Australian Letter: Cornelia Rau was released earlier this month after being held for 10 months for illegally immigrating to Australia. She had been incarcerated for six months in a prison in Queensland before being transferred to Baxter detention centre in South Australia, writes Pádraig Collins.
In Baxter she was kept in an isolation cell for a week and then in solitary confinement in a high-security unit for 18 hours a day.
Ms Rau is not a typical boat person who chanced her luck to get to the promised land of Australia though. She's not a boat person at all. She's a blond-haired former Qantas hostess from Sydney whose only "crime" was to speak German and suffer from schizophrenia.
The 39-year-old, who moved to Australia from Germany with her family when she was 18-months-old, left a Sydney psychiatric hospital last March and had no contact with her family since. They thought she was dead.
But Ms Rau's sister, Chris, saw a Sydney Morning Herald article about a mystery German-speaking woman held at Baxter, known only as "Anna". Shortly after, a faxed photograph confirmed "Anna" was her missing sister.
"We're just relieved that she is alive," was Chris Rau's first reaction, but it would not be long before relief turned to anger and dismay.
Last April Ms Rau had been staying near an Aboriginal camp at Coen, in far north Queensland. The locals had taken care of her when she arrived without money, food or a place to stay. However, they became concerned that she was sick and took her to Cairns police station, from where her traumatic journey of wrongful detention began.
A Queensland police spokesman said that Ms Rau gave false names, which they checked against databases.
"When inquiries failed to positively identify the woman, police formed the opinion she may be a suspected non-citizen because of statements she made and the language she was speaking."
While both Prime Minister John Howard and Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone have refused to apologise to Ms Rau or her family, the opposition Labor Party has been quick to condemn the government.
Labor immigration spokesman Laurie Ferguson accused Immigration Department officials and Queensland police of ineptitude. "Although this woman is obviously very ill, the department only saw fit to place her in appropriate care once they found out she was an Australian resident . . . Suddenly it's dangerous to speak a second language in Australia," he said.
The prime minister cited legal reasons for his refusal to apologise, but Chris Rau has said that her parents do not intend to sue.
She said they just want answers to questions such as: "How could the system allow Cornelia to suffer such horror? . . . And what must be done to ensure it never happens again?"
The Rau family is not holding out much hope for straight answers, though. Chris Rau has already said the immigration department was evasive and misleading. She said no one from Immigration had contacted the family at a time when the department told the media it was assisting the family in being reunited with Cornelia.
Ms Rau is worried that her sister's mental state has been irreversibly damaged by what she has experienced while in detention.
"Eleven months ago we had already lost much of the old Cornelia, but no matter how dire the circumstances, she always knew who she was and contacted us when she was in trouble.
"But that has changed. Where once she would seek hugs and reassurance from us, now she is telling nurses at Glenside, the Royal Adelaide Hospital's psychiatric wing, that she would rather go back to Baxter than be hospitalised. She is very determined her name is Anna Schmidt and that her passport is in Baxter.
"Our greatest fear is that these months of incarceration . . . have irretrievably tipped her over the edge and we'll never find her again . . . Our nightmare, which is only just beginning, is that we might get Cornelia back physically but . . . the person we love may be lost to us forever."
Chris Rau, who is a journalist, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that her sister's case illustrates a shameful double standard in Australian law. "While she was an unnamed illegal immigrant, the only treatment she received for mental illness was longer periods in lock-up as punishment for bad behaviour. From the information coming out of Baxter, the lock-ups led to a worsening of her condition and worse behaviour," Ms Rau wrote.
"Yet, magic! As soon as she became an Australian resident she was whisked away to a teaching hospital, seen by consultant psychiatrists and medicated. During which leg of her flight from Baxter to Adelaide did she suddenly gain the basic human right to medical treatment?"
The government has announced an inquiry but it will be held in private and it does not have the power to compel those involved to be interviewed or to order documents to be produced.