Sea-Kayakers Paddle Into Australia's 'Excised Zone

Sea-kayaking expedition paddles into Australia's 'excised zone'

Having returned from the excised Christmas and Cocos Islands on Saturday, Simon Keenan, founder of Paddling for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, and David Corlett, author of Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers (Black Inc 2005), will today begin their journey up the West Australian coast and into the 'excised zone' off the Australian mainland.

The pair will drive to the central coast of Western Australia before paddling into the excised zone near Coral Bay, at latitude 23 ° South.

This is the next leg of a 2½ month sea kayaking, road and air odyssey around some of the islands to Australia's north that have been legislatively removed from the migration zone in order to prevent asylum seekers landing there from seeking protection in Australia.

The excised zone includes nearly 5000 islands off the mainland of Western Australia , the Northern Territory and Queensland. Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands were some of the first Australian territories to be excised when the excision laws were passed in 2001.

'Paddling and swimming in the waters off Christmas Island was a very moving experience,' said Dr Corlett who in 2004 travelled to Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Thailand to research his book on the fate of asylum seekers Australian officials had rejected. 'These are the same waters in which asylum seekers sailed in and swum in and in some instances died in as they came seeking Australia 's protection.'

'Christmas Island is a place of incredible beauty, extraordinary hospitality and the site of some of Australia's dark asylum seeker secrets,' Mr Keenan said. 'It is not far from here that the children were not thrown overboard and that the SIEV X sunk.'

Christmas Island's new purpose-built, high-tech detention centre, capable of incarcerating 800 people is due to be complete shortly. 'The detention centre looks more like a place where you would detain serious criminals than a place to accommodate people who come seeking Australia's protection,' Mr Keenan said.

www.paddlingforrefugees.org/

ENDS

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