The controversial events surrounding the Tampa 10 years ago today gave many Australians a reason to help asylum seekers build a new life.

ON AUGUST 26, 2001 the Norwegian freighter Tampa, en route to Singapore from Fremantle, responded to a May-Day call issued by Australia’s Rescue Coordination Centre. Changing course, the freighter made its way to an Indonesian fishing boat stranded in international waters about 140 kilometres north of Christmas Island.

When the Tampa reached the stricken vessel, it was coming apart and on the verge of sinking. The difficult rescue operation continued all afternoon. By the time it was over, 438 asylum seekers, many of whom were Afghans in flight from the Taliban, were on board the container ship. There were 43 children, pregnant women, and ill and distressed passengers with nothing left but the clothes on their back.

In the ensuing days, the Tampa remained stranded off Christmas Island, denied entry by a decision directly made by then prime minister John Howard, while his government frantically sought to find a way to offload the passengers elsewhere. The rescue triggered a political crisis that was to change the course of Australian politics.

As David Marr and Marion Wilkinson note in their book Dark Victory, after heavily armed SAS troops commandeered the Tampa, no civilians on the island, including journalists, were to be allowed near the ship. ”No cameraman,” the authors write, ”would get close enough to the Tampa to put a human face on this story. The icon of the scandal was to be a red-hulled ship on a blue sea photographed through heat haze by a very long lens.”

Just two months earlier, in June 2001, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre was founded, based on diametrically opposed principles of engagement with asylum seekers. It began, says founder Kon Karapanagiotidis, as a project for his welfare studies students at Victoria University. The initial goal was simply to provide food for destitute asylum seekers on visas that left them with no rights to Centrelink payments, public housing or even a healthcare card. The centre’s first home was a tiny shop front in Nicholson Street, Footscray. Manned by five volunteers, it had an operating budget of $200 a week. ”We were literally begging for food,” Karapanagiotidis recalls. ”We would drive all over Melbourne in search of cheap groceries to keep us going the next day. By midday, whatever food we had would be gone. The plight of asylum seekers was an invisible issue at that time. Few people knew they existed.

”Then Tampa happened, and something changed. Instantly. We had angry Australians coming in saying: ‘I’ve got to do something. I can’t stand what’s being done in my name’. For all the wrong reasons the issue was suddenly in the public’s consciousness. It was a kind of shared desperation. We had asylum seekers coming in off the street in dire need. And we had Australians anxious to do something that countered what was happening off our shores.”

These days the centre, now located in West Melbourne, has 800 active volunteers, 33 staff, and has helped over 7000 asylum seekers.

Karapanagiotidis dashes out and returns with a battered A4 size Collins notebook. The dark blue cover is almost detached, the pages fraying. The book lists every person who has been helped in the centre. Each name is dated and numbered. The last name, added on the morning of our conversation, is numbered 7143.

”In one given week, we can have a group of schoolgirls turn up with boxes full of food they had collected. And in the same week, someone from a synagogue, a mosque, a church, a union, the State Library, members of the North Melbourne Football Club. They bring food, nappies, transport tickets, and clothes.

”So many times over the past 10 years we’d think: ‘We’re just not going to make it’. Then people arrive at our doorstep, unspoken, unplanned, unorganised. You cannot orchestrate such a movement of humanity. They brought in material things, life-saving aid. But they were also bringing in hope.”

Karapanagiotidis recalls many special moments. There was the elderly couple who came in with a box of lettuces they had grown especially for the centre; the 10-year-old girl who sent in a cheque for $20 with a note: “I heard there are kids in detention. I’ve saved up my pocket money. They need it more than I do”; and the grandmothers throughout regional Victoria who knitted baby clothes, scarves and beanies.

He recalls that six months after it first opened the centre moved to a larger room in the same building with one phone, one virus-infected computer, and legions of mice.

”They would sit there, watching us calmly as we worked at night. And when we left, they would take over. In the morning my first task was to come in with a broom to scatter the mice so as not to scare the East Timorese women who were coming in to attend our English classes.”

Then parents started turning up with sick children desperately in need of medical support. By March 2002, the centre had established the first Victorian health service for asylum seekers.

In 2004, the expanding centre shifted to its current three-storey premises in West Melbourne. ”The worse the plight of asylum seekers became, and the more cruel the rhetoric of the Howard government, the more people came in desperate to help,” says Karapanagiotidis.

The volunteers have included recently released asylum seekers wanting to express their gratitude for the legal help they received from the centre while in detention. ”There was a Bangladeshi man we had helped when he was on the brink of deportation, a Pakistani who was still in community detention, and an Iranian who had spent seven years in detention,” Karapanagiotidis says.

”We were painting the walls of the new centre and had taken a breather from work.

”We were sitting together, breaking bread. Eating. We were like brothers. If only the people could see them. These guys had nothing. Yet they came back night after night to help out.”

We turn our attention back to the names in the fraying book. Each person has a story to tell, and Karapanagiotidis seems to know them all.

He flips through the pages and pauses at specific cases. On the first page, there are 13 names, recorded back in 2001. They include an Iranian who had spent four years in detention, and was on the verge of suicide when finally released; a Colombian who was eventually deported; a Kurdish freedom fighter whom the centre helped to finally get a visa; and a Turkish man who, 10 years later, is still fighting for his freedom.

”I saw him yesterday. I had to tell him: ‘I’m sorry. We’ve done all we can, but you have to fly home. If not, they’ll put you back in detention’. His wife was weeping. He was a big tree of a man, and he just smiled. It was a sad smile I have seen hundreds of times, one that says: ‘I thank you, I know you have tried everything’, but inside I am broken. At these times I feel like a failure.” He points to another name. ”This one was the father of a little girl who tried to hang herself in detention. They’re citizens now and their kids are doing well. And this one I saw just recently, years after I first met him, two suicide attempts and two babies later.

”I had to tell him: ‘Sorry, you have been rejected again and we’ve got to start all over’.

”But on the same day, there was a Sri Lankan man who received his permanent visa after eight years of us fighting his case, and after 17 years of waiting. I walked out and saw him standing, over there, by the stairs, staring at his papers, dumbfounded.”

On hearing the good news, some asylum seekers pass out. Others weep uncontrollably, or run around hugging and kissing everybody.

”They still have to adjust to a new life,” Karapanagiotidis says. ”But in that moment, they know they can finally stop running. In that moment they’ve regained their freedom. They are like shadows as they go through the process. And then, it is like colour and light has re-entered their bodies.”

The services provided by the centre are extensive. Apart from emergency material aid, the daily meals and weekly food parcels, there are comprehensive health services, a home tutoring scheme, ESL classes, workplace English courses, placements in TAFE and other education facilities, a micro credit scheme, legal aid, mentoring and counselling programs. Schools regularly tour the centre to see the work, and speakers – including asylum seekers – educate the public about the refugee experience. The centre also fosters a catering service and a cleaning business run by asylum seekers.

But Karapanagiotidis says the heart of the work is the individuals and their stories. Earlier this year, in a play produced by the centre, asylum seekers stepped onstage to recount their harrowing journeys, and reveal the depths of their struggles, their loneliness, fear of rejection, and the moments of hope and triumph.

”You live a thousand dreams and see a thousand deaths each day here. This is what those who come to the centre understand, volunteers and asylum seekers alike. The centre represents a different Australia. It is the opposite to everything the Tampa came to stand for.”

Karapanagiotidis glances at his watch. He has an appointment with an Iranian woman who has recently fled the theocratic dictatorship. As we step out of his office, he is embraced by the Sri Lankan man who had recently won his freedom after 17 years in limbo. He is beaming. ”He has returned from the dead,” says Karapanagiotidis.

The centre is humming. Lunch is being served in the downstairs meeting room. Asylum seekers are sitting at tables and on sofas, eating, chatting, or at computers, accessing their emails. A small group sits in a back room at their weekly music circle. The morning English classes have just finished. . Others are seated outside the warren of ground-floor rooms, waiting to be seen by volunteer doctors, community nurses, physiotherapists and lawyers.

I speak to a volunteer who has taught English here for six years. ”It may seem chaotic on the surface,” she says, ”but this is the sanest place I know, and the warmest. People here know what’s important in life.”

I ask one asylum seeker what brings her here. ”This is my home. When I am in my room I miss my family. I am bored and tired. These people are my new family. When I am here, I can forget for a few hours. And be human.”

Arnold Zable’s is a Melbourne writer. His latest book is Violin Lessons (Text $29.95). He and Julian Burnside will be in conversation at 4pm on September 3 at the Melbourne Writers Festival.