I've been watching Stateless, the ABC drama about Australia’s immigration detention system, with some reluctance. Not because it is poor, but because it is so powerful.
Like the recent Total Control, which described the toxic intersection of Australian politics with the lives of Indigenous Australians, it describes the appalling reality behind the anodyne words of our policy towards the people it targets. The reluctance arose out of shame that in the last thirty years the treatment of people seeking protection in Australia had become more brutal and that my own efforts to help change public attitudes to refugees had been so unavailing.
Stateless invites us to see life in a remote detention centre. It shows the anger and despair of vulnerable people at being treated as criminals, at having to deal alone with the loss of families and of self-worth on their journey to Australia, at being unable to support families that they had left behind and at an opaque and arbitrary administrative system designed to frustrate every request.
The challenge faced by the creators of Stateless was to move past the apathy and denial which make people turn away in boredom or embarrassment when stories and images of non-Australian people in detention are presented. The dramatic device, based on an actual event, is to see the detention centre through the eyes of a generous and sensitive young father who is persuaded to work at the centre, and a blonde, blue-eyed white woman. We know through the backstory that she is a mentally ill Australian citizen dumped there by the same bureaucratic incuriosity that afflicts the people who seek protection. Her perspective and that of a reporter help the viewer break that barrier.
The series represents well the inherent tension between the Immigration Department’s desire to implement a policy of deterrence based on the suffering of the people detained and the concern of the staff to run an orderly institution. This expresses itself in characteristically Australian simultaneous censoriousness at all violation of regulations and the mockery of hypocrisy. Both are evident in scenes when the officers inform people of their non-functional rights and their enforced duties. It also shapes the actions of a new department officer sent to keep the centre off the front pages.
It is difficult for any dramatic representation of the effects of long-term detention to show how casual, everyday inhumanity interacts with time. The damage done by detention is measured by the slow leaching of brightness from the eye of people who have survived many threats to their lives and safety. Hope is eroded by forced inactivity, the daily humiliations of having to beg for human rights that are rewritten as privileges, and the frustration of lack of progress in their claim for protection. In time the eyes grow dull and hollow, a sign of the mental illness that may develop.
In drama, the torture of enduring pain can be represented only through horrifying single events and by extreme reactions. This can misrepresent the relationships between people locked up and those responsible for locking them up. These are more subtle than the violence and barely concealed racism displayed by psychopathic guards depicted in Stateless. Officers are generally ordinary people, but living in a world in which emotional detachment and attention to regulation are the only way to survive. Their demeanour is the product of a policy that inflicts suffering on detainees in order to deter others, a morally corrupt system that taints all it touches, especially the relationships between people.
'It is difficult for any dramatic representation of the effects of long-term detention to show how casual, everyday inhumanity interacts with time. The damage done by detention is measured by the slow leaching of brightness from the eye of people who have survived many threats to their lives and safety.'
Behrouz Bouchani’s account of his ordeal on Manus Island, No Friend but the Mountains, explores in great detail this dehumanising process at work. In Stateless, it is made personal in the descent into moral darkness of the new department officer sent to the centre.
The series depicts the world of asylum seekers shortly after the boats were stopped and before Manus Island was functioning. In some ways that was a more human, if less predictable, world than is life in detention today. Information flowed much more freely, the process was less militarised, the rule of law was more respected, and conditions were less controlled.
Today the number of people held in Australian detention centres is smaller than depicted on Stateless. Communication between people detained is more regulated, however, and the details of their lives from receiving visitors and gifts to the furniture and fittings are governed by an obsessive attention to safety and security. The resultant regime is experienced as humiliating and petty. Inefficient and underfunded assessment procedures means that people are detained for longer. The militarisation of the department, too, means that information is controlled and the public kept uninformed. Government ministers can now sleep undisturbed.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Barbed wire fence against blue sky (Getty images/Xinzheng)