An Interview With An Ex-Nauru Volunteer: “I Saw Guys Who Would Mime Shooting Asylum Seekers In The Back Of The Head”
Mark Isaacs has seen the effects of offshore detention first-hand, and he thinks that you ought to hear about it.
When someone finally gets around to making that ‘History Book’ that I keep hearing about, Mark Isaacs won’t warrant an entry alongside Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Those two will be filed under ‘whistleblowers’, people that acted on conscience to expose hitherto unseen acts carried out in their name by their government.
Isaacs, the author behind The Undesirables, a just-published book based on his experiences as a Salvation Army employee in the Nauru refugee processing centre, is less of a whistleblower and more of a courtroom sketch artist: he didn’t uncover the practice of offshore detention, but now that it stands in the dock of public opinion, he’s on hand to add colour and definition, giving us a clearer picture of the day-to-day degradations that the policy entails.
Who Is Mark Isaacs?
Mark Isaacs spent eight months on Nauru between October 2012 and June 2013, as a support worker with the Salvation Army. During his time on the island, he took to recording events and his thoughts in a journal, as a way to try and make sense of the traumatic environment that he found himself in. After his first rotation, Isaacs returned home to Sydney. “I felt quite disconnected, and couldn’t socialise,” he said. “I didn’t really know how to convey the horror [of Nauru] to people. I had one friend that kept asking questions, but they were crap questions. Eventually, I said, ‘Read this, it might give you a better idea of what it’s like’.
“After that, his questions became more pertinent, and I realised that he understood what I’d seen. That’s when I thought that if I could keep building this, people could see just how bad it is, and maybe I could affect some kind of change.” Fast-forward to the present, and those journal entries form the basis of The Undesirables, an account of Isaacs’ time on Nauru and the proud, desperate men that he met there.
Life on Nauru
“I remember looking at the Arabic clients – big men, strong men – when they spoke, they spoke in this aggressive, loud manner,” Isaacs recalls. “Persian clients, when I first met them, they were doing Nazi salutes at me, and they had this real anger.”
These were the sort of people that successive Australian governments have warned the Australian public about, but as Isaacs got to know his ‘clients’, the façade collapsed. “This whole notion of them being terrorists, it’s just a construct – but without ever thinking that I believed it, I was just instantly intimidated,” Isaacs admits. “They’re just people, though, with wives and children. There were times when I was feeling down, and some guy would come up and give me a hug. And yet these men had the most awful stories: torture, families murdered; simple things like not being allowed to go to school.”
As for the people he worked alongside, there was broad spectrum of types, with a correspondingly broad range of attitudes towards the people under their care. “With the Salvation Army, the level of care and support from the people I worked with was extremely encouraging,” Isaacs says. However, he continues, “there were people who weren’t supportive, who perhaps felt that the asylum seekers deserved the treatment that they were getting. As you went into other organisations, this idea that [offshore detention] was an essential policy became more prevalent. In Wilson Security, I saw guys that showed up and actually cared, and I saw guys who would mime shooting asylum seekers in the back of the head with a sniper rifle.”
In short, Isaacs found that it wasn’t the most compassionate place. “There was a sense that if you showed sympathy for asylum seekers, then you were on the wrong side, and that was enforced by confidentiality agreements and threats: that the government was checking your emails and your Facebook.”
Inauspicious beginnings
Isaacs picked up an altruistic streak from his father, a doctor involved with refugee clinics, and prior to his involvement with the Salvos, he was working as a writer with Oxfam. However, his first experience of detention centres was inspired not by altruism but by more libidinous motives. “I was working at Oxfam, and I was trying to pick up one of the girls there,” Isaacs explains. “Her mum was taking people to Villawood [Detention Centre], and I went there so I could schmooze the mum, to get to the girl.” It didn’t take long for him to be confronted by a harsher reality. “The first man I met was a Tamil man with rope-burns around his neck, from a suicide attempt,” Isaacs quietly recalls. “I’ve travelled a lot, but it doesn’t prepare you for that sort of environment.”
About six months later, Isaacs was working a full-time job when a friend told him that the Salvos were recruiting. “I called them up, and a week later I was in Nauru.” Regarding his reasons for quitting a comfortable job and heading to Nauru, Isaacs’ motives were twofold. “I wanted to do as much work as I could, and also just to learn more about it,” he says. “It became immediately apparent that the camp was understaffed, not enough facilities, not enough supplies. From day one, we were working against the policy, because my job was to assist asylum seekers and the policy seeks to make life harder for them.”
Mark Isaacs is a courteous, convivial dude, but on the subject of Nauru, his anger is palpable. “It was already hard, but throughout my time there conditions just got worse, the mental conditions, and the suffering. It’s hard to be dealing with these men every day and not feel angry about it.”
Despair as a political strategy
He left before the riots of July last year, but The Undesirables is haunted by a sense of inevitability. Depriving people of agency, hope and dignity tends to end one way, and Isaacs gives a vivid account of the physical and emotional deterioration of the men that he oversaw in Nauru.
When I mention Liz Thompson’s recent claim that ManusIsland is “an experiment in the active creation of horror”, Isaacs concurs: “Yeah, it seemed to me like they were trying to see how much they could put in before something exploded.”
On the sheer inhumanity of mandatory detention, Isaacs is unequivocal. “It’s not quite sadism, but the point of the policy is to make conditions so bad that they prefer to stay in their own country, or go to another country, or go to a UN refugee camp.”
Isaacs is fully aware of the political and pragmatic difficulties that have made the issue such a tinderbox. “There are hundreds of brilliant minds that have looked at this,” Isaacs says, “And I certainly don’t have a water-tight solution. I do know that we have to treat people humanely. You can’t put people in these conditions and then justify it by saying that it’s to save lives at sea.”
Would his former employers at the Salvation Army be happy with The Undesirables? “I’d imagine they won’t be very happy,” he admits. “But really, it comes down to whether I think it’s worth it – and I definitely think it’s worth it.”
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The Undesirables is available now through Hardie Grant
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Edward Sharp-Paul is a writer from Melbourne whose words can be found at FasterLouder, Mess+Noise, Beat and The Brag. He tweets from @e_sharppaul.
Feature image a screenshot from Fairfax