Most Thursday mornings for the past two years I have been in detention. With a couple of friends I've made my way past the high fences, barbed wire and security guards outside Maribyrnong Detention Centre. We've sat in the gloomy visitors' room with a series of confused, angry and desperate people who have been locked up without a trial and without sentence being passed. We've heard stories about torture and fear, about separation from loved ones, about night journeys over mountains and across the ocean. We've learned about food and customs and languages and religions. We've laughed a lot at the detention centre and cried occasionally at home.
This Thursday was different. This Thursday, a man who had been in detention for four and a half years - the friend who we've been visiting for the longest - came to visit us. He got out of detention two weeks ago and today we showed him around the university. He was walking around the streets of Melbourne with us! We had breakfast in a funky little Carlton cafe, and we explored the nooks and crannies of this campus together. Things I'd never noticed: Across the court from the library, the garden beds are full of papyrus. One of the doors to the university carpark was moved here from a street in Dublin, Eire. There is a chunk of stone from the gates of the Port Arthur settlement in the middle of one of the university gardens.
Throughout the morning, I kept wanting to stop and grab his arm and say 'You got out! You're free! You're here with us!' I was overwhelmed by the experience of walking through the streets with him, finally away from that terrible place of guards and high gates. But what would he have said to me, if I had expressed my joy? At lunch we toasted 'Azadi' - 'freedom'. Freedom for him is a life without his daughter, a life of depression medication and chain smoking, a life without work or self-respect. A ruined and precarious life. My government did this, and while I am so glad my friend is free, I am deeply ashamed of what we have done to him. Will there be justice for him?
No comments:
Post a Comment