http://www.theage.com.au/news/state/2002/02/02/FFXJ2LXU4XC.html

A town bound by the cult of secrecy


By CHRISTOPHER KREMMER
Saturday 2 February 2002

At first glance, there are not many votes in the burning gibber plains of South Australia, with only 359 permanent residents in the Woomera township, and less than 100 in the quarter of a million square kilometres occupied by the rocket range.

But two weeks ago when Afghan asylum seekers at Woomera began a hunger strike to demand a resumption of processing of their claims for refugee status, the politics that won John Howard a third term emerged again in the harsh glare of a desert day.

The crisis, which ended on Wednesday when processing resumed and the Afghans called off their strike, sailed smack into the middle of another election to decide the fate of the sole remaining Liberal state government in Australia. With the result of the February 9 polls likely to be balanced on a knife edge, every vote matters.

In Woomera, a plan to shut the detention centre and move inmates to the Baxter centre at El Alamein set off alarm bells. The chairman of the town board, Henriette Greenfield, conducted a snap poll of her members and made a statement to the effect that closing the Woomera detention centre would kill off the town.

During the era of the joint Australian-American spy base at nearby Nurrungar, Woomera boasted a population of about 7000. Now it can't field a football team. In this desperate community, the detention centre provides the majority of jobs.

On the surface, Woomera is a model community, where children are polite and motorists unfailingly acknowledge passing cars. It has cable, mobiles and 50 per cent Internet penetration. But from the moment word of the hunger strike leaked out, attracting media from all over Australia and other parts of the world, the townsfolk began circling the wagons with an instinct that could only come from half a century in the national security business.

In the 1950s and '60s, the vast Woomera range was the site for Australia's first atomic tests, and its pioneering work in missile development made world headlines. Then came the joint facilities at Nurrungar that provided the United States with early warning of Russian nuclear attacks. In October 1999, with the Cold War won, the Americans departed, leaving a single, white geodesic dome and piles of military memorabilia.

Woomera was facing extinction, but just as the Americans left, boatloads of Afghan asylum seekers began to arrive on Australia's northern coastline, placing pressure on existing detention facilities. By 1999, a small camp to house the overflow had opened on the western outskirts of the clump of trees, brick veneer cottages and barracks buildings that constitute Woomera. Little more than cyclone fencing around a dustbowl, it expanded rapidly, becoming a fully integrated refugee processing and detention centre holding about 1500 mainly Iraqi, Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers.

Run by the Defence Department, Woomera is the Australian equivalent of an Indian cantonment town. The department owns all but two of the houses. Surplus guns and missiles flank the entrances to parks and other public places. Even playgrounds bristle with military hardware for the entertainment of the children.

Unemployment is an amazing zero per cent, because under departmental regulations, no one can live there unless they have a job. Retirees, and anyone else who does less than 35 hours of paid employment a week, are expected to leave.

With the detention centre came jobs. Suddenly the boys at the bar who waste no time telling you what they think of asylum seekers could get full-time positions as guards, equipped with batons, after undergoing the most minimal training.

Their new employer, like its military predecessors, had one particular obsession with which Woomera people were familiar: secrecy. The US-based company, Australasian Correctional Management, requires all its staff to sign contracts with strict confidentiality clauses.

"People here are used to not talking about what they do. Until 1982 it was prohibited for outsiders even to enter the town," says the town administrator, Bob Mackenzie, whose distinctive personal uniform of Williams boots and tropical shirts gives people something else to talk about.

On a typical stultifyingly hot day west of the great salt pan of Lake Torrens, the road to Woomera traverses a relentlessly flat landscape. Turn-offs to the Roxby Downs uranium mine and opal mines at Andamooka remind travellers that, although the landscape is austere, it can be lucrative. Certainly for ACM, the contract to operate the Woomera centre has proven to be a bonanza. It costs taxpayers at least $100,000 a day in payments to the company, which provides "custodial services" around the world in 39 prisons capable of holding 27,500 prisoners.

From sunrise to sunset, buses rush in and out of the burgeoning compound. Staff are bussed in from their barracks while Afghan children are bussed out to their classes. Trucks deliver an unending supply of material for maintenance and construction of the massive facility. On still nights, noises from the detention centre drift over the town. Sometimes they include blood-curdling cries, although no one seems sure who is thrashing who. "Sometimes the screaming gets so bad that we have to go inside," says Dave Kirby, who runs a service station next to the centre.

Now and then, the scanners monitoring the centre's radio traffic burst to life as guards respond to a self-mutilation, suicide or escape attempt. Further out at the Stuart Highway junction at Pimba, the road signs point 500 kilometres to Adelaide and 1000 to Alice Springs. Like the first Australian colonies, isolation makes for a grim prison.

At Spud's Roadhouse, a retreat for transcontinental road trains just a stone's throw from the Adelaide-Alice rail line, barely a head turns when the television relays a live cross to New York, where a reporter discusses the impact of the Woomera crisis on Howard's trip to America.

Last November, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Ron McLeod, noted in his annual report to parliament that: "Immigration detainees have lesser rights than convicted criminals held in jails and (are) held in an environment that appears to have a weaker accountability framework."

But the cult of secrecy enveloping Woomera is unlike anything witnessed at urban detention centres such as Villawood and Maribyrnong. At Woomera, you sense that anything could happen, and the nation might be left none the wiser. Its special status provides a dangerous immunity. In a town built from scratch by migrant labour after World War II, the secret code is "Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil".

When the chants demanding freedom emanating from inside get too loud, ACM drowns them out with deafening onslaughts of muzak. The townsfolk blame the media. Our presence has been portrayed, both by them and the government, as incitement, as if the only responsible action we could take would be to go away.

They shrug off the frequent suicide attempts by detainees as acts of spoilt children. The use of ambulances to rush protesters who have mutilated themselves to hospital is, they say, a waste of public money. All the people of Woomera know or want to know is that the prison has bought them freedom. Subsidised water means their sprinklers can continue dousing their electric-green lawns at high noon.

There's talk of a new boom in aerospace industries that might yet give Woomera a new lease on life. British Aerospace Systems has already contracted to market the range. But Woomera's new status as Australia's best-known prison could jeopardise this lucrative future. Likewise, continuing chaos in the detention centres could drown out the Howard Government's efforts to project a positive agenda for its third term.