First in a series
Journalist Katie DeRosa of the Victoria Times Colonist has travelled throughout Australia and Thailand to learn more about Australia’s mandatory detention policy and talk to refugees, in an effort to understand why they would pay a human smuggler and risk their lives getting on a boat. She travelled to Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, where hundreds of people arrive each month and where all refugees are initially held in one of two detention centres. She visited Northam in Western Australia, where the government has just spent $ 125 million on a new detention centre; the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where refugee families are held in a suburb- like alternative detention centre called Inverbrackie; and Dandenong just outside Melbourne, where a thriving Afghan refugee community has revitalized a previously dead area. And finally, she travelled to Sydney, where an Afghan Hazara refugee has used art and the support of an Australian family to thrive in community detention. In Bangkok, DeRosa talked to refugee families who are stuck in limbo waiting to be resettled. They live in constant fear of being rounded up by the Thai police, which refugee advocates say drives them to pay human smugglers for a spot on a boat. DeRosa’s project is the first to be funded by the James R. Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship, created in memory of the late journalist, who was a foreign correspondent for Southam News, editor of the Ottawa Citizen and executive managing editor of the Toronto Star.
This series continues on Monday