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Refugee Chen Xing Liang revisits the Port Hedland Detention Centre where he was detained for six months after arriving in Australia illegally. He was one of 56 Chinese refugees. He recalls crying from loneliness.
The Isabellas: The Long March (1995)
This clip chosen to be G
Teacher’s notes
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This clip shows scenes illustrating the environment of Port Hedland in Western Australia, where Chen Xing Liang was kept in a detention centre. Footage of a goods train, the desert landscape, mining operations and women playing bowls are shown and the local radio station announces the arrival of 56 Chinese boat people at the detention centre. Chen looks into the centre from outside its wire fence and walks around its perimeter as he recollects his experiences there. The soundtrack includes sound effects and Chinese music.
Educational value points
- Chen, featured in this clip, arrived on the far north coast of Australia on 31 December 1991 with 55 other Chinese nationals, including one child, in a wooden fishing boat code-named Isabella. In 10 days they walked more than 150 km over inhospitable terrain until the first of the party came across a remote cattle station in the Kimberley. All members of the party were found and later placed in detention while their applications for refugee status were processed.
- Port Hedland is an example of an Immigration Reception and Processing Centre, also called a detention centre, where people who arrive in Australia without authorisation must be held while their reasons for being in Australia are investigated. These investigations may take months and, in some cases, years. Australia has six onshore Centres, most of them in remote parts of Australia such as Woomera in South Australia and Curtin and Port Hedland in WA.
- Since legislative changes made in 2001, detention centres such as the one shown in the clip have been established on Nauru and Papua New Guinea as part of the 'Pacific Solution’, a strategy to process those intercepted at sea or on specified territories such as Christmas Island before they arrive on Australian soil. Asylum seekers who arrive on territories that have been excluded from Australia’s migration zone, such as Christmas Island, face two possibilities. They may be removed to a declared country such as Nauru or they may remain on Christmas Island, in which case they are deemed to be offshore-entry persons and do not have the right to apply for a visa.
- The images in the clip and its soundtrack emphasise the foreignness of the environment that Chen and the other Chinese asylum seekers encountered when they arrived at Port Hedland. The images of huge pieces of mining equipment, the vast empty terrain, a dead kangaroo on the road and even the women bowling reinforce the foreignness of this land as seen from Chen’s perspective. The mournful Chinese-influenced soundtrack underlines this feeling of isolation and alienation and invites the viewer’s sympathy with the plight of the boat people.
- The clip refers to ‘boat people’, a term that passed into common usage in the 1970s and referred to asylum seekers who arrived in Australia in boats without legal authorisation. These were mainly Indo-Chinese seeking escape from refugee camps established in South-East Asia after the Vietnam War. In 1989 a second wave of Indo-Chinese boat people arriving in Australia resulted in the establishment of detention centres and the Migration Reform Act 1992, an amendment to the Migration Act 1958 that made detention of asylum seekers mandatory. Since 1999 the majority of boat people or, as they are increasingly termed by some Australians, ‘illegals’, have come from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.
- According to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Australia had 13,593 unauthorised boat arrivals between 1989 and 2003, and 556 unauthorised boat arrivals were in immigration detention in February 2007.
- In 2001, the Tampa, SIEV-4 and SIEV-X incidents, all involving boats and asylum seekers, had a significant effect upon Australians’ attitudes to refugees, Australia’s refugee policy and the outcome of the 2001 federal election. In late August the Australian Government tried to prevent the Norwegian freighter Tampa from conveying 433 refugees, rescued from their sinking boat, to Australian soil. In early October HMAS Adelaide had attempted unsuccessfully to force the refugee boat known as SIEV-4 (SIEV stands for ‘suspected illegal entry vessel’) to return to Indonesia. When the boat sank the Government reported that parents had thrown children overboard to ensure rescue, a claim that proved to be incorrect. On 19 October, 353 of a total of 400 Iraqi and Afghan passengers drowned while trying to reach Australian territorial waters when their vessel, known as SIEV-X, sank.
- In 1977 the then minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Michael Mackellar, articulated the basic principles of a comprehensive refugee policy, including the formal recognition of an ongoing commitment to refugees. Although at the time Australia had ratified the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, its selection of those eligible to enter Australia was determined by the White Australia Policy, embedded in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was not finally abolished until 1973.
