For Fatima Frotan, the shuttered doors of Afghanistan's embassy in Canberra represent the sad reality of a life split in two.
When Kabul fell to the Taliban, her life changed overnight. She left everything behind in a rush, eventually being evacuated to Australia where she arrived in Canberra during COVID-19 lockdowns and had to start again from scratch.
Ms Frotan described the sudden flight as a "choiceless choice".
"No one wishes to be a refugee. No one wishes to leave home unless they have to," she said.
"I was glad that I had the choice to come to a safe country, but it was never an option for me to stay back home, because the situation was impossible."
That was why the formal closure of the embassy struck such an emotional chord across the Afghan diaspora.
For community members, the building served as a vital cultural anchor.
"Having the embassy open during all this time, it gave people like me, and also the diaspora in general ... a space to feel connected to its culture, to the community during those difficult times," Ms Frotan said. "For us it was really beautiful."
However, she feared the loss of consular services would leave nationals facing impossible bureaucratic situations, particularly where official paperwork required an embassy stamp.
"There was no consular services, it was like all the doors were closed to them," she said.
The shutdown followed a joint understanding between the Albanese government and ambassador Wahidullah Waissi to suspend operations.
A spokesperson for Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Australia would "not accept a Taliban representative", arguing the mission could no longer operate under international conventions because the ambassador no longer had a recognised sending state to fund or direct him.
The government warned that the Taliban regime would not honour documents from non-Taliban missions, leaving citizens vulnerable to detention or deportation abroad.
However, the spokesperson insisted that the Department of Home Affairs and the Australian Passport Office would assist the community, saying: "We are actively engaging with the Australian Afghan community to ensure people are not left without lawful status or access to essential services."
Local advocates argued that the administrative safety net was already under strain. Dr Nadir Saikal, ACT state director of the Afghan Peace Foundation, supported the refusal to legitimise the Taliban but said the closure left a painful void.
"Not only me, all of the community across Australia, they're not happy," he said. "That embassy is very important, a symbol for Afghans, for the Afghan community in Australia."
He said returning to Afghanistan was not a real option for most people.
He shared a recent case of a Melbourne man who went back to central Afghanistan to visit family and was killed by the Taliban, saying: "No one is safe ... I never encourage people to return to Afghanistan from Australia."
Through his work with refugee communities, Dr Saikal said he was worried about thousands of people who suddenly felt they had nowhere to turn.
"We kept receiving [calls] from the members of our community, and they didn't know where they should go for the extension of their visa," he said. "We were missing the administrative task of the embassy."
Although he personally welcomed Australia's firm stance against the regime, he urged the government to keep the physical building alive as a community space.
Dr Saikal said the embassy should never be handed to Taliban representatives, calling the Taliban a terrorist group responsible for massacres, human rights abuses and bans on women's education and work.
"Even if it cannot operate politically, we want the embassy to be kept open for cultural and social activities, as a good sign of friendship towards the Afghan community in Australia," Dr Saikal said, saying the grounds felt like the land of Afghanistan in Canberra.
For Ms Frotan, the ultimate response to the diplomatic freeze lay in investing in the Afghan women and girls who managed to escape, pointing to the Afghan women's cricket team and scholarship recipients now in Australia as the true future of her country.
"When I asked ... the Australian government to support Afghan women, I did not necessarily mean for them to be saved," she said. "I want [the] Australian government to invest in their potential."
