‘Visibility is a trap.’
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The next day, our compound was visited by a cadre of Australian customs officials. Rather than introduce themselves or try to engage in conversation, they broke up into twos and threes and walked among us, peering at their subjects like we were exhibits in a zoo. This unnerving ordeal lasted for days.
Next, they announced they wished to meet us for a formal interview. The news circulated from cell to cell, passing like a flame on gasoline along the concrete walkways where we were allowed to get out and stretch our legs. One of my bunkmates, also from Burma, was the first to be summoned, and we were happy for him – and for ourselves. At last, it had begun. Our claims for asylum would be heard and we would start the process of being taken from this place and resettled on the mainland.
When my roommate returned an hour or so later, his face was a mask of affliction.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Is there something bad?
‘It has nothing to do with asylum or processing,’ he mumbled. ‘They didn’t even ask my name, just my number, and all the questions were about the boat. “Who operated it? How did you meet them? Where did you find them? How much money did you pay them? Did you arrange for others?”’
The dismal pattern would be repeated as customs interrogated dozens of refugees, zeroing in on the boat that had carried us on our life-and-death trip from Indonesia. Missing from the discussion were the questions you might expect, like ‘What are you running from?’ or ‘What made you want to take such a gamble with your life?’ The aim was simply to identify those who’d orchestrated the voyage.
My number was never called. Maybe the officials had drawn a select sample of passengers and shut down the investigation when they got the information they wanted. Meanwhile, when we asked the guards when we could talk to someone from immigration, we were met with the same response: ‘You’ll see immigration when they want to see you.’
One afternoon we were rounded up and herded into the main yard, where we were faced by a row of officials, dressed in blue polo shirts marked with the Australian crest. They were flanked by security guards and a team of interpreters, distinguished by their striped yellow vests.
One of the men in polo shirts read aloud from a short statement and waited as it was translated into our various languages. He said there had been a change to Australian law on 19 July, five days before our arrival. Those entering Australian territory by boat and without a visa after that date would not be permitted to claim asylum in the country. They would instead be transported offshore and held in indefinite detention, either on Manus Island or Nauru, while their claims were processed.
It sounded like bad news and caused immediate confusion. No context was given and no questions were allowed. The man had just rattled off an update on Australian law as if we would follow what he was talking about. It was an execution sentence delivered with the tone of a dull announcement at a high-school assembly. As it filtered through a dozen or so interpreters, the statement left most people scratching their heads. I understood English and even I wasn’t sure what was meant. It was also the first time I heard of Manus Island.
Over the next few days we pieced things together. The first clue was that Manus Island was part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), something the guys learned through phone calls to friends and family back home and in Australia. For me, the words ‘Papua New Guinea’ brought to mind the lessons of high school anthropology class, where I had been taught the progress of civilisation had happened unevenly in the country. There were still people who used spears to catch fish, or wore traditional clothing, or practised tribal warfare. While it was unfair to call it an undeveloped place, we had been taught it was definitely, by many measures, an unusual and sometimes dangerous place to live.
Others had heard of PNG through stories of civil unrest in the context of the West Papua uprising – the decades-long conflict in Western New Guinea between Indonesia and the Free Papua Movement – which summoned more images of violence. In the absence of the internet or other information sources, we imagined the worst.
Our only window into the outside world was a TV mounted in the mess area, tuned to the news on the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster. From time to time commentators discussed the new policy regarding offshore refugees. The focus of these reports was more on personalities and political niceties than what any of it meant. The main revelation seemed to be that, in June, Kevin Rudd had taken over as prime minister from Julia Gillard. Whoever they were.
Our worries grew as we began receiving our ‘privileges’, as they were coyly called. Each fortnight, detainees were allocated twenty-five points which we could use to make phone calls or buy toiletries or cigarettes from the detention centre canteen. It was a prison economy, disposing us to value the smallest favours we were granted by our keepers.
When our points were renewed two weeks after the announcement of Rudd’s new rules, we might have been expected to celebrate. More cigarettes! More toiletries! Instead, people urgently called friends and family in Australia to get a sense of how long we were to be held, and what was coming next. Those phone calls triggered an avalanche of distressing rumours about the conditions on Manus Island and Nauru.
Manus, in particular, was portrayed as an alarming place indeed. People spoke in hushed tones about strange and violent rituals still being practised in remote parts of PNG. Only a month earlier I’d been euphoric about my future. Now I was petrified.
In early September, from outside the facility itself, ABC News reported on the dramatic scaling up of the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre. The journalist stood in front of row upon row of dingy green tents, set close together, with flaps of tarp to block the view from outside, and a further row of barbed-wire fence to keep out the surrounding world. The tents looked like they had been placed there recently, suggesting a combination of mobile army camp and a fixed development much newer than the prison.
Through TV news we’d also come to understand there was an election coming in Australia. Until that point there had been an understanding among most of us that Kevin Rudd was probably using threats against refugees to win votes. It was common, in my understanding, for politicians to say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards. But when those neat rows of tents flashed up on the TV, my hopes were dashed.
From that moment every one of us became transfixed by Manus Island. The news played on a loop and many guys hung around waiting for the footage to reappear so they could obsess about it – again. Each day, by the afternoon a crowd would gather in the mess hall to watch the grim-faced ABC reporter and the sinister tents arrayed in the equatorial jungle.
Manus Island became our sole topic of discussion. Some stuck to the view it was all about politics. After all, the election was only days away and TV commentators said the Liberal Party, led by a man named Tony Abbott, was ahead in the polls and Australia could be about to see a change of government.
It seems remarkable now but we were all rooting for Abbott to win. Although he pushed the hard line that he would ‘stop the boats’, the logic among detainees went: ‘If Rudd was the one to open the Manus detention centre, then Abbott will be the one to close it.’ That was how politicians worked: they cancelled each other’s policies. And surely a party labelled as ‘liberal’ would take a gentler approach. We never could have guessed that both major parties in Australia had a history of deporting, imprisoning and traumatising refugees.
On 7 September we stood around the TV and cheered as Tony Abbott led his party to victory. The high-fiving didn’t last long. Two weeks later, Abbott launched Operation Sovereign Borders, a newer, more aggressive policy toward the refugees arriving by boat. The policy had its own promotional graphic, a picture of a tiny vessel on a storm-tossed sea, and the tagline (in all caps, naturally): ‘NO WAY: YOU WILL NOT MAKE AUSTRALIA HOME.’ A map of Australia with a line through it, like a ‘No Smoking’ sign, underscored the point.
The irony of this approach, from a country that had been built on an invasion – a hostile takeover by sea, by white settlers forcing themselves on an unwilling Aboriginal population – was lost on the politicians.
Staking his claim on this policy of nativism, Abbott announced plans to intercept the refugee boats and turn them back to Indonesia. Christmas Island was to be emptied. The single men were to be sent to Manus Island, while women, children and families were to be dispatched to Nauru, a speck of a nation in the western Pacific.
By now, footage of the arrival of the first detainees on Manus Island had become a regular part of immigration policy coverage on ABC TV. The clip showed frightened men being herded off a plane under guard. Strangely they were wearing shorts and rubber thongs. ‘Who travels like that?’ I wondered.
Looking down at my own skinny self, dressed in shorts and flip-flops, I realised my life had reached a terrible turning point. This had stopped being a strange movie that I was watching from the back of the theatre. The project to deport us to Manus Island was more than a possibility, or a line of political rhetoric, or a story told by the fireside to scare children. It was my life and it was real.
The election was over and the plan was going ahead. Very likely it would sweep me up and take me with it.