LOCKED UP, LOCKED OUT AND IN LIMBO

It’s been 20 years since the MV Tampa sailed towards Australia and capsized our refugee response. Yet today, thousands are still suffering in a system that promotes cruelty over compassion and punishment over protection.

- Kathryn Madden

Every night for 18 months, Betelhem’s body stiffened when she heard her tent door unzip. A surge of sticky tropical air, thick with mosquitoes, would come rushing in as a security guard shone a torch in her face, lingering for a moment before checking number 016 off his list. “All I wanted was a lock,” she recalls. “I felt like I was in prison.”

Aged 21, the university student had fled political unrest in Ethiopia and risked her life on a leaky fishing boat travelling from Indonesia to Darwin, hoping to find asylum in Australia. On arrival, exhausted and alone, she was sent away for processing on Nauru, a tiny, bankrupt republic of rocky outcrops and barbed-wire fences. “I was so confused for the first six months because I didn’t really speak English,” says Betelhem. “I would think, where am I? What’s going on? Am I dead? Am I in hell?”

She was given an ID tag and referred to by number rather than name, and spent months dressed in old bedsheets, her bare feet burning because all her possessions had been lost at sea. Her eyes were scarred by scenes she cannot unsee: fellow asylum seekers setting themselves on fire – one who burnt to death – and women who were abused by guards. “My friend, a beautiful Iranian girl, wanted cigarettes to calm her stress. I didn’t like the way one of the guards used her. Do you know what I mean?” she hints. “He started giving her marijuana and saying he wanted to see her at night. She dreamt to be a journalist but now she’s a drug addict. On Nauru, many women [figuratively] lost their lives.”