Curtin Detention Centre

Saturday, 12 Jun 2010. Bad news tonight. The first victims to be locked up in Curtin were flown in today from Christmas Island.

This is government policy deliberately designed to cause harm. We have solid academic research as evidence. What happens to people in indefinite detention is, their mental health breaks down. This is what happened before and  it will happen again.

All the table tennis and paper plate making activities are not going to stop these men worrying about their families and children in camps and hellholes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. In addition to the isolation they will have no mobile phones to contact family or friends, and will be reliant on camp phone facilities which we know have proved problematic everywhere.

We remember Curtin: The men in this video on Youtube went on a hunger strike in desperation because they had been locked up in the compound for months with no information. They asked to see lawyers, to find out what would happen to them. Immigration Department refused to tell them anything, so they went on a hunger strike and for this they were locked in these cells for weeks until they could not take it anymore.

What will Immigration and SERCO do when the men's mental health breaks down this time? In the past, isolation cells were used extensively. If  a person became suicidal they were stripped, placed in a hospital gown - no underwear - handcuffed, helmetted and shackled, and locked in isolation units. If they refused to eat, the air-conditionning was turned up so that they were freezing. Since this was exposed following Cornelia Rau's cruel treatment in Baxter, it is unlikley that a government or security agency would be able to rely on these methods, so what will they do?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/12/2925566.htm

Who will visit the 300 single men locked up in isolated Curtin detention centre, 28 hours by road from Perth? Some amongst them will be victims of torture and trauma, men who have witnessed massacres and murder of family members, men carrying the mental and physical scars of torture, beatings and imprisonment in their home countries. Depression and suicide are risks when people do not know how long they will be held in this no-mans land.

We know from past experience that detention centres with no external visitors and humanising influences fester into places where violence and abuse become the dominant culture.  We know the comfort and strength which people receive from community visitors. The visitor programs at Maribyrnong and Villawood offer support to people there as well as an independant monitoring of conditions in a system where no formal independent monitoring mechanism exists. It is often the visitors who identify people who are torture victims, who are ill and who need help.

Curtin Detention Centre was the worst of Australia's hellholes. See pictures below. It was the most secret, most isolsted and the most brutal. The commandant of Curtin was Greg Wallis, Immigration Minister Ruddock's favorite bower boy. He went on to run Baxter Detention Centre and organised the cruel kidnapping of a little girl, a matter on which he may still be charged.

Curtin is 28 hours by road from Perth. It is 30 minutes by road from Derby and six hours from Port Hedland. The Rudd government may think they can detain and hide people in an isolated hellhole but they underestimate the decency and determination of the human rights community in Australia. For a decade we fought the Howard government and we have lost none of our resolve.
If the Rudd government persists in this blatant abuse of human rights we will make life hell for them. We remind the Rudd government that the the Howard government held people in indefinte arbitrary detention, and look what happened to them.

Added to this indignity is the plan to take teenagers to Baxter detention centre and lock them up until they are forced to go home.
How quickly the promises to end the detention of children have been forgotten.

Re-opening Curtin could be the Prime Minister's nemesis. He is ill-advised by the old Howard war horses if he thinks the Australian human rights community will stomach this assault on vulnerable people.

We urge the Labor government to read the book below to remind themselves of the brutal conditions in Curtin.
Human Rights Overboard, seeking asylum in Australia, by Linda Briskman, Susie Latham & Chris Goddard. Winner of the Literature Non-Fiction Award of The Australian Human Rights Commission’s annual Human Rights Medals and Awards

Pictures taken by detainees in 2002

There were never any direct flights anyway from Sydney or Melbourne to Port Hedland or Curtin, and in 2010 there are now even less flights available. Therefore, the majority of the Australian population are approximately seven hours flight away, by jumbo jet, making social visits very, very difficult. This was of course the conservative Howard government's purpose, and it is now the identical purpose of the Rudd Labor government.

When Refugee Action Collective got started in Victoria in December 2000, some of these guys had already been held in detention for over two years. Therefore, quite rightly, they believed no-one other than the brutal immigration regime knew they were there.

It's a testimony to human resistance that these pictures exist at all.

Disturbed and frightened people were shoved into these little boxes "until they calmed down."

It usually broke their spirits.

Eight years later, in April 2010, some victims of this abuse still have side-effects.

The manager of Curtin, Greg Wallis, was a psychopathic bully. Unfortunately, when this place was closed in about 2004, Greg Wallis then went to manage the high-tech Baxter detention centre in Port Augusta, South Australia.

All detainess under the control of Greg Wallis remained psychologically damaged many years after their release — and Greg Wallis was rewarded with a diplomatic post in Lebanon.

Right: The main problem for most was boredom.
No visitors - because nobody knew
they were there - and nothing to do
but contemplate their horrible futures.

Left: further testimony to the resistance in the Australian population, this map of the inner layout of Curtin Detention Centre was not freely distributed by the fascists who ran it...

But they wouldn't go far before they were prevented from going any further.

You wouldn't want to be inside unless it was pissing rain, which it often is up there.