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Actress, activist author
The current detention of asylum seekers on Manus, Christmas and Nauru islands is further blackening the nationâs once fine human rights reputation
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he current detention of asylum seekers on Manus, Christmas and Nauru islands is further blackening the nation's once fine human rights reputation.
A frighteningly high percentage of Australians support their governments' so-called Pacific Solution that Children's Rights International chair Alistair Nicholson has accused of representing 'Gestapo-like
tactics ['¦] that would make Stalin and Goebbels proud.'
'The percentage of Australians who are anti-asylum-seeker and anti-refugee, according to a politician I spoke to recently, is 70 percent. This is alarming,' said acclaimed Australian actress-turned-activist with Actors for Refugees, Diana Greentree, who has written a fictional account of the issue based on many real cases of the plight of refugees in detention.
Her work, The Camros Bird, is set against the backdrop of the Woomera detention center in Central Australia, which was shut down in 2003 after four years of suicide attempts, hunger strikes, riots and self-mutilations by asylum seekers lodged in this desert hell.
The center was officially named the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (IRPC). At times the center, which was designed to house 400 asylum seekers, imprisoned nearly 1,500 people ' almost a third of these were children.
Greentree begins her story with the well-documented 2002 Easter riot and break-out at the detention center that was supported by hundreds of Australian protesters who had travelled to the remote desert site to display solidarity with the asylum seekers and to protest the imprisonment of people who had already been severely traumatized by the threat of torture and assassination in their home nations.
'The Camros Bird came about because
I was disgusted at the way asylum seekers were being treated in Australia. Particularly at the time of the Tampa Affair,' said Greentree following a public talk on her book at the Bar Luna in Ubud, Bali.
The Tampa Affair ' called a 'detonator issue' by some ' occurred in 2001 when a Norwegian ship, the MV Tampa, rescued 438 asylum seekers from a listing Indonesian fishing vessel.
Australia attempted to turn the Tampa back from Australian waters, forcing the ship's captain to declare an emergency. This event sparked the Australian government's to devise its Pacific Solution, denying any asylum seekers not arriving in Australia by recognized means the right to land.
'So the book is about the events that were happening under John Howard. I didn't think it could get worse than the John Howard years, but it has,' said the actress, who has performed with silver screen greats like Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter on a raft of films and television productions.
'With Actors for Refugees, we performed for six years around Australia telling a lot of the stories that are in my book and other stories we learned from refugees.'
With the closing of Woomera and a change of government, Greentree and many others supporting asylum seekers and refugees believed, naively, that human rights and compassion for people in extreme distress and desperation would emerge ' just as it had post-World War II when Australia was an original signatory to the UN's 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and in the post-Vietnam War days when the 'Lucky Country' opened its borders and arms to give succor to asylum seekers.
'At the end of the Howard era I thought, 'Great, it will be much better under Kevin Rudd',' said a disappointed Greentree, who acknowledged the Australian Labor Party was 'a little less cruel' in its treatment of asylum seekers.
'Certainly not as it is now under Scott Morrison, where people who have been recognized as refugees and are on bridging visas are not allowed to work, study or receive Social Security and so the only way to survive is with the help of community and church groups,' said Greentree on Australia's current asylum policy.
She pointed out that those who arrived recently and are in detention on Manus, Nauru and Christmas Islands will never be allowed to settle in Australia. They may stay on those islands for the rest of their lives.
Through her book Greentree brings to life Amir, an Iranian asylum seeker detained at the Woomera center, and a woman, Olivia, who will later share much of his life. They lock eyes and fates during the storming of the Woomera detention center in the famous Easter protests of 2002.
These characters in her story are composites of real people, said Greentree.
'Initially, I wrote the book as non-fiction. Then I realized it would identify individual refugees and many of them were still fighting deportation,' said Greentree.
She added that using the tools of fiction might help her book gain a wider readership, reaching people who would not normally read about the plight of refugees. This mechanism appears to be working.
'Last night during the talk at Bar Luna several Australians said to me they had no idea our government had treated people in the way I describe. There were tears as I read the 17-year-old Afghan boy's letter,' said Greentree of the wall of silence on the bitter fate of asylum seekers imposed currently by the government and to a degree by much of the Australian media that is happy to blame Indonesia for not halting the flow of refugees from its shores.
In The Camros Bird, refugee character Amir does find happiness and builds a new life like hundreds of thousands of other immigrants to Australia, which includes the current Australian prime minister, London-born Tony Abbott, and his New Zealand-born wife Margaret.
Australia's current policies on asylum seekers may make the fictional Amir one of the last to ever do so.
