how were you treated when you first got here you treated mom it took us four days before we could see a land and it was Christmas Island it was the best moment of my life it was just kind of my bed people started shouting ICL and it was just like one of those pirate movies actually I do remember I told my mom were going to heaven it was like the place of peace the place where there's no dirt there's a lot of angels I guess and yeah white people and after that all hell broke loose
rivers that night with immigration and they gave us a number my number was done 94 do n 94 that was the first sign that you're a prisoner I was almost three months in detention center the camp was set up for no hundred people but they crammed peein 1,100 people there so they put us in in a room that was very small and we couldn't even get out to the yard for fresh air so we were locked for two months of spend for uncertain years in some of the worst detention center Australia Zhou has got to
offer prisons are way better because you know when you're gonna get out you know there is a light at the end of that tunnel the attention doesn't have that light when they wanted to give us food they will squeeze the food through the windows get you know to kind of give us our food initially we were getting a little bit of you know fry fish a little bit of nice dishes as we call it you know later on the food got worse the amenities got worse toiletries got worse we just barely getting you know glass
of a little cup of milk and a little of conflicts obviously they'll push us to do some Veggie Mars to make us a true Aussie no wonder I know people don't like Vegemite too much salty is terrible one thing we Australian don't like to accept we are no more humane than countries like Iran and Afghanistan have been abused have been putted in isolation I've been beaten up I've been puttin in a room sub-zero temperatures with no claws and all these things happened to me when I was 15 16 17 we were given options to go
either to jazz mania or to to Adelaide I think I ain't to Queensland so I asked the guards which place is good there as well people go twins land for holidays so you might as well go there so I'm going there when my family first got here we didn't speak a single word of English except for yes and no the only word I spoke was how are you and that's something I learned back in a refugee camp so immediately of course we were treated like incredibly uneducated people and we were treated as though we didn't
know things in general so I felt at the time I did get bullied a little bit yes oh yeah this is the first group of queue jumpers who came here a war people well that's fine and slowly you know people get understanding a first step they are not bad after all you know they're human beings living breathing human beings who could say where it really hits me and ended was 8th of May 2002 10 o'clock in the morning when my parents got deported I was 17 we just hit me I realized that I'm alone and
that's where my childhood basically has stopped and I thought you know what had no choice in it I had to grow up [Music] [Applause]
