My eyes wince with boredom at the news again today. A bird trapped inside a cage drawn by a juvenile asylum seeker in detention adjacent to a report of a mother who died during childbirth in detention. Oh no sorry, that was last year. This year it’s a formulated table of the data collected, complied from the findings found about the juveniles in detention centres (who also drew pictures). The phone rings and I’m zapped into another place. There’s a crisis at work and I need to come in as soon as I can. I am me but I could just as easily be you. I get inside my car and by the time I arrive at the place I’m going to my mind has been adequately numbed by the inane chatter on the radio, my thoughts scattered across the world by various lyrics on the selected playlist. Asylum seekers? Where? Not here. I have forgotten what you were talking about. Bring it up again in a few months’ time on my Facebook feed and I’ll have another look.

I once came home to find a Somali woman and her family squatting in my flat. My bleeding-hearted flat mate had given them the keys and told them to make themselves at home. By the time I arrived every single cushion and mattress had been put on the floor in the living room and placed against the skirting boards to form a circle.  The middle of the circle was filled with every single pot in my kitchen. Some of the pots had food in them and others had been turned into food waste bins. The smell that pervaded was untraceable in my recent memory yet it rekindled times tucked deep away in my collective unconscious and somehow made me feel alive.  After an explanatory phone call from my flat mate I learned that the woman and her family had been asylum seekers, that her daughter was born in detention and that she had spent three years at the Maribyrnong facility.  Wow, I thought to myself. We are good people. We care. We make an effort. We go out of our way. We read the news and get angered by it. We stand up and protest. We sign petitions and write newspaper articles. We encourage others to question.  We drive asylum seekers to doctors’ appointments. We do a lot.

A few weeks later I found myself inside a detention centre for the first time in my life. I was only allowed into the reception area. My flatmate had become a regular visitor of asylum seekers so people smiled politely at us as we waited. Once our assigned asylum seekers arrived we were allowed to sit with them for half an hour. We could chat, play games and share food after our parcels had been scanned by security. Then we were told to leave. Each visit added to the growing collection of pictures drawn by some of the children inside the detention centre that my flatmate started gathering. I can do something with these she thought aloud.  If people see these, they’ll do something. They’ll cry. They’ll be disturbed. They’ll sit up and start demanding answers. That was in 1998. In Melbourne, Australia.

Those pictures became a whole ‘government’ inquiry, leading to hours of interviews, research, analysis, examination of the system, involving many whose names have now become well respected and household when it comes to this topic. The drawings were published – trickle by trickle. And people sighed, cried, frowned and looked aghast. People questioned, wondered and grew frustrated.  Then they woke up and got dressed for work, school, university and kindergarten. And the pictures kept piling up together with all the reports and files and inquiries into inquiries. Every so often a few pictures would be released into the public again and people would see them and say ‘oh no!’ and ‘oh how shocking!’ and ‘how sad!’ Then a little while later a few more pictures would slip out and people would see them and say ‘oh, yeah…I’ve seen that before. It’s awful.’ And then after a while someone would decide to publish a couple more dusty pictures drawn by children in detention centres and people would see them and say nothing at all. That was a few years after 1998.

Today there is BREAKING NEWS about pictures drawn by children in detention centres. But I’m already fast asleep. How can I admit that? You ask with disgust. How can I be so apathetic? You wonder.  When was the last time you checked how many official submissions there have been on the topic of asylum seekers over the past fifteen years? I have come to realise that  my apathy is a result of watching the well-rehearsed play of media, politics and tactful spin that churns out images and by-lines at its discretion and then presses auto-repeat until we have seen the same sight ad nauseam to the point that it sends us unconscious because we begin to feel the heavy weight of the fact that nothing will ever change. And how can I tackle that problem? It is so vast I cannot even see where it begins let alone where it may one day end.

I am not sure what sickens me more – the whines and groans of people who keep repeating ‘how terrible!’ and ‘how wrong!’ or the excruciating silence of the people who don’t even pretend to care. And as the world turns each day, growing more and more toxic, the resultant apathy is the malaise that keeps it there.

I still have snippets of newspaper articles gathered over time about this topic I was introduced to so many years ago. I recall an article by a well-known Australian author who has taken a vested interest in the subject of children in detention in Australia. As I read through this now old news clip I realise that one of the children he talks about is the same little girl I used to visit with my flatmate:

“I first met the girls in the centre in January 2001. They had already been there for 15 months. Among the horrors they had endured was glimpsing the body of a detainee lying in a pool of blood on a basketball court. He had jumped to his death from the hoop after an eight-hour stand-off with centre guards. Days earlier, a 17-year-old asylum seeker had attempted suicide. He could be seen pacing the courtyard with strips of bandage plastered on his throat. ” (The Age, July 17 2010)

Three words stick in my head  –  ‘17-year-old’. What constitutes a child? Does it make any difference that this boy was 17 years old? His data would not have made it into one of the countless submissions about children in detention but perhaps it appeared in a different report, or inquiry. And if it did, what difference was made, I ask myself. The author mentioned above hasn’t tired of his pursuit, so why have I?

As I skim further down the text I feel goose bumps forming. Suddenly I read my flatmate’s name. Seeing her name in print reminds me of how involved she and others were; how devoted they were and so certain they were that they would be able to change things. How passionate they were… I suspect that  now with the passing of time, over a decade, all that I would need to alter would be the names of the detention centres and the professionals employed to investigate the situations there. Every other detail that she and other professionals gathered in their inquiry would remain the same and still be just as relevant. Is that possible? Can it be? Nauru substituted for Woomera? Are we all fools at the hands of our government who treats us accordingly?

“Every time I started an interview, I would ask for their names. They all responded with their number. For example, ‘I am 1427’. The implications are frightening.”(The Age, July 17 2010)

Now that I have reached the end of the article my head is full of questions: Are asylum seekers still referred to as numbers? Are there still children in detention? Are there still incidents of self-harm and suicide? If one or more of the answers to these questions is yes it will not be good enough. With all the therapists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, activists and dollars we have thrown at this situation, where have we arrived? What have we achieved? If even one of the answers to my questions is yes the answer is nothing. I squeeze at the memory of that time in my flat with those wafting smells of a faraway place. I want to believe that those moments can make a difference; they can lead to change, they can inspire and ignite hope. But the pressure of the next day is already dawning on me and my eyes have caught the title of the 2010 news article – Birds in a cage. Am I imagining it or are we all being put to sleep on purpose? My eyes close and slumber takes over.

If I leave in two minutes I will make the 7.30 am train and arrive almost a full hour early. That will give me some quiet time to figure out a solution to the problem before the masses arrive. I glance over the news. Tony Abbot asks:

“Where was the Human Rights Commission during the life of the former government when hundreds of people were drowning at sea?” (The Sydney Morning Herald, February 12 2015) I laugh to myself but really we should all be bawling our eyes out. And the questions swim around in my head: What did I do, what am I doing, did I do enough, am I doing enough.

And so we go. I am you and you are me. On a train, in a car; in an office or in a cafe. It makes no difference. What will I put in my sandwich today? Or maybe I’ll eat out and avoid the lunchtime conversations altogether.

The names of the people discussed in this piece have been withheld due to privacy.