The Guardian’s publication of more than 2,000 incident reports from inside Australia’s immigration detention regime inspired a powerful series of protests. Helen Davidson talks to campaigners who took part

Reading the Nauru files: the people who took the story to the streets

This year the Guardian published the Nauru files, an exposé of abuse, mistreatment and widespread trauma among refugees and asylum seekers in the Australian-run offshore immigration centre. Through more than 2,100 leaked incident reports, the public gained the largest insight yet into the mix of desperation and banality in these lives in limbo.

We were very distraught at the Nauru files, even though we were all aware that terrible things were happening Sarah Keenan, International Alliance Against Mandatory Detention

The files, written by guards, caseworkers and teachers who worked on the Pacific island nation, contained reports of mental trauma, self-harm, sexual assaults, child abuse, hunger strikes, assaults and injuries. While Australia’s Coalition government largely dismissed the concerns raised, the series of reports prompted international condemnation and rebuke, including from the United Nations, and sparked a parliamentary inquiry.

Among grassroots groups it inspired an unusual form of protest, as activists and others read the files aloud in London and several Australian cities, including Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Newcastle, Hobart and Canberra. The protests, organised independently of the Guardian, took on their own life as groups from across advocacy, activism and organised religion congregated outside shopping hubs and immigration department offices.

“We were all very distraught at the Nauru files, even though I think we were all aware that terrible things were happening,” says Sarah Keenan, a member of the International Alliance Against Mandatory Detention and a main organiser of the London event.

“Just taking the time to read through the incident reports day by day and seeing how things build up. I think those of us who read them were very emotionally affected by it, so we wanted to do something publicly that was a bit confrontational to the Australian embassy but was also peaceful.”

For 10 hours at the gate of the Australian high commission in London, protesters read from beginning to end each of the redacted Nauru files reports. “It was a very exhausting day,” says Keenan.

Nauru files 'an extraordinary trove of short stories', says Richard Flanagan Read more

The group passed out flyers informing spectators that the performance sought to highlight the contradiction between the “narrative of abuse” revealed in the files and Australia’s image as “a progressive nation and a desirable destination for tourists, students, highly skilled workers and international investors”.

“The duration, monotony and repetition entailed in the reading of each file echoes the normalisation of the violence and tedium endured by refugees in indefinite detention,” it read.

Keenan says the response was mixed but largely supportive, with many passersby stopping to listen.

“The only negative response I think we got was from a couple of Australians who were exiting Australia House. One guy really didn’t like it,” she recalls. “He just said something to the effect of, ‘It’s a policy that works and we have to stop the boats,’ and he dropped the flyer.”

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Keenan is unsurprised to hear there was more negative reaction in Australia, where a coalition of activist groups inspired by the UK efforts held their own readings in capital cities.

Matt Anslow, an organiser for Christian refugee advocacy group Love Makes a Way, says thousands of people witnessed the Sydney reading but the reactions varied.

“We had some people walk past and shouting abuse, ‘Send them all back’ – that sort of thing,” he says. “Usually it wasn’t exactly what you’d call coherent. I think some people responded out of anger and occasionally said things which weren’t exactly rational. But that was expected.”

Some people were “amused” but others stopped and listened, Anslow says.

“One woman sat there for 90 minutes and she wept. She told us she didn’t know anything about the issue and she didn’t know any of it.”

Both Keenan and Anslow say they were most affected reading the more than 50% of reports which related to children, and about people wanting to die.

“I talk about the trauma of having read them but that’s nothing compared to the trauma of having lived it,” says Anslow. “I can’t even comprehend what kind of damage we do for someone to get to that point.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A member of the ‘Love Makes A Way’ Christian movement reading from the Nauru files outside the department of immigration in Melbourne to highlight abuses against people in detention. Photograph: Melissa Davey/The Guardian

Anslow says he wanted the confronting distress of the reports to be just as unavoidable for those walking past. “What we wanted to do was provide a public platform right in the middle of Sydney and other cities where people would have to be confronted by those files by hearing them,” he explains.

“Even if they were just walking past and even if they didn’t care, they had to hear them in some way.”

It’s this quality which perhaps led the novelist Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker prize winner, to describe the files as “an extraordinary trove of anonymous short stories” in his keynote speech at the Melbourne writers’ festival.

“I suspect they will continue to be read in coming decades and even centuries when the works of myself and my colleagues are long forgotten,” Flanagan said.

“And when people read these stories – so admirable in their brevity, so controlled in their emotion, so artful in their artlessness; their use, for example, of the term NAME REDACTED instead of a character’s actual name to better show what is happening to a stranger is not an individual act, but a universal crime.”

After the publication of the Nauru files, the Australian government launched an internal review of the incident reports, despite being in possession of the originals.



The review confirmed what had already been reported by the Guardian: 19 cases of violence or sexual abuse – including eight cases involving children – had been referred to Nauruan police, but with no prosecutions.

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The Nauruan government has made legislative changes to strengthen its child protection laws and system but there have been few prosecutions since and no convictions.

The detention centre on Nauru is no longer a closed centre, with those who still live inside it (as opposed to the community dwellings outside) relatively free to come and go. But reports of hostility from local Nauruans, as well as violent attacks by locals and other refugees continue, as do claims and evidence of mental and physical ailments. No refugee from the centre can settle in Nauru. The government has offered only short residency visas.

Calls for Australia to resettle people on the mainland continue, but both the government and opposition are resolute that doing so would encourage people smugglers to restart their business.

Many refugee families are now seeking resettlement in the US under a newly announced deal with the Australian government. The deal is far from set in stone – details are scant and there is speculation that the incoming president, Donald Trump, may reverse the agreement made with the Obama administration.

It is still not clear if the deal applies to the single male refugees held on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where the supreme court this year ruled Australia’s detention centre unconstitutional.

Australia’s hardline immigration policies remain in place, with the government throwing everything at the wall in the face of mounting international disgust and an apparent decline in local public support. Fewer Australians are against immigration than in years past, and more are pushing the government to find a solution to the offshore detention crisis. In the meantime, people on Nauru wait and hope.