SYDNEY: Nalia was so shocked by reports about conditions in Australia’s detention camps that she started to correspond with one of the refugees. She is a 21-year-old student and her friend is a 31-year old Iraqi doctor who has been held at the Immigration Detention Centre at Villawood here, for two years. “He is not a criminal,” she said. “He’s a refugee and is simply waiting for his asylum claim to be processed.”

Nalia and a small but growing band of Australia’s liberal middle class are becoming politicized by a hardening stance on immigration. There was international outrage when the government turned away a boatload of refugees, mostly Afghans, picked up by a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa. But this paid electoral dividends and since Sept 11 it has grown even more resolute.

There are lots of guards at Villawood. They are all employed by a subsidiary of the private US prison company Wackenhut. Amnesty, the UN and the Lancet have all produced reports on the detention centres, revealing that the staff frequently abuse and intimidate inmates.

One refugee who is 40 but looks 60 says he his suffering severe depression. “There’s nothing to do here except sleep,” he says,” but I can’t sleep. We are always being mustered - like in the Army - to have our ID cards checked, even in the middle of the night.” He escaped the Taliban and left his wife and children. “I would have been killed,” he says. “I think of them all the time and hope they are still alive. I will bring them here when this is all over.”

He has been here for 18 months. He cannot be deported because Australia has no diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. He says that most people have been here between eight months and three years.

A young man has arms are covered in knife or razor marks. He has been self-mutilating. “He witnessed his mother being shot in Afghanistan; 27 children were burned alive in his village where he grew up,” says his friend and translator. ”He has been convicted of reading the Bible - that means death under the Taliban. He had to escape.”

The detainees are traumatized, bored, lonely. The food is not too bad these days. “Villawood is called the holiday camp of detention centres!” they joke, “The others are worse.”

Nuri spent 11 months at the notorious Woomera detention centre, Adelaide, and now lives legally in Sydney. He says: “Before I came here I thought Australia was paradise. But if I had known what it was like in the detention centre I would rather have risked being killed by the Taliban.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.