“I THINK ONCE CONTROL OF OUR BORDERS IS PERCEIVED AS BEING ‘UNDER CONTROL’, THEN IMMIGRATION IS VIEWED FAVOURABLY BY AUSTRALIANS.”.
MARK ISAACS Eyewitness accounts from inside Australia’s detention centres are rare. Walled in behind government secrecy, contracts which bind them to silence, and fear for their livelihoods, staff and former employees of the groups running the centres bite their tongues or confide only in close colleagues, family members or friends. The few who have spoken to the media have mostly done so anonymously, or through third parties. Now, the first of what could be a steady trickle of embarrassing whistleblower accounts has emerged in the form of an explosive book, The Undesirables, by a former Salvation Army employee, 26-yearold Sydneysider Mark Isaacs. The title is taken from a term Isaacs says a government staffer was overheard using to describe the asylum seekers at the camp. Isaacs was only 24 when, on the strength of a single phone call and with no experience, he was hired by the Salvos and sent to Nauru with less than a week’s notice to ‘’provide support’’ to asylum seekers detained there. The date was October 1, 2012, just two weeks after then prime minister Julia Gillard had reopened the offshore camp in a desperate revival of former prime minister John Howard’s ‘’Pacific Solution’’ - an attempt to deter asylum seekers by shipping them to the tiny Pacific nation for indefinite detention.
Deborah Snow www.smh.com.au
The Last Post: Thanks for joining us here at The Last Post, Mark. Your book, The Undesirables, was released, detailing your experiences on Nauru. What had you been doing that led you to going to Nauru? Mark Isaacs: I think the decision to go dated back six months, or longer, prior to going to Nauru. I had been working as an intern for Oxfam 3things movement which is a youth movement aimed at encouraging young people to search for justice and I was doing that once a week and other than that I was an unemployed university graduate. That was the beginning, where I started to get more of a public readership of my writings. I was then also looking at justice. The beginnings of my going to the detention centre wasn’t an altruistic one, it was to do with a pretty girl. She was at Oxfam and told me her mother was going to Villawood Detention Centre, the
asylum seekers. I went along and it was that trip to Villawood that really opened my eyes to the asylum seeker debate but even after that visit, it wasn’t until about six months later, I’d taken a full-time job and was working with the state government and had really moved away from that area and then a friend of mine told me that, with the re-introduction of the Pacific Solution and the no advantage policy and with the re-opening of Nauru and with Manus that the Salvation Army were hiring people to go over to Nauru and I was given a number to call. I called a woman and a week later I was flying to Nauru. TLP: We can be thankful to the pretty girl for what you’ve done then. Did she go to Nauru with you? MI: Nah, unfortunately not. She wouldn’t even go on a date with me. TLP: What were the feelings going on with you, flying there and then approaching Nauru? MI: It was very much a whirlwind lead up to going, from making that call, to quitting my job to going to medicals and packing my bags and flying off. For me, it was very much an unknown adventure. That’s how I saw it, as an adventure. It showed my naivety, I guess. I
“WE WERE TOLD WE WEREN’T ALLOWED TO CALL BACK HOME OR SEND EMAILS OR TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT ANYTHING THAT HAD HAPPENED IN THE CAMP.”
42 THE LAST POST - REMEMBRANCE DAY / SUMMER EDITION 2014