The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau.... This week’s issue is written by Isabella Kwai, a reporter with the Australia bureau. The first thing I saw in Mackay was the sun setting over towering fields of sugar cane.... “ Sad that our history is not spoken about.” His friend, a white woman, shook her head....

In the subsequent years, the country sent more than 4, 000 people to state-sponsored immigration detention centres in the tiny Pacific state of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.At least 10 have taken their lives while being held in Australia’s offshore processing centres.... These people are often traumatised anyway, and then they’re then stuck in a prison environment that makes their trauma worse and worse, ” he said.“ It’s ruinously expensive because you need to keep people offshore