The lives of refugees detained by the Australia government on remote Christmas Island are the focus of a powerful yet poetic new documentary
Five years ago, Gabrielle Brady, an Australian film-maker, decided to visit an old friend who had moved to remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. The tiny tropical Australian territory was only settled a century ago, when phosphate, deposited as guano by seabirds, was mined by Chinese and Malay labourers. Its latest industry, however, was the controversial “offshore processing” of refugees. For the past 17 years, asylum seekers reaching Australia’s shores by boat have been dispatched to island detention centres and detained there indefinitely.
Brady’s arrival on holiday gave her friend, Poh Lin Lee, a break from her difficult job on Christmas Island, providing therapy for traumatised detainees. “We spent two weeks enjoying this beautiful environment – diving with dolphins, looking for whale sharks, going to really remote beaches,” remembers Brady, who now lives in Berlin. “At the end, Poh said: ‘I need to show you something.’” They slashed their way through dense jungle with machetes (“everywhere you go on Christmas Island, you need a machete”) to reach a lookout. Below spread the grey buildings of the huge camp for refugees. “It was just truly shocking,” says Brady. “I’d seen that image so many times in the Australian media, but I’d forgotten it existed.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2F6E2Zj
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