Moira-Jane Canahan is a school nurse and mother-of-three now working in Alice Springs. She came to Australia from England as a £10 assisted migrant and grew up in Woomera, well before the detention centre was built.

From first-hand observances Moira-Jane Canahan shares in the sense of hopelessness and helplessness consuming detainees.

I ARRIVED in Woomera Detention centre as a nurse in 2000. At this hot, dusty, arid, miserable cage in the desert. Full of men, women and children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, beseeching the guards that: "Please, we are human, we are not animals, why do you treat us like this?"

The desperation and hopelessness permeated the air and the longest any of those people had been there at that stage was five months. Some are still there.

I've seen and heard the guards laughing at the pain and suffering of the people imprisoned in Woomera. Singing to the Iraqis who have had a rejection: "I'm leaving on a jet plane, goin' back to see Saddam Hussein". Witnessed the guard making a detainee beg for soap. No English did this woman speak, she had learnt the word soap from someone. To the guard she said, "soap". The soap was proffered and withdrawn when she reached for it, again and again until she said please.

I watched those poor women in their purdahs cringe in shame when forced to abandon every cultural sensitivity and attend a mixed clinic, sit in a room with men and then have to ask for sanitary products. They would stuff them under the abeyahs or jumpers and scurry away, heads down.

As nurses we were eyed with suspicion by the guards, management and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. A few of us would advocate strongly on our patients' behalf. At one stage some of us had our names, addresses and telephone numbers translated into Arabic and Farsi so that we could give them to people and support them on their release. We had to have them in Persian and Arabic so the guards couldn't understand what it was if they saw it.

More than one nurse lost a work contract for this reason. The private Prison Company ACM's response to our caring was to completely ban all nurses from saying goodbye to anyone when he or she was given a visa. That was so hard. We were also told how our phones would be tapped and ASIO was watching us. It was bizarre. The paranoia and suspicion were incredible.

Initially, I ate the same food as the refugees. After two weeks of chronic stomach pain I received a meal that I was able to scrape in one complete lump into the bin. It was the colour and consistency of dog food. The smell of coleslaw was making me retch, and I just could not face another mouthful of any of it. That was after two weeks. Try two years.

I spent most of my time there imagining. Imagine if it was my children. Imagine how bad it must have been to make that journey. Imagine how much pain they must feel. Imagine being intimate with your husband, and having a guard burst into your room, and then imagine the further humiliation when he shares his story with anyone who'll listen.

Imagine having rotten teeth and being in agony and told you'll have to wait at least another two months to see a dentist. Imagine you no longer have a name, just a number.

Imagine all you have to wear is a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of thongs and it's about one degree celsius in the morning, and your thongs are being held together with wire and string that you've managed to scavenge off the army tents. Imagine you are 17 years old and all you want to do is go to school and instead you can do nothing at all. Imagine that you slowly watch your family disintegrate before your eyes. Imagine seeing someone lose their mind. Imagine why people who fled to save their lives and saw them as precious, are now trying to lose them. Imagine that you have NO RIGHTS.

If you can imagine that, then you can begin to have a small sense of what Woomera detention centre is like, and perhaps can feel just a little of the anguish that fills those cages.

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