The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners
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REPORTING FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY: STORIES ABOUT ASYLUM SEEKERS
by Debbie Whitmont
The 1961 census, held the year Four Corners was born, recorded that more than 90 per cent of Australians considered themselves British. In keeping with the times, Four Corners’ first presenter, Michael Charlton, spoke with a plummy English accent. By coincidence, he and his family lived in the same block of flats as I did. The first time I heard the Four Corners theme music, I was in the flat downstairs playing with Michael Charlton’s children. It never occurred to me that, years later, I’d be working on Four Corners myself.
I didn’t realise, either, that my own family, who had fled wars in Europe, was part of a minority in Australia. Or that the most disturbing stories I would report for Four Corners would be about a new wave of immigrants and the way they were treated.
By 2001, as Four Corners was getting ready for its 40th birthday, Australia’s cultural diversity was a trademark. That year’s census found one in every five Australians had been born overseas. Back then, the World Trade Center was still standing, a Norwegian freighter called the Tampa hadn’t yet appeared on the horizon and Australia was still basking in the glow of the successful 2000 Olympics. Few Australians knew that while preparations for the Olympics had been going on in Sydney, asylum seekers were being beaten with batons in nearby Villawood detention centre.
Divisive as the asylum-seeker debate remains, it’s hard to overstate the fear and anger that gripped the nation in 2001. From a few hundred arrivals a year, the number of asylum seekers entering Australia by boat — then routinely called ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’ — had suddenly swelled to thousands. Immigration detention centres were bursting at the seams. Reports of riots and fires in the centres only hardened the popular view, supported by the media and both sides of politics, that ‘boat people’ weren’t wanted in Australia.
At the time, I had other concerns. I was about to go back to work after taking maternity leave. Four Corners, with its long hours and often gruelling workload, isn’t exactly a family-friendly work environment and I didn’t know how I would manage with two small children. Luckily, as it turned out, my partner, Peter McEvoy, who had been the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Media Watch, had transferred to Four Corners after Media Watch was axed under Managing Director Jonathan Shier. Peter and I arranged to work together, to help juggle child care.
Often, the hardest part of working on Four Corners is deciding on a story. Some stories, about big events or important people, are obvious. Others come from viewers or tip-offs. But sometimes, the idea begins with simple curiosity. In this case, I was intrigued by a piece in the Good Weekend magazine’s ‘The Two of Us’ column about the friendship between Zachary Steel, a clinical psychologist, and Dr Aamer Sultan, an asylum seeker. The two had collaborated on a damning study of the mental health of asylum seekers which had been published in the respected medical journal The Lancet. It was a rare glimpse behind the razor wire. But what particularly interested me was that Dr Sultan was an Iraqi.
I’d been the ABC’s Middle East correspondent, had lived in Jordan and travelled a number of times to what was then Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I knew Iraqi doctors were well trained and that escaping the country would have been difficult and dangerous. I wondered why Dr Sultan had been held so long in detention.
I found out later that immigration officials, who seemed to have very little information about Iraq, had simply chosen not to believe Dr Sultan and had refused him a refugee visa. But because there were sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime, he couldn’t be sent back and had been left indefinitely in detention. Locked up in Villawood, he’d found nearly all his fellow detainees were suffering severe depression and had tried to help them. After two years, he was overwhelmed and exhausted.
Both Aamer Sultan and the Refugee Action Group, who were in contact with a number of detainees, told us they were most worried about one Iranian family detained in Villawood. The Badraies, with their young son and baby daughter, had spent 11 months in Woomera detention centre during its most violent riots. Their six-year-old son, Shayan Badraie, had witnessed guards hitting his father and seen other detainees threatening or attempting to take their own lives.
As a result, Shayan had become so traumatised he’d stopped eating, drinking and even speaking. Consequently the family had been transferred to Villawood and, after two months in Westmead Hospital, Shayan had begun to recover. But as soon as he was sent back to Villawood, Shayan became ill again. By mid-2001, he was being hospitalised every four or five days, to be rehydrated and fed through a drip. On top of that, it was feared Shayan’s father was about to be sent back to Iran.
At first, it seemed impossible to tell Shayan’s story on Four Corners. The media was — and still is — totally banned from Australian detention centres. Even if we could tell viewers what was happening to Shayan Badraie, how could we prove it? And what if our questions meant his father was deported? A 45-minute Four Corners program needs people and pictures, and we had neither. Surprisingly, a few days later, it seemed that although we couldn’t get into Villawood, part of Villawood might come to us.
In mid-July 2001, 46 detainees broke out of Villawood in two mass escapes. The first problem was how to find them, the second was that talking to them would almost certainly mean breaking the law. The government had recently increased the penalty for helping or hiding an escapee to ten years in jail or a $10,000 fine.
Our interview with two of the Villawood escapees, at the end of a very long night which began at a Sydney railway station, was probably the most surreal experience of my life. I’d secretly interviewed wanted terrorists in places like Beirut and Gaza, but I never thought I’d be sneaking around Sydney risking imprisonment to meet people who had come to my own home country seeking asylum. And until then, I wouldn’t have believed that what I heard that night could have been allowed to happen here in Australia.
The two escapees we met told us that a group of detainees had spent nearly two months digging their way out of Villawood — from a hole in the floor under a carpet in a room used as a mosque, down two metres to the drains and through about a dozen sets of new gratings the Immigration Minister had recently shown off to the media as an anti-escape measure. Their escape was the stuff of a POW adventure. They’d drawn a map and rostered escapees to leave in small groups. It had taken nearly an hour to crawl along the muddy airless drainpipes to the other side of the razor wire.
The two men told us they’d emerged in suburban Villawood muddy and terrified. ‘Mohssen’, a 28-year-old Iranian, said he had joined the escape at the last minute: ‘For me, the end of the road was deportation, so I decided to escape.’ The second man, ‘Stefan’, from Algeria, had been the last to leave. He’d had to cut a fence to reach the mosque, which had set off an alarm.
But it was what the two told us about Villawood detention centre that was most disturbing. Until then there’d been very few reports from inside the detention centres and neither Peter McEvoy nor I had ever heard anything like the descriptions we were given that night of life in detention.
The conditions — a dormitory shared by 60 people, newcomers sleeping on the floor, boredom, constant identity checks and no exercise facilities — were one thing. But the despair was another. Mohssen said he knew two Iranians who’d tried to kill themselves. He’d seen one of them carried away on a blood-soaked stretcher.
Zachary Steel, the clinical psychologist, later told us he believed the people in Australia’s detention centres were among the most traumatised on the planet: the horrors they had fled compounded by their experience in Australian detention. More than a decade later, it could still be true.
‘When you are at Villawood you ask yourself, “Why am I here — why?”,’ said Mohssen. ‘Maybe it’s a crime because I came to this country? Because I applied for a protection visa? … To tell you the truth, sometimes I tell you that I am not in Australia. Maybe I am not. Maybe I am in another country.’
After meeting the escapees, we became convinced that somehow we had to see the inside of Villawood and show what was happening. Using a mobile phone the detainees had hidden in the grounds, Peter spoke to Aamer Sultan and asked him if he’d consider filming if we could get him a camera. Aamer had never used a video camera before but he courageously agreed. Just as courageously, Jacquie Everett, a lawyer who’d been visiting the Badraie family in Villawood, said she’d try to smuggle the camera inside.
Jacquie explained her rationale in an interview for the program: ‘If somebody came to me carrying an ill child — no, there would be no dilemma. I would want to do whatever I could to help them.’
Mobile phones did not routinely contain video cameras in 2001, and since the Four Corners budget didn’t stretch to a spy camera, we had to make do with a cheap video camera from the local electronics store. It was midwinter and as Jacquie always wore a collection of jangling silver bracelets, she put on a heavy coat and hid the camera under her arm, hoping to blame any beeps from the metal detector on her jewellery. Luckily, back then, Villawood’s metal detector wasn’t too sensitive and the plan worked. Jacquie also took in the camera’s instruction book.
While Peter organised the camera, I took a day trip to Auckland. New Zealand has never imposed mandatory detention on asylum seekers and we wanted to compare the two systems. We’d also discovered that a Villawood escapee had made it to Auckland, so I arranged to interview him. In contrast to the clandestine interviews with the escapees in Sydney, he and I strolled around a park together, talking about Villawood.
Flying back from Auckland, I thought about the various reports I had made from the Middle East about injustices in other people’s countries. Now, it was Australia that stood alone, as the only developed country in the world with mandatory detention for all asylum seekers. My own country was detaining more than 500 children, abusing human rights and breaching international conventions. Yet mandatory detention was supported by both sides of politics, and according to the polls and the media, the majority of Australians. Why did the standard seem so different? Why were so few people complaining?
There had been allegations of abuse in Australian detention centres — including one of sexual assault against a child — but because the victims hadn’t been identified and the claims hadn’t been publicly proven, the government had been able to deny them. Peter and I knew this Four Corners would be different, because Aamer Sultan and Shayan Badraie and his family would be clearly identified and their claims would be detailed. We feared repercussions for them, but they wanted to go ahead and we wanted to tell their story.
I was convinced that if we could show the asylum seekers were real people and explain why they had come here, Australians would understand and accept them. I felt Shayan’s story should be reported as if it had occurred in any other country. I decided to start the program with images of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. It was an uncomfortable contrast and in some places, it wouldn’t make us popular.
I doubt either Peter or I will ever forget seeing the first video Aamer Sultan made inside Villawood. He’d filmed it the night before, while our own children were tucked up in their beds at home. Zahra and Mohammed Badraie were in a bare white room with six-year-old Shayan slumped in his father’s arms on a mattress on the floor, barely moving. Shayan was limp and lifeless, a little boy who was clearly seriously ill lying in what looked like a cell.
‘He’s very fearful and anxious, and he just sits in a corner not speaking,’ his father Mohammed told Aamer’s camera. ‘Sometimes they tell us the child can survive for five days, meaning that only when he is about to totally collapse will they take him to hospital.’
I found it almost impossible to believe that the little boy I was looking at, who was so obviously in need of help, was only about 40 minutes’ drive from where we were sitting.
When I first started at Four Corners as a researcher in the 1980s, the journalist who encouraged me to become a reporter was the late Andrew Olle. Then Andrew was Four Corners’ presenter, doing interviews and sometimes studio-based programs. We researchers took turns to work with him, which could be very demanding and sometimes quite scary. Andrew Olle never accepted second best or took no for an answer, and often drove everyone crazy with last-minute changes. Being a perfectionist helped make Andrew Olle one of the country’s finest journalists. I had never fully realised how much the same applied to Peter McEvoy.
When Peter saw Aamer Sultan’s first video, he decided, shocking though it was, that Aamer could tell us more, especially about his own thoughts on detention. Aamer agreed and the next day Peter visited Villawood to smuggle more tapes in for him.
The video statement Aamer Sultan ended up making was devastating; he understood the reasons behind the detention regime better than almost anyone. He said, speaking straight to the camera: ‘After a time I realised these fences around us are not to prevent us from escaping — never. No, these fences have been set to prevent you, the Australians from approaching us. It’s pretty clear.’
When Dr Sultan explained why he was risking serious repercussions by recording the video, I was surprised to hear him say he remained optimistic. ‘Still feeling that Australians, if they knew — and that’s what I am trying to let them know — they wouldn’t accept it.’ At the time, I believed the same. But I was wrong.
When ‘The Inside Story’ aired on 13 August 2001 and Australians saw Shayan Badraie in Villawood detention centre, the ABC’s internet forum went into meltdown. It was the biggest online response Four Corners had ever had. Thousands of people emailed expressing outrage and offering assistance to asylum seekers. Among several thousand supportive messages, less than a handful were negative. But the tide soon began to change.
In Canberra, the press gallery was strangely silent. So was the Labor opposition. Not one journalist, other than the ABC’s 7.30 Report, contacted us to follow up the story. And before long, some in the media began to attack Four Corners.
‘Exploiting a troubled six-year-old boy for political purposes is a despicable act,’ wrote the Daily Telegraph’s Piers Akerman. ‘A parody of investigative journalism,’ shrieked the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Sheahan. ‘Detention centres are not meant to be holiday camps,’ weighed in the paper’s leading columnist, Alan Ramsay. Not one of those who criticised the program ever contacted Four Corners to ask about it, and Alan Ramsay, judging from the basic errors of fact he made, hadn’t even bothered to watch it. When Four Corners wrote to the paper pointing out Ramsay’s errors, the Sydney Morning Herald refused to publish our letter.
About a week later, talk-back radio joined the fray. Suddenly, a new flood of phone calls hit the Four Corners office. Unlike the earlier, positive messages from people who had watched the program, these ones were negative and sometimes abusive and came from radio listeners who openly admitted they hadn’t even seen it.
In 2002, journalist Mungo MacCallum wrote in his Quarterly Essay, ‘Girt by Sea’ [March 2002] about the reaction to Four Corners’ ‘The Inside Story’:
By any measure it was an appalling story of neglect, cover-up and sheer brutality; a clear case of child abuse by all the authorities involved. It was the kind of case which would normally have the tabloids and the radio shock jocks screaming for blood. And yet almost nothing happened. The popular media were simply not interested; perhaps they were already reading the public mood of sullen resentment that they had helped create.
MacCallum suspected the response to ‘The Inside Story’ inspired the Howard government: ‘… if the decision to use the boat people as election fodder had not already been taken by the time of Shayan’s case, it was certainly taken then.’
It took the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, several days to put out a media kit
criticising Four Corners. The delay, wrote Piers Akerman, was only due to the fact that the program was ‘so riddled with errors’. The Minister’s response didn’t even mention the mandatory detention of children, instead listing 15 pages of Villawood’s amenities, such as computers (though they were still on order), and boasted that dozens of people at the centre played tennis every day (though there wasn’t a tennis court).
After Four Corners went to air, one of the few journalists to take up its substantive concerns was the 7.30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien, who interviewed Philip Ruddock the night after the program. Asked about Shayan Badraie, the Minister did all he could not to humanise him, referring to Shayan on four separate occasions as ‘it’. (‘I understand it receives foods and liquids … We are working at getting the child into an environment in which its condition can be managed.’) Finally, in an echo of future claims that asylum seekers threw their children overboard, the Minister laid the blame for Shayan’s trauma on his family, telling O’Brien, ‘Well, I’ll simply say that the child is not a natural child of the mother — it’s a stepchild.’
The Minister had argued that journalists had to be kept out of detention centres to protect detainees’ privacy and when we had asked him about Shayan Badraie, he had told us that he couldn’t comment on individual cases. Now, when it suited, he didn’t hesitate to breach the family’s privacy on national television. Shayan, who’d been very young when his parents had divorced, hadn’t even been told the truth himself. For Shayan, the Minister’s revelation was yet another trauma.
Soon, the Telegraph was carrying on the Minister’s story, with Piers Akerman publishing numerous false claims, including that Shayan had been stolen from his mother. Peter McEvoy obtained Mohammed Badraie’s Iranian divorce papers, showing he’d been awarded custody of Shayan and proving Akerman’s allegation (and others he made) were untrue but the Telegraph wasn’t interested.