Inside Australia's Immigration Detention

I met the flirtatious hairdresser this morning!  He has not been sacked after all.  The source of the false information was one of my good friends.  His nickname is 'Professor' because he is very arrogant but often what he says is completely wrong.  Ha ha ha.  Real professors will be most annoyed if they noticed how they are perceived by the general public.   Anyway, it's good to have the hairdresser back since if my lazy judge takes long to write up a judgment, I will have my hair trimmed next month again. Today, I went to the knitting class again to learn the latest topics in the detention centre.  Girls told me that a new policy on food was introduced today and now a visitor was allowed to bring food in for detainees.  After the knitting class, I asked about the new food policy to a detainee who collected everyone's signature to put the ABF on notice that we would institute a class action if the current food ban policy was not changed...

It's Thursday.  My plan to finish off all the work on this litigation in this week means that I need to write up the draft of my final submission today.  This paper will not make any difference to the fate of my case so I have a little difficulty in keeping up my motivation.  But since I may want a job in future from the big law firm which the Immigration hired, I have to perfect my job to impress them. So I was ready to be in a full throttle this morning.  Then, I received a call from a sister who would visit this detention centre shortly reminding me of it.  Ooooops.  I forgot that.  But I thought it was the only task for the day and I would focus on my work after the visit.   Then, I went to the visit and met some asylum seekers who were with the sister at the visit.  Ughhhh.  I ended up agreeing to read his papers after the visit.  But his case was so simple and the judgment he got was very short.  So it did n...

For the last two weeks, I was told by a few people that there will be a new policy on visitors.  First thing I heard was that there will be a criminal history check when applying for a visit.  Then, I was told that 100 point IDs will be required.  Then, a visitor has to apply for a visit at least five days prior to the planned visit.  Yesterday, someone told me that the success or otherwise of an application for a visit will only be told when a visitor arrives at the planned visit.  I have not had any confirmation of all these information.  So I don't know whether it is true.  But the detainees here are in a panic.   A refugee girl is worried whether her husband has 100 points of IDs.  An interstate girl is worried if her husband flies from interstate and is refused entry into the centre.  My friends here are worried whether their criminal records prevent them from keeping their promise with each other to visit each othe...

My compound has a few flower beds or vegetable patches in the internal garden.  Currently, parsley, coriander, pak choy, celery, corn, sunflowers are growing.  The other day, some corns were pulled out and some sunflower's stalk was broken into two.  That made me feel sad.  I thought some of the stupid girls here must have done.  But that might have been an unsubstantiated allegation.  I saw this morning, a young cockatoo perching on a broken stalk of one of the sunflowers and happily munching on seeds!!  So cute!   This is the first time I saw a cockatoo in Villawood although I see galahs, a gang of thirty, visiting the Oval every day.  A family of five masked wrap wings (a kind of plover) lives in the Oval and they are my favourite to watch even though masked wrap wing is not one of my favourite species of bird.  The Oval also accommodates Indian mynah while my compound is a territory of an Australian native, noisy myn...