One afternoon in mid-June, I sat with Ethan*, a local islander, at Nauru’s boat harbour. He was speaking about how life had changed in the country since the asylum deal with Australia was agreed. Just a few years before my arrival in 2016, the small Pacific island had once again been financed to process the asylum claims of migrants attempting to reach Australia. If successful, refugees would be resettled locally around the island. Successive Australian governments had taken a tough zero-tolerance approach, making sure that anyone making their way by boat without documentation would “never settle in Australia”.
Not far from where we sat, placards covered the fence of a refugee resettlement compound, reading: “We’re refugees not criminals,” and “Freedom is a Right Not a Crime, We Want Justice.”
“The thing is none of them want to be here,” Ethan explained, “and we don’t know who these people are, they could be dangerous. Why else does Australia not want them?” These fears were echoed to me numerous times in Nauru. “I’m so worried about having the refugee children in our school,” Sandra, a teacher at Nauru’s only secondary school, said on another occasion. “We don’t want to touch or go too close in case they say we hit refugees. And natural things like kids pushing each other on the playground. The next day it’s in the Australian news”. This teacher’s fears were confirmed several months later, with headlines like: “Nauru Government Denies Refugee Children Are Abused in Schools.”
