KON Karapanagiotidis is a long-time Melbourne resident. He didn’t need to take a leaky and dangerous boat to Manus Island. But he did. Because it gave him first-hand experience at just what asylum seekers desperate to get into Australia are facing.

Below is an extract from Kon’s memoir The Power Of Hope, which tells his story about overcoming traumatic childhood racism, to setting up the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, now one of Australia’s most loved human rights organisations.

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WE STARTED walking in the direction of the centre, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. All the lies our politicians had told us about Manus died in an instant when I saw it for myself. It was so much worse than anything you have read or been told. The only way I can think to describe it is that it was a living graveyard. This was a place where my country had decided to leave more than 400 human beings to die.

This regional processing centre had been built to destroy hope, to kill dreams, to erase any memory people had that they were once human. It was a place built on the dead spirits of freedom seekers and the corpses of men who came seeking our protection. This was where Reza Barati had lived, where Hamed Shamshiripour and Faysal Ahmed had slept. Our guides’ voices dropped to a hush as they pointed out places of mourning and grief everywhere we walked.

It was so dark, so vast, so brutal in its architecture. Every space had been organised to criminalise, humiliate and degrade the men. The centre itself was surrounded by high steel fences, metres high, that were topped with multiple strands of razor wire. But, as Behrouz would say to me later that night, “Kon, it’s not the walls, barbed wire fences or the cruelty of this place that destroys us. It’s being separated from hope, from safety, from family and freedom.”

Manus was a prison that had suffocated these men’s freedoms to such a point that they could no longer dream. Indeed, one man confessed that exact thing to me with his words, “Even my dreams cannot escape this place.” And clearly these men, who had been through so much, were all trapped in a waking nightmare.

Once we were guided inside the complex, through the tall gates, I was quickly struck by the physical appearance of the men. So many of them had arrived on Manus on the cusp of manhood at 19 or 20, but now, only several years later, they had the bent and scarred bodies of old men, and all because of our constant neglect and abuse. I asked them what life was like for them. “We don’t live,” they told me. “We just exist. And we wait and wait and wait.”

The centre itself resembled the footage you’ve likely seen for Guantánamo Bay — a hellhole built on top of a beach paradise. I stopped for a moment to think about this.

Those men had spent nearly five years looking out to the beach and sea, which were only metres away, but they had never been able to walk on the sand or go for a swim. They were reduced to staring and wondering, or perhaps to thinking of their own boat journeys and those people they knew who had perished on the way.

They showed me where they had queued for up to three hours for their medicines. It was along a narrow corridor that at its end had a counter behind glass, rather like a bank, with a few narrow openings to pass the men their pills and other medication. They showed me the soccer field, which had been fashioned from hard rocks, stones and dirt. It wasn’t fit to walk on, let alone to play the world game on. Then the men explained how, until just recently, the centre had been segregated, with half of the men forbidden to mix or speak with the other half. Effectively there had been two prisons within the complex. The men had been arbitrarily separated by a Berlin Wall-like barbed-wire fence. There was no reason given by the authorities for doing this; they did it just because they could. This was a place where logic and reason didn’t seem to exist.

I was shown flimsy tin structures that looked like small abandoned aeroplane hangars and told how hundreds of people used to sleep in there in bunks. I tried to picture crowds of men piled in on top of each other to the point of near suffocation, with just a few feeble fans to battle the brutal heat. Now, though, I saw that the men slept on the tops of shipping containers, using the height as a means of protection from being attacked by the locals.

I saw men lifting buckets of contaminated water out of wells that they had been forced to dig to stay alive. Our Government had ordered that their water be cut off. Let me repeat that — the Australian Government had ordered that more than 400 men be cut off from any water source. The men now bathed in green wheelie bins, and many of them were covered in angry red rashes, with infections and sores on their backs and legs, and in their eyes and ears. I saw men with swollen and purple feet from stepping on filthy nails. I saw a man have an epileptic fit with no medicine to counter it; and I saw another man bedridden, also without any medication for his diabetes and kidney condition. This was a humanitarian catastrophe.

Whatever you have read about the conditions on Manus Island, you need to know it was far worse and the places that these men have now been moved on to are simply smaller prisons. Nothing has improved for the men still there after an agonisingly slow five years.

Yet amid all this horror that I was seeing with my own eyes, something truly extraordinary was happening. These men, who had been robbed of everything, still showed decency, compassion and love for us. It was a profound truth of the enduring and indestructible nature of our humanity.

On the night we were there, the men insisted on making us some tea and sharing what little food they had. They wouldn’t take no for an answer — hospitality and welcoming strangers was in their blood. I remember thinking, these are the sort of men our country needs. So we sat on the floor of a shipping container sipping tea and eating biscuits like family, like we were brothers and sisters with the men on Manus. We joked, took selfies and talked about our dreams, aspirations and futures as if we were in another place and time.

I was so humbled by the courage and generosity of these men. The Government had banked on all the men turning on one another once water, food, electricity and medicine were cut, yet these men did not sink to that. In what can only be described as the direst of circumstances, they had found a way to work together, rationing what little food had been smuggled in, sharing medicines, digging wells together and providing comfort to one another for an entire month before being brutally removed under the threat of violence.

What I hadn’t understood until I visited this hellhole of a prison was that for the last four-and-a-half years it was the only place in all of Papua New Guinea where the asylum seekers felt any sense of agency, self-determination and safety. After being discarded by the Turnbull Government, the men themselves now ran what was once their prison. At last they could move freely among one another, and they would be the ones to decide how the small stores of food, medicine and water would be shared — and shared with kindness rather than having to queue three hours for a tablet. For a brief time they were men again. They were men with choices, no matter how small; they were men with dignity, no matter how compromised.

So it’s hardly surprising that they did everything they possibly could to stay in there. I will never forget leaving the ruined centre and turning back to watch the men wrap huge chains around the gate and lock them tight to keep themselves safe.

The Power Of Hope by Kon Karapanagiotidis, $32.99, is published by HarperCollins and available now at all good bookstores and online.