No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  Nobody else had been in the house; Marjorie hadn’t used the corkscrew because although she very much liked a glass of wine in the evening, all the bottles she had in the house were the new, screw-top variety. Like many people, she hadn’t used a corkscrew in years.

  The caseworker knocked on Ali Khan’s door. There was no answer – Marjorie said he never answered – so the caseworker opened it. Ali Khan was sitting on the floor. Nothing about him had changed since the day he arrived. He even wore the same clothes, or so it seemed. He had taken his shoes – the white Vans – off and they were parked neatly by the bed, which appeared never to have been slept in.

  The caseworker explained the situation: something was missing from Mrs Devlin’s things, and they would need to search the room. It took exactly two minutes to find the corkscrew on top of the pine wardrobe.

  The caseworker held it up to him, saying, ‘Why did you take this, Ali?’ but he did not respond.

  Marjorie had been watching from the bedroom door.

  ‘As soon as they found it, I said, “Oh no, oh no, what was he going to do with that? What was he going to do to me?”’ she told me, eyes wide.

  The caseworker was inclined to give Ali Khan the benefit of the doubt. Here was a teenage boy who had previously been hacked at by people who wanted to steal his bones. Perhaps the corkscrew was for protection? But it hadn’t been found under his pillow or under his bed or anywhere that might suggest that he intended to be able to reach for it. It was up on top of the pine wardrobe.

  Ali Khan offered no explanation. He looked down at his feet.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, this is the last straw,’ Marjorie said, repeating for me what she’d told DIMIA, complete with side-to-side flat hand movement. ‘I do not trust this boy. He has to go.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  It’s perhaps worth remembering at this point that Ali Khan wasn’t an asylum seeker when he came to Australia. He was an Australian citizen. It won’t surprise anyone who works with newly arrived refugees but the fact that he was here legally – that he’d in essence been invited to come – didn’t mean that anyone official had much of an idea as to what to do with him once the home stay fell through.

  What is known is that Ali Khan went from Marjorie’s home to a 1970s Aussie motel in Sydney’s west. I’m sure you know the kind of place I mean: it had a double bed with faded bedspread, faded curtains and worn towels. There was an ensuite: a pink ceramic sink built into a laminate bench, a narrow shower with a three-panel sliding door, and a toilet with a plastic lid.

  When the coroner, Ian Hanrahan, asked the officials from DIMIA why they’d put Ali Khan in the motel – alone – they couldn’t really explain it, except to say that there was a feeling that he might pose a ‘security risk’.

  ‘For having a corkscrew?’ Hanrahan said.

  It was meant to be facetious but one of the newspaper journalists took it seriously.

  ‘Remember that the terrorists who bought down the World Trade Center towers only had box cutters,’ he wrote.

  I don’t usually write to the newspapers but I was tempted on that occasion to remind the reporter that the September 11 attackers also had planes.

  The cost of putting Ali Khan in the motel was exorbitant, even if it was for only a short time. The owner-operators were an older, married couple who had very quickly figured out that they could charge DIMIA pretty much whatever they wanted to take what’s known as ‘overflow’ from the jam-packed immigration detention centres.

  As such, they were charging DIMIA $500 a night for rooms that usually went for $120 a night.

  Ali Khan stayed for twelve days. DIMIA explained that this was so his case file could be examined. Hanrahan wanted to know if anyone examined him – a psychologist, perhaps? The answer to that was no, but the DIMIA officer who examined Marjorie’s complaints about Ali Khan did decide that he couldn’t go back into home stay. He’d have to go into detention.

  ‘That’s quite a leap,’ Hanrahan said, ‘from home stay to detention.’

  The DIMIA officer said, ‘There’s nothing in between. Except maybe prison. And there wasn’t anything to charge him with, really.’

  Hanrahan said, ‘Not “Being in possession of a corkscrew”?’

  Again, he was being facetious.

  ‘It was only ever meant to be an interim solution,’ the DIMIA official said.

  This being 2006, the Department of Immigration had just six detention centres to choose from. There are now more than thirty – and all of them are full. I probably don’t need to explain what’s happened: our borders have collapsed. There are more boat people coming now than ever. People are smashing up against the cliffs on Christmas Island, they’re being thrown into wild seas, they’re cruising into Australian waters and calling on the navy to save them – and, since we have no real idea what to do with them once they arrive, most end up in detention.

  The centre closest to where Marjorie lives is called Villawood. It’s almost always got problems. The week during which staff were looking for a place for Ali Khan happened to coincide with one of the regular protests (detainees get up on the roofs and wave placards, demanding their freedom). Staff had gone into lockdown so Ali Khan ended up in a place known as Baxter (full name: Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre, but everyone called it Baxter) near the town of Port Augusta in South Australia.

  It was his second trip on a plane, except that this time, he was headed back to a centre for refugees.

  The landscape out around Baxter is stunning – red earth, purple mountains, blue sky – but Ali Khan wouldn’t have known about it: all the windows at Baxter faced inwards.

  The centre opened in September 2002, exactly a year after the September 11 attacks, with a population of seventy detainees. By the time Ali Khan arrived, there were 300. The average stay behind wire had blown out from sixty days to something like 800 days; plenty of people were going in, not many were getting out.

  ‘The decision to place Ali Khan in Baxter was taken for his own safety because of unrest at Villawood,’ the DIMIA officer told Hanrahan (jargon like that has taken over every government department; it’s like nobody speaks plain English anymore).

  ‘The intention was always to move him once his status had been clarified. It was, as I’ve said, an interim move.’

  Hanrahan looked up over his steel-rimmed glasses. He was sitting up high on a platform at the front of the court, looking down over proceedings, a tinny Australian coat of arms Blu-Tacked to the wall behind him.

  ‘On an interim basis, you say?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And how long was he there?’

  The DIMIA official squirmed. I felt a bit sorry for her. It wasn’t her fault. She was simply the officer chosen to give evidence on the department’s behalf. She’d never even met Ali Khan.

  ‘He was there for 228 days,’ she said.

  Hanrahan was still looking over his glasses – looking, but saying nothing. Then he said, ‘That’s a definition of interim that I’ve not heard before.’

  Some time was taken up, describing Baxter for the court. The location was chosen mainly because it was remote. A detainee might be able to escape but where were they going to go? The nearest town was Port Augusta, and from there, it was more than 300 kilometres to Adelaide, provided you could get there, which the detainees obviously couldn’t since they had no cars, couldn’t rent them, and would have instantly been spotted trying to board a train. There wasn’t much sympathy among security guards or people in town for the new arrivals.

  Most of the detainees claimed to be from Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan – they were people who were fleeing the war – but some of them were lying. They weren’t from Afghanistan, they were from Pakistan. They weren’t political refugees, they were people seeking a better life. Most had paid people smugglers to arrange their passage to Australia. They’d been warned about being put in detention upon arrival but had been assured that it wouldn’t be for long.

>   Then came the winds of change: the September 11 attacks, the bombing in Bali – people started feeling jumpy about who was trying to get to Australia and what they might do once they arrived. Both parties, Labor and Liberal, were competing with each other, each trying to take the toughest stand against boat people. Before long, the length of time that people were spending in detention had blown out from months to years.

  Detainees would arrive at Baxter in reasonably good spirits. They’d go to the gym and to the English language classes. They’d have a spring in their step as they walked down the halls. Months would go by, and they’d start to move more slowly, and their smiles would fade, and their mood would become melancholy. Every day in Baxter was the same as the last and would be the same as the next. Nothing ever changed – and nobody was ever told how long it would go on.

  In frustration, detainees at Villawood had taken to making public protests by getting up on the roofs. That movement soon spread to other centres. Some detainees had taken to cutting themselves with their razor blades and, when the razor blades were taken away, they started cutting themselves on the razor wire. There were a couple of quite serious protests at Baxter before Ali Khan got there. Detainees would get up on the roofs of the buildings and stay up there for days, blistering like bubble wrap in the desert sun.

  The media loved it. They’d get tip-offs from the refugee advocates – retirees and uni students, and other concerned types like Marjorie – that a protest was planned. They’d drive out to Baxter and take photographs of women and children behind the barbed wire – and, since the women wore headscarves and aprons, and the children were barefoot, pedalling dolefully on rusty old tricycles, it would look like a scene from a Polish ghetto, not democratic Australia in the twenty-first century. Men started sewing their lips together, swallowing shampoo and detergent; cutting themselves with plastic knives. Things really got out of hand the night they set fire to the place. Thirty of the rooms got damaged. The government was carrying on about how it was lucky nobody got killed but finally the detainees were getting plenty of publicity and that was always the aim.

  Before long, action groups had planned a big protest. It was 2005, the Easter long weekend, I think. A convoy of old cars drove out to Baxter. There was only one road so it wasn’t like police didn’t know what was happening. Plus, the protestors had alerted the media, who went and rented all the rooms in Port Augusta – the owners ramped the nightly rate up for the occasion. There were a couple of big puppets: a giant John Howard head with glasses made from coathanger wire and long, spidery arms that could be moved by people holding big sticks, for example.

  There were genuine refugee advocates in the crowd, but the anti-Israel, free-Palestine people were there as well, as were the International Socialists, the Grannies Against the Iraq War (GAW), the Greens, and anyone else inclined to call the prime minister ‘little Johnny Howard’. They made a camp in the open paddock, less than a kilometre away from Baxter. It started out fairly peacefully. There was drumming and dancing. Some people stripped off; one or two guys got pretty close to naked, which was fine, except that the detainees had no way of knowing what was going on. The walls around Baxter were high, and the camp was out of sight.

  Someone hit on the idea of sending up kites. The detainees would see them in the blue square of sky above their heads. That worked until police came and confiscated the kites. The media got it all on camera: hippies in dreadlocks shouting at police officers wearing those canvas pants that gather at the ankles and tuck into heavy boots. There was spittle flying everywhere, people chanting and banging on drums. Police horses arrived.

  Protestors like to make a big deal about the presence of horses, like it’s the ultimate symbol of fascism. The facts of the matter are more prosaic: in terms of crowd control, one horse is equal to fifty police officers. The size and the sound of them, the unpredictable way they move, the heaviness of their hooves . . . they keep people under control in the way a wall of police can’t.

  It’s very useful for crowd control, is a police horse.

  The news reports were dramatic: lines of police standing in the South Australian desert sun, each with a perspex shield, trying to stay emotionless while the protestors screamed in their faces. The cops are pretty used to it. They stand with their hands folded placidly in front of the body, the feet slightly apart, staring straight ahead, but you can only imagine what they must be thinking.

  The protestors wanted the detainees to stage a breakout. It wouldn’t be easy. There were two fences around Baxter: an inside one, and an outside one with a bit of no-man’s-land in between. The more agile detainees got over the inside fence pretty quickly. They started pushing on the outside fence. The police seemed more unsure about what to do.

  The protestors had come prepared. They were pushing wirecutters and pliers through the fence. They were giving people blankets to throw over the razor wire, and one of the big banners also went over the razor wire, to help the people inside get out. They passed star pickets through, and bent the cyclone wire out of shape.

  The detainees had poles from the volleyball nets. They started escaping through the holes in the fence and, when police and guards came after them, they waved the volleyball poles in their faces.

  The perimeter fence – the outside fence – was breached around 10.30 pm, by which time it was cool, and pitch dark. Detainees went running into the desert. By mid-morning the following day, most were begging to get picked up. It was forty degrees in the shade, and there was no shade.

  About fifty detainees got out. I don’t know where they thought they were going to go. There’s nothing but desert for miles around Baxter. It was pretty easy to find the missing detainees. The real worry was not finding them. In all likelihood, they had no water. They’d fry out there. A couple of them gave up running as soon as they saw a police car. They were burnt and dehydrated, relieved to be found.

  Some got picked up by protestors in their beaten-up old cars, young blokes with face piercings, high on the thrill of the protest. They motioned the escaped detainees to hurry, hurry, get in. They drove them further into the desert and then appeared to either lose their nerve or run out of ideas. They left a group of them with bottles of water and bananas that had turned black in the desert heat. God knows what they thought but, eventually, the detainees hiked to the nearest road – which in the South Australian desert is also the only road – hoping to find a lift. The only cars on the road by then were police cars so it was straight back to Baxter.

  The government held a press conference, saying they were appalled by the behaviour of the detainees: yes it was hot and boring in detention and they’d been there a long time but that was no excuse to break government property and threaten the lives of guards with volleyball poles. It wouldn’t be tolerated.

  Things had been tough at Baxter but they were about to get a lot tougher.

  Chapter Nineteen

  No report anywhere suggests that Ali Khan caused any trouble at Baxter while he was there. That shouldn’t be taken to mean that he escaped the harshness of the place. Like everyone else who arrived at Baxter after the riots, Ali Khan would have been strip-searched upon arrival – bend over, part your bum cheeks so we can see inside – and strip-searched again, every time the security guards got wind of a new protest brewing.

  He’d have been put in nylon handcuffs and taken into the courtyard, to kneel on the grass in the hot sun while private security guards did routine monthly searches of Baxter for weapons (sharpened plastic knifes, for example). He’d have had to live with all the new rules that were put in place after the riots, too. Some of them were trivial – the guards took away all the cricket balls and billiard balls, since they were now ‘weapons’ (some detainees had taken billiard balls from the games room during the riots, put them into their socks and swung them around, like the hammer throw), meaning there were fewer games to play and things to do. Not that Ali Khan seemed to be the game-playing type, but you know what I mean.

&nb
sp; It was a tough environment, which the media understood, which is why they wrote some pretty outraged stories about it. I myself remember giving the occasional sermon about the need to be kind to asylum seekers. Not everyone agreed with me. I heard people saying things like, ‘If they don’t like it here, they can go back where they came from.’

  That wasn’t an option for Ali Khan.

  He could hardly go back to squatting under corrugated iron in the refugee camp, behind a cyclone wire fence. He’d supposedly won the refugee lottery. Free passage to Australia! He’d come to Australia legitimately. He’d jumped no queue. He even had the passport. He shouldn’t have been locked up at all.

  The negative media coverage, criticism from the UN and so forth, finally took its toll: in 2007, the Howard government announced plans to close Baxter and to move most of its residents to different detention centres. You’d think that would involve some kind of thorough examination of the files. Maybe somebody would spot that Ali Khan was still being held, almost a year after he’d arrived, despite him being an Australian citizen, and raise a few questions, but that didn’t happen.

  Ali Khan was sent from Baxter to Villawood, in Sydney’s western suburbs, and again, you’d think there would have been somebody there to notice that he shouldn’t have been in detention – but since Ali Khan never said anything – he wasn’t exactly the jump-up-and-down, I-want-to-see-a-human-rights-lawyer type – nobody ever did and he ended up staying for years. Of course that was the government’s fault. They’ve tried to say it wasn’t – a private company was involved in screening detainees – but who appointed the private company? Anyway, it hardly matters. The point is, Ali Khan was locked up there for years when he shouldn’t have been. I can’t know for certain what that might have been like for him – there are people who argue that he was probably safer there than in the camps in Africa – but I do have an idea of what life in Villawood is like.