The view west from Perth’s Kings Park looks out over the Swan River as it runs towards the Indian Ocean.
Far beyond the horizon lies Sri Lanka, where one desperate decision changed the course of Alex’s life, leading him to Australia – and ultimately to end it.
After 16 years trapped within Australia’s byzantine immigration system, most of that time incarcerated, shuttled between bleak detention centres in a confusing and capricious internment, Alex could abide no more.
On a Sunday in September, Alex took a taxi to Kings Park. There, alone, he set himself on fire.
He would later be identified only by his fingerprints. It was all that was left of him.
That evening, when his daughter, Latheesha, called Alex for their regular Sunday chat, it was a police officer who answered the phone. From nearly 6,000km away, the 18-year-old learned she would never see her father again.
Her 16-year-old brother, born months after Alex was forced to flee his home, would never meet his father.
Escape from violence
In early 2009, as Sri Lanka’s pitiless civil war raged towards its final frenzied months, the violence edged closer and closer to Alex.
He knew already its dangers. A political campaigner for Sri Lanka’s opposition party, he had previously been kidnapped and had his finger cut off by political opponents. His business partner was discovered dead after being snatched by security forces.
Alex, of Sinhalese ethnicity and a member of Sri Lanka’s Catholic minority, had also witnessed the murders of more than a dozen men by members of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the feared Tamil Tigers.
As the chaos worsened, Alex was forced to abandon the only home he’d known, leaving his two-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife for the uncertainty of the sea.
In March 2009, seeking to escape the escalating violence in Sri Lanka, Alex and 31 others pooled their money to buy a small fishing boat.
They left the country from the port city Negombo on 31 March and arrived in Australian waters on 22 April. They were intercepted off Western Australia, and taken into immigration detention.
Alex, while an organiser of the boat journey, made no profit from the trip. But because it was Alex who had collected money from his fellow passengers to buy the boat, and because the vessel was registered in his name, he was charged with people-smuggling and taken to a maximum-security remand prison.
He faced court and in 2010 was convicted of “organising the bringing of groups of non-citizens into Australia”. He was sentenced to five years’ jail.
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The conviction could not stand, as the court of appeal ruled that the jury had been misdirected over Alex’s defence that the boat journey had been organised in circumstances of a “sudden or extraordinary emergency”.
“There is a significant possibility that the appellant has lost the chance of an acquittal,” the Western Australian supreme court said.
The commonwealth director of public prosecutions withdrew the charge, arguing it “was not in the public interest” for another trial to be brought, and Alex was released from prison.
It was a hollow victory.
Despite the quashing of his conviction and the withdrawal of all criminal charges, Alex was never freed. He was taken from prison straight into immigration detention, where he was held for nearly a decade, shuttled – seemingly at whim – between the onshore detention regime and Australia’s remote centre on Christmas Island.
The harm of Alex’s potentially limitless detention was exacerbated by the bewildering asylum process that teased, almost taunted him, offering slivers of hope, only to dash them again.
In 2011, Alex was invited to apply for a protection visa. The application was refused. He appealed; the refusal was upheld.
The Australian government leaked Alex’s details online, further jeopardising his safety. Alex was invited to re-apply for protection.
An independent review body, the Immigration Assessment Authority, found Australia owed Alex “complementary protection”, a form of protection outside the refugee convention but with similar effect.
Alex, the authority found, was at risk of imprisonment and “serious physical mistreatment, including torture” if he was returned to Sri Lanka. Australia was legally obliged to protect Alex and could not force him back to his homeland.
Still he was detained. As Alex waited – wasted – another two years in detention for his protection visa application to be assessed, his case managers watched helplessly as his mental health deteriorated.
“He was just so destroyed. It was like he had lost all hope,” one of those case managers within the home affairs department, John*, told the Guardian.
Alex couldn’t sleep. He was diagnosed with depression. The years of his children’s lives he had missed were lost for ever.
Stranded, caught between two unbearable realities – unable to return to Sri Lanka, and fearing he would spend the rest of his life detained in Australia – Alex tried unsuccessfully to take his own life on Good Friday 2012.
Legal limbo
John submitted frequent requests for Alex’s release into the community. Each time they were refused.
On one occasion, Alex’s file returned from the immigration minister’s office with a handwritten note appended: “deport this man.”
Alex had an ongoing protection claim at the time.
“A remark like that without even considering this guy has protection claims ongoing … what chance did we have?” John told the Guardian.
“There’s no way I can forget seeing that written on it.”
In 2019, yet another immigration minister – the seventh since Alex’s arrival in Australia – rejected his protection claim, determining that he failed the character test as the minister “reasonably suspected” Alex had “engaged in the offence of people-smuggling”.
The minister said he noted submissions before court that Alex had acted “out of necessity to save his life” and that he had displayed “good conduct while in detention despite the prolonged nature of his detention … without having been convicted of a crime”.
But, the minister said: “There is a low tolerance for visa applicants who have previously engaged in criminal or other serious conduct.”
Alex’s lawyer, Sanmati Verma, described the minister’s decision as “substituting his own opinion for that of a court”.
“The chain of reasoning was perverse,” Verma says. “It involved such a fundamental misunderstanding of the separation of powers for a minister, a member of the executive, to say I know what a criminal offence is. I am judge, jury, executioner.”
Alex’s legal team challenged the minister’s decision in the federal court and in February 2020 the court ordered the minister to assess the claim again.
After months without any ministerial response, Verma took Alex’s case back to court, seeking to compel the government to act on his visa application and arguing that the minister had exceeded his power in finding that a criminal offence occurred. The government settled. Alex was granted a temporary protection visa.
He was free.
He shared a message with his supporters.
“By the will of God and your support, I got the visa and am now, finally, a free man. I am forever indebted to you all. At this moment I am reminded of the words of God.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
After more than 11 years of incarceration, Alex was allowed to live in the Australian community.
He spent the next five years roaming Australia. He picked up work where he could, often in remote, isolated parts of the country.
He stayed, for a time, in Sydney’s Hills District with refugee advocate Claudia, a friend and supporter who had visited him in detention.
Another friend, Sister Elizabeth Young, found him cleaning work in her home town of Forbes. A Sister of Mercy, Young had met Alex in her role providing pastoral care at the Curtin detention centre. Alex had volunteered to sweep the centre’s modest chapel.
“He always worked very hard to try and support his family. He didn’t want to rely on Centrelink,” Young says. “He wanted to live a regular kind of life.”
He could not travel to see his wife and children because of his visa restrictions.
But of the little he earned, he sent home to them anything he could.
“He bought his children whatever they wanted,” says another friend, Diane. “It was a type of compensation for all the missed years.”
In 2024, Alex found work in Western Australia’s Pilbara, far from those who had supported him, and his fragile mental health worsened.
Isolated, he grew increasingly anxious about his uncertain visa status. His protection visa was set to expire on 30 September. He would lose his right to work, his right to remain free.
Young referred him to support services in Perth, but he never made the appointment. The help he needed he could never quite reach.
Instead, Alex took a taxi to Kings Park, where the view west looks out over the river, towards the sea.
* Name changed to protect the case manager’s identity
