'Grinding resilient men into the dust'

Welfare worker and author Mark Isaacs describes the shock and despair that confronted him at Nauru's detention centre in 2013.
Witness accounts from inside Australia's detention centres
are rare. Walled in behind government secrecy, contracts which bind
them to silence, and fear for their future livelihoods, staff and former
employees of the organisations 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-year-old 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.





Mark Isaacs
No hope: Mark Isaacs. Photo: Nick Moir


Isaacs was only 24 when, on the strength of a single phone
call and with no experience, he was hired by the Salvos and dispatched
to Nauru with less than a week's notice to ''provide support'' to asylum
seekers detained there.



The date was October 1, 2012, just a fortnight 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.



Isaacs completed five rotations through the camp, each of
several weeks. The last he saw of ''Topside'', as the internment camp
on Nauru was known, was in June last year, shortly before inmates burnt
much of it to the ground.




Nauru
An asylum seeker in a neck brace after a suicide attempt. Photo: Supplied


There is a rawness and an immediacy to this account because
it is so recent. Originally slated for publication next month, the book
- available from Monday - has been rushed out by publisher Hardie
Grant Books after the chaotic events at the Manus Island detention
centre last month which left one man dead, and scores injured.



Isaacs' book constitutes a warning that, no matter how much
physical facilities on Manus and Nauru might improve, it may be
impossible to avoid violent periodic eruptions inside the camps in the
future.



It is because the men have no hope, he argues, and therefore little to lose.




Nauru
Two men on a hunger strike. Photo: Supplied


''Criminals were given a sentence to serve: these men were
not even given that,'' Isaacs writes. ''They feared they would die in
Nauru, that they would be forgotten, that they would become
non-people.''



Isaacs has heard all the arguments about why imprisoning men
in their hundreds on small Pacific islands and leaving them in limbo is
the only way to ''solve'' the asylum seeker problem.



But nothing convinced him the cruelty inflicted in the
process was worth it. There were moments of heartbreak for the young,
untrained Australian, facing the anguish of these men.



Reza, an internee to whom he'd been giving private English
lessons, nearly succeeded in taking his own life with a toxic cocktail
of cleaning fluids, mosquito repellent, antidepressants and sleeping
tablets.



One of the camp's most respected religious leaders, Ali,
descended into three days of psychotic madness which left him rolling in
the dirt and barking like a dog before he was removed by health
workers.



For Ali's Iranian countrymen, it was deeply shocking to see
their revered mullah, a man who until then had been a source of succour,
reduced to the state of a rabid animal. Later, Isaacs discovered that
Ali had just lost a child, having tried, and failed, to transfer funds
back home for the sick youngster's treatment.



A third moment of heartbreak came when the camp poet, Pez - whom Isaacs had befriended - tried to hang himself in the laundry.



Isaacs did his best to lighten the long days with
recreational activities for the men, but was left feeling as though he
was working in a ''death factory''.



''There was no way I could deny I was a part of it, because
there I was and it was my country and my people and we were putting
these men through such torture'' he said this week.



''It doesn't matter who you are, or what side of politics you
are on, if you had been in the position I was in, having to sit there
and have a man's friends show you the cord that he tried to hang himself
with, crying with them, the rain coming down … it was overwhelming.''



''The camp was built around destroying men,'' he writes, '' grind[ing] them into the dust.''



Isaacs was not a Salvation Army member. He'd done some
writing for Oxfam and was working for the state government when a friend
told him the Salvos were urgently seeking staff for the hastily
reopened Nauru facility. He was hired without even a face-to-face
interview.



In passages that will be deeply embarrassing for the Salvos -
and for the previous government - Isaacs paints a picture of a camp
so hastily set up that the organisations charged with pulling it
together virtually had to make it up as they went along.



The new recruits were a ''motley crew'', he says, some of
whom were untrained seniors or university students; some only got their
contracts as they arrived at the airport to make the trip north. Some
were not even sure what an asylum-seeker was.



''I wasn't given any training before I was sent over'' he
says. '' No preparation, no cultural diversity training, I didn't know
anything about Tamils, or people from Iraq and Iran, and I was one of
the comparatively well-informed. There was an 18-year-old there! How
can you expect an 18-year-old to look after traumatised, war-torn
people?''



In a written response on Friday, the Salvation Army - which
has not yet seen the book - said Isaacs was ''engaged … . in a role
that required him to fulfil unskilled duties … [and that] support worker
roles typically do not require individuals to have particular skills or
experience.''



It also said that in the ''early days'' of beginning its
work on Nauru and Manus Island, ''the Department of Immigration …
required an incredibly rapid start-up, which meant that a formal
induction was not developed prior to [the Army] getting its first people
on the ground.''



During Isaacs' time there, hundreds more men were poured into
the camp - Sri Lankans, Tamils, Iranians, Iraqis, Hazaras from
Afghanistan, Pakistanis and Palestinians. The camp ran on myriad rules
that were chopped and changed: no hair dye, swimming for inmates banned
because of health and safety concerns, no vocational training for
internees because that would break the ''no advantage'' rule (i.e. they
were not, under the policy, to receive any ''advantage'' over asylum
seekers still awaiting processing in UN centres).



Isaacs and his ''recreation'' team tried to defuse the boredom with cricket and soccer competitions.



There were rivalries between some of the staff attached to different aspects of the camp's operations.



''Each agency wanted to be the lead agency, the head honcho
of the island,'' Isaacs writes. ''The disorganisation of the Salvation
Army meant it was a long way down the pecking order, and the staff
suffered because of this.''



Isaacs was mysteriously blacklisted from the camp for a few
weeks, and was later told it was because of complaints by security staff
that he fraternised too readily with camp inmates.



Staff were repeatedly warned against speaking out about what
was going on behind the camp gates. At one stage, Isaacs was told there
was an ''intel'' file on him. ''You were not allowed to email your loved
ones about what was happening, even what the food was like,'' he said.
''They said that people were checking our emails and Facebook, it felt
like being in a horrible fascist state.''



Isaacs acknowledges the Salvation Army got more professional
over time at the task it had been rushed into, hiring more qualified
staff, and sharply reducing the turnover among contract workers. But he
says ''it was the same situation, just wrapped with a prettier bow''.



Isaacs' account is a frank portrayal of the toll on
well-meaning Australian men and women who travelled to Nauru to try to
ease the inmates' plight. Even coming back for short visits between
tours of duty was hard, because few friends really understood the burden
staff members were carrying.



Several of the men Isaacs looked after on Nauru have now been
moved to the mainland, where they live on bridging visas and minimal
benefits. Others have been moved to the Curtin detention centre.
Several await court proceedings on Nauru because of their alleged role
in last year's riots.



In February this year, the Salvation Army's $74 million
government contract to provide welfare services at Manus Island and
Nauru was not renewed. ''The Salvos were damned if they did, and damned
if they didn't,'' Isaacs says. ''Maybe they are better out of it,
because their hands were tied … maybe they could have pushed harder for
the men's rights. But then maybe they would not have been able to do
the work they were doing.''