Meet "Nine Fingers"

After taking the initial photo I put out the call to find out who this Asylum Seeker was and thanks to all the shares, he was reached and has now replied. This is a slice of his story.

Michael, thank you for asking who I am. Suddenly, thanks to your Facebook post I am known as “Nine Fingers.”

Each of those fingers represents one year of detention or you could say the 9 christmases we have all missed. 9 years could also represent the number of years we have eaten food from plastic containers with plastic cutlery and the number of years since we have eaten from a normal plate or with normal cutlery. Two bags of food are delivered in paper bags each dinner and lunch time for us to microwave. Everything is plastic or paper. Personally I cannot stomach food at the moment. I look at it and my stomach heaves.

 The Park Hotel is being used as an APOD, which means Alternative Place of Detention. Life in here is nothing like a normal hotel.

I do not think anyone reading this could imagine the terrible agony of spending every day in a small room, with the windows locked shut for three years and six months. Too often I fear I am losing hold of my mind. Sometimes I find myself staring at the ceiling in my room and time disappears. There is nothing to do in this place. There was a time when I may have watched a movie to try to kill time but I cannot do that anymore. I cannot concentrate on TV and feel anxious when I try. All of us are the same in this place. Every day is like a year to us and time is a blur.

 In the last year or so we have seen people talking about being traumatised after a couple of weeks in hotel quarantine. I wish they would imagine years and try to understand our struggle. We do not blame the Australian people for this. So many have no idea about what is happening to us or what we have been through. We know we are being held for political reasons even though we have never committed a crime or done anything wrong. Are we less valuable than a dog? Even a dog goes out regularly for a walk. Even an actual criminal knows how long he will be imprisoned for but for us there is no end date and we have no right to know government plans for us - we have been moved from place to place at whim for their convenience not ours. Our human rights are not respected.

 I try to keep myself active. There is a small square common room on one of the floors. There was a fire on that level recently so I have not been able to go to that room. We were relocated to a lower level. Before the fire I would run around this common area for thirty to forty-five minutes every morning. Then I would do some simple exercises like push ups and sit-ups to keep my strength. There is no gym in here.

 Like everyone held in this hotel and other places of detention around Australia, I was evacuated from Papua New Guinea to Australia in July 2019 with urgent health needs. Some came from the island of Nauru. I had been in pain for three years prior to this and medical reports recommended my evacuation to Australia for specialist care. I also spent 9 months in an immigration detention centre in Brisbane. In May 2020 I was relocated to a Brisbane hotel, used in the same way as this one. In July 2020 I had an operation and was moved here in April 2021.

There are 31 of us in the Park Hotel - 12 in MITA (Melbourne’s immigration centre) - 9 in BITA (Brisbane’s immigration centre) - 2 in Perth’s Yongah Hill centre and 2 in Sydney’s Villawood centre. We all live the same monotonous meaningless life. We have all been hoping for freedom for 9 years and are now mentally exhausted and broken. We are not sure how much longer we can endure this.

Many of the cohort who came with us have been released into the community. We have asked many questions about this - why some are released and others continue to be locked up. There are no answers or logical explanations. People are randomly selected for release. We are kept on one level of this hotel - level 2. We can go to level 4 for fresh air and to sit in the sun. None of us have met Novak Djokovic. It has been a very long time since we have walked freely on a street and it has been made come increasingly difficult for us to have visitors. All of us hope and dream of freedom and to be part of the world instead of seeing it through a window. We want to live, work, pay taxes, marry and have children - just a normal life really. Nine Fingers - 550 Words Page of 2 3 This is the photo you took of me in Melbourne’s Park Hotel This is a photo that a Journalist took of me in the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel in Brisbane around Easter 2020 Nine

“Let me know if you’d like to know more”

~Michael