Snapshot

13

Whoops, she’d cut off those cops in their sports car and nearly collected a Passat. Tessa Kane grinned ruefully, shrugging an apology at Pam Murphy and John Tankard. Pam returned the grin, her cap at a rakish angle. A tough little broad, Tessa thought, heading towards the main gate.

The detention centre was a cheerless expanse of chilly cement-block huts behind razor wire. Originally intended for 350 inmates, it had held almost 500 asylum seekers at one stage, in a concentrated knot of misery. Now the ‘flood’ of asylum seekers had dried up and most of the detainees had been shipped back and a few granted residence visas. Eighty were left: a handful of asylum seekers from the Middle East, and people who had breached or overstayed their tourist visas. Soon all would be deported.

The centre had delivered no benefits to Waterloo that Tessa had seen. Most of the locals had been apathetic, a handful angry and ashamed, and the remainder rubbed their hands together at this God-given opportunity to relish their prejudices. They seemed to applaud the perimeter guard who’d shouted at a detainee: ‘You are one ugly fucking Arab.’ There had been plenty of letters to the editor after Tessa had published that quote, objecting to the word ‘fucking’; none objecting to the matter of detention itself, of course, or the centre, or the mindset of the guard. It had been-still was-an unhappy place. Last week there had been a riot-termed a ‘disturbance’ by corrections staff-and today Tessa could see men and children on the flat roof of the gymnasium, displaying banners: We Are Human Not Animal. In the first six weeks of operation, two men had been trapped on the razor wire; over a ten-month period in the second year, seven inmates had sewn their lips together; and most had gone on a hunger strike at one time or another. Fires had been lit, rocks thrown, tear gas used.

That had been the public face of almost all of Australia’s detention centres, the one you saw on commercial television’s current affairs programs. Tessa had been interested in the hidden stories: mental illness; treatment refused for sexually abused children; the dubious backgrounds and qualifications of the guards; the attitudes of the Refugee Review Tribunal and Department of Immigration staff. There had also been whispers of corruption. Apparently Charlie Mead and his section heads had routinely defrauded the federal, state and local governments by artificially inflating the cost of repairs, provisions, services and wages, the benefit flowing to their employer, ANZCOR, an American company that managed prisons and detention centres under contract to the governments of Australia and New Zealand. They operated out of Utah and had branches in Canada and the UK.

And soon the detention centre would close its doors. Tessa wanted one last opportunity to nail the detention system itself, and Charlie Mead’s role in it, to the wall.

Why had Mead agreed to see her? For the past three years he’d been typically contemptuous of the media seeking interviews, and do-gooders befriending the inmates. Perhaps he’d got sick of the way she always concluded her articles with the words ‘Centre management declined to comment’, or he simply didn’t care, now that he’d be moving on.

Tessa ran through her mental notes on him. Born in Durban, South Africa, fifty-five years ago; served in the army for ten years before completing a law degree in Johannesburg and an MBA in London. Worked in prison management in the UK, then successfully applied for the position of deputy manager-and later manager-of a maximum-security prison in Brisbane. There his tough line had alienated guards and inmates alike, but that had been no handicap to his being hired to manage the Waterloo Detention Centre. Arrived Waterloo, January 2002. Married to Lottie, about whom Tessa’s research had found no information. No children.

She was obliged to wait outside the main gate while the guard confirmed with the administration building by telephone, then was directed to an adjacent carpark. She got out, locked her car, and was turning towards the gate, tucking her keys in her briefcase, when a guard materialised in front of her. She’d not heard his approach. He jerked his head and she followed him, a solid, swaggering figure, through the outer and inner razor-wire perimeter fences and across a paved area to the administration block. It was separated from the other buildings by high, tubular steel railings. A child smiled at her through the bars; two women appeared to be painting the doors to a dormitory; several men stared at her, cigarettes in their hands, while others booted a soccer ball from one side of a stretch of cracked asphalt to the other.

Tessa closed her coat more thoroughly at her throat, as if to dispel the dense fog and the air of hopelessness. No one glanced at her in curiosity or hope: she no doubt represented another branch of an unfeeling government. She’d been to plenty of prisons over the years as a reporter and newspaper editor. This was worse than a prison because, for many of these inmates, further abuse-even death- awaited them on their repatriation to home countries.

Her briefcase was scanned electronically, then searched manually, and her mobile phone and microcassette recorder confiscated. ‘You’ll get these back when you leave,’ said the man who’d searched her. She was obliged to step through a metal detector and even then her coat was removed and the seams, cuffs and collar searched minutely by hand. Tessa stared at the walls, which were bare and painted a comfortless white.

Finally she was shown to a straightbacked chair in a corridor and told to wait. White walls, photographs of the US president and the Australian prime minister. After fifteen minutes a young woman stuck her head out of a nearby doorway and beckoned to Tessa. ‘Mr Mead will see you now.’ Her look of appalled fascination was a sure sign that she’d read last week’s Progress and half expected Tessa to take her clothes off and have group sex with the guards.

Tessa entered an office dominated by a desk and the man behind it. As expected, the room was furnished with filing cabinets, shelves of books and spiral-bound reports, and a barred window that looked out onto an exercise yard, but the desk was set up as a security and communications centre, with several telephones, an intercom system, security monitors, two computers, a laptop and a fax machine. The walls were bare but for a couple of framed certificates and a photograph taken during the centre’s opening ceremony, the mayor and councillors grinning as they clapped Charlie Mead and other ANZCOR dignitaries on the back. Pricks. If you looked closely enough, you could even see the $100 bills changing hands. Even more would change hands once approval was given to refit the detention centre as some other kind of facility.

Camp for disadvantaged children? thought Tessa sourly. Community centre for the people of the housing estates?

She caught Mead looking at her. He was a rangy man, all bone and sinew, with a knobbly hard skull and quick, sharp, coldly humorous eyes. He rose-he was very tall-from behind his desk, reached across it and squashed her hand in his. He pointed to the chair opposite. ‘Sit.’

A growling voice. He watched while she took out her notebook and tested the ink flow of her pen. Then she gave him a brief, automatic smile, and was halfway through thanking him for his time when he said, ‘Kane: is that a Jewish name?’

Well, hello, she thought. Was she going to get the full treatment? Ironical amusement, raised eyebrow, frank appraisal of her legs, overt anti-feminism, overt anti-Semitism, and a whole arsenal of other shock tactics, gestures and attitudes intended to rattle her?

So she said at once, ‘It could be argued that your guards have been dehumanised by their work here, an attitude encouraged by management. Would you care to comment?’

It was as if he’d become bored. He swung back in his chair, crossed his long legs and stared up at the ceiling. He splayed the fingers of his left hand, examined his nails. ‘“Dehumanised”? Another meaningless word among many.’

‘According to an ex-employee of-’

‘Who?’ he demanded.

‘I can’t divulge that. According to an ex-employee, your guards wake detention centre detainees at random times throughout the night, demanding they quote their detention numbers. Is that meaningless?’

Mead shrugged. ‘Security,’ he said.

She stared at him, and went on. ‘Inmates have attested that the Refugee Review Tribunal is often only one individual rather than a panel, and some of these individuals make it a point to refuse all applications.’

‘Take it up with the RRT,’ Mead said, jerking forward, his fingers flying over a keyboard. Then, with a soft, impatient grunt, he leaned back again. ‘Next question.’

Mead was tapping his pen against his teeth now, staring out of his window. She could see the back of his neck, his tough, tanned skin. There was a photograph on the windowsill and Mead picked it up, put it down again. A watchful, dark-haired woman offering a reluctant smile to the camera. Lottie Mead, presumably-and, Tessa realised, the driver of the Passat.

‘Care for a tour of the place?’ said Mead.