Lana and Scott* met in torrential rain: she was waiting for a bus, he offered her a lift.
“We just kicked it off,” Scott remembers of the chance meeting on Nauru in 2015. He was a senior manager in construction, building Australia’s offshore detention centre on the island.
Lana, now 34, had fled family violence in Iran, risking her life to travel to Australia by boat from Indonesia in 2013. After her vessel was intercepted by Australian authorities, she was detained on Christmas Island then moved to an open detention centre on Nauru, where she stayed for almost four years. In 2017, married to Scott and four months pregnant, she was flown to Brisbane’s immigration detention centre for medical reasons, where she spent the remainder of her pregnancy.
The pair have a seven-year-old son and live in regional Queensland. Lana took her husband’s surname and now works, when her limited immigration status allows, in disability support.
But with no possibility of acquiring permanent residency while in Australia, Lana is about to take what may seem an unthinkable step – returning to Iran to wait up to two years while an offshore application is processed.
Having arrived in Australian waters after the July 2013 edict that dissolved all pathways to living permanently in Australia for people in offshore processing, Lana is one of about 930 refugees in Australia known as “transitory persons”. She was potentially eligible for resettlement in New Zealand under Australia’s bilateral agreement, but could not be certain that her family would be able to migrate with her had she been approved.
Instead, she must renew her temporary visa to remain in Australia every four or six months, depending on what period the home affairs department designates.
‘I want a freedom which I don’t have’
Bethany Rose, an immigration lawyer who is representing Lana, says the process is unstable and precarious by design.
“You put in an application for a bridging E visa and, depending on department processing, you might not be granted a visa for a month, in which time you become unlawful. You can’t prove to Medicare or your workplace that you have work rights, so you lose your job, you lose your Medicare access, and this goes on and on for years,” she says.
Lana – who could technically be sent back to Nauru at any time – says she has access to Medicare for seven months a year. Unable to secure a long-term job or study, she is desperate. In the past year, she has been admitted to hospital multiple times because of panic attacks.
“It’s horrible. You’re in prison. You’re just working here and nothing else,” she says. “I can’t handle this life any more. I want a freedom which I don’t have. I have to always be scared of everything.”
Despite the deep level of isolation wrought by her immigration status, Lana has made a life in Australia. She is accepted in her community and her son speaks only English.
“These circumstances were never contemplated as the legal regime never intended for these people to ever enter Australian territory, let alone fall in love with an Australian,” Rose says.
Like Lana, many detainees on Nauru and Manus were medically evacuated to Australia because of the dire conditions in offshore detention. Rose estimates dozens now have Australian partners and children and are living in limbo, neither here nor there.
Having exhausted all options to secure lasting residency with her Australian husband and son, Lana has resolved to do what was once unthinkable: return to where she faced violence and persecution.
In the coming days she will fly to Iran and lodge an offshore application for a partner visa. There, she faces new dangers: as an apostate from Islam in a marriage with a westerner, she has refused to conform with Iran’s religious and social norms.
“Who she is, is a complete rejection of what a woman should be in Iran,” Rose says.
Lana says: “They told me, ‘If you want to change to a different visa, your option is to go back to your country.’ I said, ‘What about my son? Because he’s only seven years old.’ They said, ‘This is your problem.’
“It’s very sad to just leave my son here and go, and I don’t know what’s happening in my country, it’s not safe,” she says. “But what choice have I got?”
‘Shameful indictment’
As a signatory to the Refugee Convention, Australia has agreed not to return refugees to the countries in which they fear persecution. Rose believes if Lana returns to Iran she would be a victim of constructive refoulement – when a state creates a set of circumstances that forces a refugee’s return to their country of origin without being deported.
The home affairs department has booked Lana on a flight to Iran – with a baggage allowance included only after further advocacy.
An 11th-hour intervention by a minister remains the family’s best hope. On at least a weekly basis, Rose and her team contact Home Affairs seeking confirmation that their request for intervention is before the minister or assistant ministers and is being escalated. She has also contacted ministers’ offices directly.
Scott believes the government does not want to set a precedent by allowing Lana to stay freely. He says the way Lana’s case has been handled from the moment she learned of her pregnancy has been “horrific”.
Before working on Nauru, Scott helped build the detention centre on Manus Island. He began the work believing boat arrivers were “visa jumpers and terrorists trying to sneak in the country”. By the time he got to Nauru, his “whole mindset had changed”.
“We live in a civilised place,” he says. But Lana’s case is “so obscenely immoral and verging on criminal”.
Josephine Langbien, associate legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, says 12 years of successive governments “have inflicted ongoing punishment on people who came here seeking safety, but were instead sent to face abuse, medical neglect and inhumane conditions in regional processing centres or years of uncertainty in Australia”.
“It is a shameful indictment on the Albanese government that anyone would be forced to risk their life in order to exercise their fundamental right to live together with their family in safety.”
Home Affairs says 90% of offshore partner visas of the class Lana will apply for are processed within 25 months.
That means she should be back home in Australia by September 2027 if all goes to plan in Iran.
“Then I’ve got no one telling me ‘You are from Nauru’,” she says. “Then I’m a normal person, like other people living in Australia. Then I’ve got freedom.”
A Home Affairs spokesperson said the department could not comment on individual cases. According to “longstanding and consistent” government policy, “individuals seeking to enter Australia by boat without a visa will not be settled here”, they said.
“Transitory persons (those who arrived unlawfully by boat and were transferred to a Regional Processing Centre) do not have a settlement pathway in Australia and are expected to engage in third country migration options and depart.”
* Names have been changed
