Tales from the desert camps - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Madeleine Byrne
TWO WEEKS INTO HER CONTRACT AT WOOMERA IN 2002, BENDER WOKE UP IN A PANIC. Opening her eyes, she saw the television and comfortable room, ex-military, with its pleasant veranda, but she felt anxious. "I am guilty." Her heart was beating so fast it felt as though it was bursting inside her chest, she said. "If I don't do something, I'm guilty. I could be charged."
Bender had grown up with stories of escape. Her father, as a 26-year-old, scraped together enough money to leave Poland with his brother and reach Australia. That was in late 1937 or early 1938. His family, he thought, would come later. Seventy-five years later Bender woke in fright. Her eyes made out half-shapes in the bedroom. "I'm in this safe place. But my soul is in complete danger. I'm becoming part of the machinery." Words flooded her brain. She thought of Nuremberg, where saying you were following orders was no defence. Here she was earning money from this. "I'm becoming part of this horrific machine."
She sensed people checking her out when she was at work. There was always a "double process" going on, she says. Refugee advocates in town were wondering if she could be recruited – not brainwashed or brought into the rebellion – but if she was someone they could work with, while the asylum seekers were saying, "Is this psychologist any good?", meaning, "Will she listen to us?"
Recollections of former detention-centre staff are dominated by a sense of unreality but for Woomera employees it is even more pronounced. Not surprising when you remember that the town, according to tourism material, was closed to the outside world for most of its life. Until 1982, when it was derestricted, it was a "secret town".
"From day to day, you felt cut off," says Bender. "Even though I watched television, I mostly watched stories about Woomera. It was an all-pervasive environment." On a worker's day off there was nothing to do apart from wander around the town. "It was like the rest of your life ceased," she says.
She was not alone in this. Until May 2000, the detainees had no access to phones, newspapers or television. Following the June break-out, a man who had been held since January suddenly asked Rogalla, "Why are you putting us here in the middle of the desert?" Before this, he had no idea where he was. The overwhelming sense of unreality was made more intense for the many staff who felt their core values, or sense of identity, were under attack.
MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF THE ALLEGEDLY HAPHAZARD TRAINING OF ACM DETENTION-CENTRE STAFF – so much so that a 2001 Government report included a summary of the training provided to new recruits. "All applicants for positions with ACM are psychologically tested," it stated. "All staff are trained to look after detainees, to treat them with respect and to provide a humane environment." Those moving from ACM's correctional arm undergo a 24-hour "bridging" course that supplements 240 hours of orientation and pre-service training.
"I studied multiculturalism," Rogalla recalls an officer telling her proudly.
"Multiculturalism?" she asked with interest. "What exactly do you learn? How did you study that?"
"Well," the officer paused, "when you get a Muslim woman, you never make eye contact with them when you're a bloke!
"What you do is look her right between the eyes and that way she doesn't make eye contact, otherwise, she thinks you want to have it off with her." Rogalla is laughing now. "Or her bloke might get a bit funny about it," the officer finished.
Yet none of the staff interviewed had any orientation about the specific needs of asylum seekers or women and children in a detention environment. The 2002 ACM code of conduct does not refer to either concern and makes no distinction between "prisoners/inmates/detainees".
For Bender, the issue was not so much the lack of training but the system's inability to respond to the needs of the often-traumatised detainees. "Some of the set tasks were very much rubber-stamp tasks." She lists them: "They need a psychologist to tick off putting people in an isolation wing. Tick. They need a two-minute observation and 15-member High Risk Assessment Team [to care for suicidal or self-harming detainees]. Tick."
ACM was very proud of this system imported from its prisons, she recalls, because no one died. "You never let them out of your sight but you did nothing to reduce their self-harming desire," Bender says. But while the professional's signature was required to put the detainee in, the same person did not have the authority to have the person released. "It had to be approved by not one, but several managers."
There is exasperation in her voice as she describes the situation. Abruptly, when telling the story, the perspective shifts. "You had to argue that they were safe. Of course they weren't safe. It would be impossible to make that decision on your own. You'd ask for other options, especially for the children ..." Once Bender tried to have a boy of about 15 transferred to Woomera hospital, with no success. The management view was: "Put him in a cell, get a guarantee he won't self-harm, then we'll get him out." When the boy later threatened to self-harm, he was returned to isolation, along with his father. "It was a Sophie's Choice situation; it's this, or nothing. If you don't choose this, it will be worse," says Bender.
Bender remembers one woman called a "model prisoner" by the staff, because of her behaviour. "She never complained; she'd been compliant and helped out in the medical centre. One day, the woman lost it and started screaming, getting angry and throwing things. She'd been waiting and waiting and maybe received an indication she wouldn't be getting a visa, despite her partner being granted protection and living in Sydney. The woman was flexi-cuffed and put in the cell. She was furious and upset. She couldn't calm down." Bender felt she had to play the game: "I was in the same position, pleading, being compliant, so they'd let her out."
"This is upsetting her, she needs to be released," Bender pleaded.
"No, she can't go," the manager replied. "Not until she stops being upset. It's on your head if anything happens. Can you guarantee it?"
THE HIGH-SECURITY ENVIRONMENT AT BAXTER IRPC SHOCKED "JACKIE" when she started work there as a nurse in 2003. "I can't imagine being, or feeling, watched 24 hours a day and never being able to go somewhere and have a chat where someone wasn't watching me." A psychiatric and general nurse with training in midwifery, Jackie had nine stints at Curtin, Port Hedland, Baxter and Christmas Island between 2002 and 2003. (She spoke anonymously, fearing her future employment would be threatened otherwise.)
Jackie met a psychologist due to fly out later the day she arrived. After discovering they were of a "like mind" and all she needed to know (who she could speak to, who she couldn't, what she could get away with) they agreed that it would be a good idea to resurrect the women's group that had been running at Curtin.
After receiving funding from the centre manager, Jackie bought some fruit and food the women craved: spring onions, lemons, almonds and dates. Once the group got going, the female nurses and detainees took part in activities together. "It was great fun." One urged her to get up onto her feet, "Come on, come on, Jackie." So she, along with some Port Augusta nurses, got up to dance. How the women cheered. "It was like, even if you're big and shake your bits, you can have a bit of a laugh."
Then they saw the camera. Everybody froze. "I nearly died, thinking how the people in central command would have been really pissing themselves ..."
A pregnant detainee – a woman she didn't know well but someone who, she says, became an instant friend – walked over to Jackie and took her Akubra. "She went and got a chair, stood on it and covered the camera, then said, "Now dance!"
From then on, whenever they met, someone would stand with a hat over the camera, even if it was only for a conversation, Jackie says, "because we didn't want them looking at us".
IN THE DETENTION ENVIRONMENT, GROUPS QUICKLY FORMED. DIVISIONS DEVELOPED between former prison guards and those employed specifically to work in detention. During its contract, ACM tried to shift from a model borrowed from prisons to a less authoritarian one. Rogalla says that during her second contract the company started recruiting officers specifically for the work. She recalls the two groups – the former prison guards and detention officers eyeing each other suspiciously. "One thought they were better than the other," she says.
But Bilboe, the Woomera psychologist, was disappointed to see that a move towards a "nicer" environment in late 2000 had dissipated by the end of 2001. By then, some of the asylum seekers had been detained for more than a year and were starting to exhibit what Bilboe calls "reactive behaviour".
To stop this, he says that ACM started recruiting hardline staff. "That's when I started writing reports regarding concerns about some of the injuries detainees were presenting with following incidents [that] would leave ACM open to allegations of excessive use of force," Bilboe says.
A former Woomera nurse recalls: "From the very beginning, 30 per cent of the officers were decent, good blokes. You'd see them with a child on their hips, doing the best that they could. Whenever clothing came in, you'd see them trying to get the women what they wanted. They were good blokes."
The others who came from prison environments, she says, treated the detainees like prisoners and the little kids like dogs.
"On hot days, when it was up to 40 to 45 degrees, the little kids could only drink out of the tap. It took a long time for the water to cool, which meant they only had boiling water to drink. When the officers saw the children they'd shoo them away from the taps. The kids would be milling around and the officers had these big Eskies full of iced water, taunting the kids. I thought, ‘What bastards you are'. Sometimes, you'd hear the officers boasting of how during their night shift they'd ... There were four or maybe six gas lights in the compound, which lit it up like daylight," says the nurse. Since the detainees didn't have curtains on their dongas, they were forced to sleep with the light coming through the window. "They'd wait until they were asleep and [then] they'd go along with steel torches. They'd bang on the side of the dongas, and walk off, going back and forth to wake them up."
Were the officers checking on them?
"No, they were just being bastards. They didn't want them to sleep."
Rogalla, also at Woomera at the time, cautions against a "false dichotomy" where some staff and management are seen as humane, others heartless. "The issue is government policy, not who the private contractor is or who the employees are at the present time." Yet staff considered "inappropriate" managed to slip through, and ACM has acknowledged that it was difficult at times finding suitable staff. Another nurse recalls ACM recruiting 100 long-term unemployed as detention officers at the newly opened Baxter centre in a bid to save money.
Between August 2000 and August 2003, while DIMIA extended and re-negotiated its initial contract, ACM's future was "uncertain". "Because ACM could not guarantee employment beyond the end of the first extension period, it had difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff," the National Auditor report notes. "This resulted in the employment of casual, or less experienced staff in some centres, with some DIMIA on-site business managers reporting a consequent lower level of service delivery." Nurses were either employed directly by ACM, or recruited through nursing agencies but Rogalla remembers a former cook with no formal qualifications in the area, who conducted psychiatric assessments of the Woomera detainees in 2000.
TOWARDS THE END OF HER SECOND CONTRACT, BENDER WENT INTO "THE MESS" AT WOOMERA ONE EVENING to make herself a cup of coffee. She was working back. A group of 15 mostly male officers had settled at a table. She recalls that soon they were badmouthing the detainees. "Why do they bring their kids here?" they asked.
"None of us knows how we might be in their situation," Bender said.
They started haranguing her: "What do you know?"
"You're just a psychologist," one said. "You come here for six weeks and then you go." Bender realises her comments were provocative for these men, who were mostly in their 40s and 50s and had few options. "They were grassroots Aussies, country people," she says, and rarely encountered anyone who wasn't Australian or British outside the centre.
One of the officers supported her and said, "She's got a point."
The others were furious. Unlike Bender and some nurses who mixed with the detainees, the officers were tightly monitored. Some tried to befriend the detainees but this carried the risk of angering other officers, who saw them as being soft. "There was a double problem: management and being stuck there. And then the detainees acting out their feelings at them as perpetrators and attacking them verbally."
Within a few hours of the exchange in the tearoom, the health manager rang Bender on the medical-centre phone. "I've got to warn you," she said, "the manager's just told me."
The operations manager called Bender into his office, where she was disciplined for "causing distress" to the officers. "They're very stressed," he said. "I don't want them upset. It's taken us a long time to help them cope."
IN HER LAST WEEK, BENDER HAD TO TELL A WOMAN SUFFERING FROM DEPRESSION that her husband had tried to kill himself, but people kept intruding. "I had to ring the telephone interpreting service – a guard bursts in. I asked her to leave." Each time she started speaking to the woman, the guard burst in again.
"This is a session," Bender cried out. "How dare you interrupt."
She's losing it, management thought, and possibly feared that she would bring a stress claim. "When I arrived I was dubbed ‘quiet as a mouse' by the health manager," she says. "My style is to try to grasp what is going on; I became the mouse that roared by the end of it."
Bender was fired two days before the end of her contract. By then it was already too late. She had come through with her promise to the detainees and spoken to ABC Radio National about conditions in the centre. She was scared about being exposed but felt she had no other choice. "I made a snap decision," she says. "It was a bit like sitting beside the pool and you surprise yourself by jumping in. It was cold."
"A lot of the time, I felt very unvalued, as if I were in jail," she says quietly. The strange thing is that inside the detention centre she felt she belonged. One of her friends, when asked how she was, said: "I think she is totally in her element."
Something strange happened there. Unable to relate to the majority of officers, Bender felt at ease with the asylum seekers, sitting on the floor in their little rooms, drinking tea and sharing their stories. "I felt it was normal," Bender says.
"I could relate to this – these young men who were desperate about their families." They were, in a sense, her father. They were her father as a young man. "There I was, sitting with these Iranians, Iraqis and Palestinians and feeling that they are my people," she says. "I'm used to intense dark faces, making endless cups of tea, sitting around the table and you just talk and talk and talk."
Her father rarely spoke about what had happened to his family. "It would seep, or be expelled, out of him like a forced breath," she says. "It would emerge when looking at the few photos left: ‘See, I was always with my mother. See, I am holding her hand.'"
Out of a silence would come the memory of his failure to bring them out of Poland to safety. Occasionally he'd refer to his family in ways Bender didn't fully understand. Once she asked how her paternal grandfather had died. With a wry smile, her father said, "From an earache". He had been shot in the head. They were all shot, murdered with millions of other European Jews.
Much later, Bender understood her father's enormous guilt that he had survived. "I picked up by osmosis and inference and absorption the sense of shame he carried," she says. "He was very sad a lot of the time, with black moods and often with a short fuse." Fearful that he would not survive financially, he was first a clothing-shop proprietor and then invested in real estate. He had an endearing sense of humour. "There were glimmers inside him," she says, "of a capacity to express love." Her father was such a good man, she was told when he died, especially to the Lowiczers (the 30 or so survivors from his village now settled here) whom he helped selflessly.
All this came to her later, but at Woomera, among the detainees, she felt at home. "I believe that in times of great despair small gestures can sustain people," she says. Whether bringing in batteries, or pens, or simply listening to their stories, she had to believe such gestures offered some comfort; if only to remind the asylum seekers that they were human beings, not numbers. ♦