to get a look at the killers lurking not far from us. Frankly, I think they saw some high-finned creatures leaping out of the water—which were more likely to be dolphins than sharks—but it showed how few of the passengers knew anything about the sea or marine life.

By this stage, we were all at the point of exhaustion and despair. The atmosphere on board was only getting worse. As well as being sick, most people had been sitting in a cramped position for more than a day and tempers were becoming quite frayed. Arguments were breaking out—especially within family groups. We were tired and filthy, with no idea if or when we would set foot on land again. We had no expectations because we simply didn’t know what was going to happen to us.

The rain remained constant and it was pitch black. The crashing of the ocean was almost deafening and the backdrop was the moaning of the passengers vomiting on each other. It was like a cargo of dead and dying fish spread across the decks.

Before we started on this voyage, I thought that when it was dark, we would be able to navigate by the constellations and stars in the night sky. It wasn’t like that at all. You couldn’t see anything because of the rain and complete cloud cover. Instead of my illusion, it was like ink. No lights, not even the lights of passing ships.

Finally, dawn brought a new day—and with it, the rain cleared, the wind dropped and the ocean conditions calmed. And as the weather eased, it didn’t seem quite so chaotic on board. The day drifted slowly by and then, around seven o’clock in the evening after something like thirty-six hours at sea, we saw lights.

The Iraqi sailor who’d become our captain-by-default was perched on top of the rear deck cover and was one of the first to spot the glow. Not many people were awake or alert enough to see the lights by this stage—and rather than raise false hopes, we checked and double-checked to make sure we weren’t just seeing the lights from a ship.

Silently, those of us in the know focused our eyes on the lights to check for any signs that could tell us exactly what we were about to encounter.

The glows were few and far between but provided strong hope that we were close to land. None of us wanted to make assumptions, though. A false pronouncement that we had spotted land at this stage would have been utterly devastating for everyone on board.

It took about twenty minutes before we realised it couldn’t be anything else but land. And, most likely, inhabited land. That in itself was quite remarkable, since the navigation equipment had been so rudimentary and had been left, for the majority of the voyage, in the hands of an ex-Iraqi sailor and a couple of Indonesian kids.

The realisation that we were near the end of our ocean ordeal brought an enormous sense of relief coupled with eager anticipation.

We weren’t quite there, with more than an hour of sailing to go, but we could almost smell the safe harbour of where we were heading—which we were pretty sure was Christmas Island.

Navigation wasn’t a problem now. We just headed straight for the lights. In fact, as we closed in on the lights, the navigation equipment was ditched overboard. I can only think it was a precaution so the authorities couldn’t discover exactly where we’d come from.

We were probably about one nautical mile away from the island when our boat was intercepted by an Australian Federal Police vessel. It was like a small military landing craft, made of metal with a blunt, square front. There were three officers on board, along with a driver.

The police boat came alongside and someone shouted through a megaphone: ‘Stop! Where are you from?’

One of the passengers on our boat bellowed back: ‘We are asylum-seekers!’

And I thought to myself, ‘We’ve made it!’

That first contact with the Federal Police meant that we’d reached our destination, and while I was jubilant, I also had to reflect on how fortunate we had been. Without a word of exaggeration, people could have died if we’d had to spend another day at sea. The medical supplies had long gone by that stage and food was rapidly running out. Passengers would very quickly have become critically ill through a combination of dehydration and a lack of nourishment.

The Federal Police officers, two men and a woman, were appalled at the conditions on the boat when they first clambered on deck. They were wearing gloves but had no masks. And the smell must have been putrid—they were holding their hands over their mouths and noses but, despite their best efforts, were still dry-retching.

I met them as they came on board and took them straight to Doha because she was the only other person who spoke good English.

The first thing the Federal Police asked was: ‘Where’s your navigation equipment?’ Of course, by that stage, it was at the bottom of the ocean, never to be traced.

The navigation equipment wasn’t the only casualty. I think someone sabotaged the vessel by putting sea water in with the engine oil as soon as the Federal Police made contact—to guarantee we couldn’t sail any further in that boat.

Quickly, the process of unloading the asylum-seekers began. The police gave us strict instructions: ‘Come off the boat as you are. No belongings. We’ll bring the belongings off the boat and sort them out later.’

I was fortunate—I was in the first group taken into the Federal Police barge and ferried to Christmas Island, where we stepped onto a wooden walkway, made our shaky way to the end and finally alighted onto solid ground. And, believe me, putting my feet on dry land for the first time in thirty-six hours was a feeling of sheer elation. Though it would take more than an hour for my body to settle; at first, I kept feeling the rocking motion of the ocean and I was noticeably unsteady on my feet as I ventured tentatively on to shore.

Still, I recall thinking, ‘Everything’s going to be rosy from now on.’

Our expectations were that we would go through the immigration processing and would then travel to Sydney or Perth. On reflection, we didn’t know anything!

The transfer of refugees was all very efficient but, by its very nature, wasn’t quick. The Federal Police instructed us to wait at an assembly point immediately at the end of the walkway. They erected a tripod and camera, told us to line up and took a photograph of each person in turn. Then we were tagged with a bracelet, like a hospital tag when you’re going in for an operation; each one had a number on it.

There were buses on hand to take everyone to wherever our destination would be. One bus would fill up, then the police would take the barge out again to collect another load of passengers. They did this again and again; the whole process took about four hours.

Once we had landed, Doha and I stayed at the end of the walkway to translate the instructions from the Federal Police to the other passengers. Finally, everyone was off the boat and we were able to board the last bus. I remember making small talk on the journey and asking Doha about herself, but she was preoccupied with other things—after the squalor of our journey, she was keen to go to the toilet in slightly more pleasant surroundings!