They stand pristine and empty, cocooned in a silence broken intermittently by the roar of low-flying fighter jets. Woomera and Baxter detention centres, pitched in desert to confine thousands of people from across the seas, have outlived their idea. They exist as harsh monuments to history – with powerful stories to tell.
Many of those stories – tragic accounts of severely damaged asylum-seekers – were widely reported in the media, Four Corners included, despite authorities' strenuous efforts to keep the window shut on Woomera and Baxter.
Not so in the case of the men and women who ran the centres, whose job was to keep order in tense, often overcrowded conditions among traumatised people from alien cultures.
Now Four Corners hears the stories of the guards. Typically they got a few weeks' training before being sent in to quell riots and fights or deal with detainees slashing or hanging themselves.
"We were just treated like cannon fodder," says one angry veteran. Another recalls facing a mass escape three days into his job. Four Corners reveals that many of these former guards are now suffering mental illnesses including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Some may never work again.
"My marriage broke up and I tried to commit suicide twice. I tried to hang myself and I took a cocktail of drugs," says Les.
"It was a very toxic environment," says a doctor who tended guards and detainees.
Some could never be adequately trained. One rookie, a troubled 20-year-old mother of three who had just fled a violent relationship, tells Four Corners she was attacked twice by detainees before she self-harmed and was sent to psychiatric hospital.
Others are haunted by the memory of detainees' suicide attempts. Rod breaks down as he points out the places he found people, including a 12-year old boy. "How can you get into his mind to tell him not to do this sort of thing?" he asks helplessly.
While detainees – known to detention centre staff as "UNCs" or Unlawful Non-Citizens - were dehumanised, guards were brutalised. Mild-mannered Rod nearly stabbed one troublemaker. "That night was the breaking point for me," he says.
For some guards, mild resentment turned to angry racism against Muslims or Arabs - even from afar. "I yell and scream and swear (seeing them) on TV," says Sean. "I hated them and I wanted to run them over," recalls Carol. "I wanted to strangle them. I thought, 'This is me, a compassionate person turning into an absolute animal'."
Now the hard edges of the mandatory detention policy are being softened, its history shaped mainly by the harrowing stories of the asylum-seekers. But in their own way, the detention centre guards – spearheads of that controversial policy, frequently ill-fitted to the task and tormented by a past they cannot escape – are forgotten casualties
