Mozhgan Moarefizadeh is stuck in Jakarta, living without rights—but with a yappy dog named Bella. With journalist Nicole Curby, she brings you into the lives of refugees like her, who are trapped on Australia’s new borderline, in Indonesia.

The Wait is a five-part narrative podcast, two years in the making. Published by The Guardian and supported by the Walkley Foundation, The Wait is a compelling and innovative combination of in-depth interviews, field reporting, audio diaries and conversations. I’m co-writer and supervising producer for the show.

Check out the website for photos and more information. Subscribe now, on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Or just listen below…

For The Saturday Paper and the Walkley Foundation, André Dao and I met four people living in Australia, working along the food chain.  This multimedia story was illustrated by Tia Kass.

Senator WALSH: Can the minister explain why… temporary migrant workers who can’t go home… have been excluded from the JobKeeper program?

Senator CASH: I thank the senator for her question… In relation to the senator’s question: because the government had to draw a line somewhere. 

– Senate Hansard, April 8, 2020

Over the last two decades, low paying work has increasingly been done by workers with no right to stay in Australia. It is especially the case in the food system. Temporary migrant workers plant, pick, pack, slaughter, slice, cook and deliver food for everyone else. 

Twin senate inquiries, into temporary migration and underpayment, are due to report at the end of the year. They have received more than 170 submissions so far, but few contain testimony from migrant workers. 

In this story, you can read about Jennifer Banga, Tiff Tan, Baali and Putri Nazeri—and listen to their voices and watch their videos.

These men, seeking asylum by boat, were forcibly transferred to Manus Island by the Australian government nearly seven years ago. Now, they are held in hotels or detention centres in Port Moresby, Melbourne or Brisbane.

The site displayed some additional information: the number of kilometres between you and the person who made the recording, and the number of minutes, hours, or days that had elapsed since the recording was made. Listen to the recordings.

Design, build and conceptual support by Public Office. Commissioned and presented by Liquid Architecture. Supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.

how are you today, 2018. A sound installation comprising an archive of 84 ten-minute field recordings by six men on Manus Island. Developed for the Eavesdropping exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, with Samad Abdul, Farhad Bandesh, Behrouz Boochani, André Dao, Shamindan Kanapathi, Kazem Kazemi and Jon Tjhia. how are you today was subsequently exhibited at City Gallery, Wellington, and Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland. Listen to the recordings.

Forthcoming, 2021.

Hosted by Academy Award-winning documentary film-maker Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna, Diego Maradona), this is the fourth episode in a five-part series from BBC World Service in collaboration with Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. Detours takes us off the main roads of our lives, following people who didn’t end up where they expected.

Producer: Elyse Blennerhassett and Michael Green

Listen now via BBC, 27 minutes.

His reason for going is to accept the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. It is a big night. His acceptance speech, Mandela like. But, the morning after is a different more complicated story.

Aziz is speaking to all the right people, making his case for himself and his friends back on Manus. They are listening. He is not sure, however, if they can do anything. He is also not sure what he should do. Should he stay or should he go?

A documentary for ABC Radio National, Earshot. Part two of a two-part series, along with Flight from Manus. Listen now, via ABC, 28 minutes.

Supervising Producer Lyn Gallacher, sound engineer Melissa May. Music composed by Hour House (Mark Leacy and Sam Kenna)

A documentary for ABC Radio National, Earshot. Part one of a two-part series, along with A Stranger in Geneva. Listen now, via ABC, 28 minutes.

I’m waiting in person at the airport in Geneva, Switzerland, hoping to catch a glimpse of Aziz as he comes into the arrivals hall.

Supervising Producer Lyn Gallacher, sound engineer Melissa May. Music composed by Hour House (Mark Leacy and Sam Kenna)

She Called Me Red, on Instagram @sbs.online.documentaries

That’s the first post in the SBS online documentary, She Called Me Red, about Yunus in Melbourne and his family in the refugee mega-camp near the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar. I’ve spent a lot of time with Yunus in the last few months. The documentary is out now, delivered via a series of posts—photos, artwork, text and videos—on Instagram.

The UN describes the violence against the Rohingya beginning in late August 2017 as genocide. This documentary reveals a small part of how it affected one family. You can view ‘She Called Me Red’ retrospectively in grid-view, starting from the bottom right corner of the account, and through the daily Instagram stories pinned at the top of the project.

IF you’ve read one quote about the ethics of journalism, it’s this, from Janet Malcolm: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

It’s the first line of her book, The Journalist and the Murderer, published in 1990. She goes on: “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Non-fiction writers are suckers for this quote. The afflicted and conflicted among us whisper it like confession; may it absolve our anguish. But the ruthless and thoughtless surely cherish it more, because it offers a tacit blessing: if it’s the craft that’s flawed, what else to do?

“I’m always a bit suss that people have only read the first page,” says Sharon Davis, a Walkley Award-winning journalist and academic. In lieu of a plot summary, this is Davis’s overview: “The journalist lied to the person he was interviewing. He lied over and over again. He made promises that he was never going to keep.”

The Messenger podcast

In recent years, I’ve been writing about Australia’s offshore immigration detention system. I spent countless hours exchanging voice messages with Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a Sudanese refugee on Manus Island, for The Messenger podcast, and I covered the closure of the detention centre for Harper’s Magazine. The men I’ve reported on remain there. I know I asked a lot of Aziz, and many others, in the course of my work.

So where does my journalism sit in Malcolm’s summation? If I don’t accept it’s immoral, am I thick? Or just not ruthless enough? After all, the practice of journalism is book-ended by two distinct approaches: at one end, I, the journalist own the story; at the other, the subject owns the story — it’s a collaborative effort.

Usually, but not always, investigative journalism takes the former approach.

Davis, for instance, has a particular interest in the criminal justice system, and that means reporting on vulnerable people. “The stories are really important to me — there are too many people in jail, too many people with addictions that aren’t being dealt with properly, too many women in abusive relationships. The challenge is finding a way to tell those stories and still sleep at night,” she says.

“I would never promise someone it’s going to be good for them, because I don’t think it is. There are a number of safeguards I try to put in place, but I never underestimate the pain people go through when they tell their stories.”

In 2012, she contacted the NSW Drug Court about documenting the way it works. Through the court, long-term addicts are released from jail so long as they join a strict rehabilitation program designed to end their addiction. It took 12 months to convince the court to give her access. Then, for two years, she followed the progress of seven people through the program. “It was a mammoth undertaking — a labour of love,” Davis says. She produced a three-part series for ABC Radio National, which first aired in 2015.

It was a risky proposition for everyone, including Davis. She was working with very vulnerable people who had long histories of drug addiction, sexual abuse — especially the women — and serious physical and mental health problems. They could be sent back to prison at any time. When she began, Davis told the participants very clearly what she wanted to do, and didn’t tape the first two interviews. She advised them to seek independent legal advice, and developed a consent form that acknowledged they’d done so. Their real names wouldn’t be used and they could stop at any time.

One quandary was whether, or how, she would intervene if she found out a participant was in danger. “Sometimes they would tell me things that made me very scared for them, particularly the women, about their housing or their domestic situation,” she says. She resolved to tell the court welfare officers to speak to the person — without spilling the details herself — and also told the person directly what she was doing. It was a hard line to walk.

I became very attached to a number of those people. My god, I wanted them to succeed. They would tell me stuff and I wouldn’t say anything at the time, and then I would come home and cry.”

The participants’ rapport with Davis was evident — the women called her “Shaz”. All were startlingly frank about their struggles and failings. Throughout the two years, as Davis conducted interviews once a week, she would often have to remind them that she was a journalist, that she was recording, and what they said could be used in the documentary.

Davis does not consider the work collaborative. She didn’t show or play the material to her interviewees before it was broadcast, but she sought to represent them fairly and with complexity. One of the men was occasionally verbally aggressive with her, but she chose not to use that tape, because that side of his character was evident in the way he spoke about the judge. She also left out some compelling information about one of the women, for fear it could put her at risk of violence. She called the woman to ask whether to include it.

“I could have made a very dramatic show from the drug court but I chose not to,” Davis explains. “I really wanted to focus on whether the court’s program works — the material had to be about what was happening in these people’s lives and how that impacted whether they would succeed.”

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s code of ethics comprises only 500 words, and it doesn’t — can’t, really — provide guidance on managing deep personal relationships. Most relevantly, clause eight states: “Use fair, responsible and honest means to obtain material… Never exploit a person’s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.”

“The code is a very useful starting point, but the whole question of consent isn’t even mentioned,” says Denis Muller, who teaches media ethics at the University of Melbourne. A major review published in 1997 proposed an expanded version, including the direction that journalists should “interview only with informed consent”, as well as a guidance clause noting that values conflict and that “ethics requires conscientious decision-making in context”. But it wasn’t adopted.

Muller stresses the importance of journalists being transparent about the purpose of the story, and giving people an opportunity to respond to criticism. “If you do those two things, I don’t see how betrayal or deception come into it,” he says. “Janet Malcolm extrapolated from one unusual example and I think that has discouraged a lot of journalists unnecessarily.”

But in stories where you develop a relationship with someone over time, Muller warns of another ethical concern — the risk of capture.

You begin to like the person and empathise with their position, and that can colour the way you report it.”

His approach is that the journalist must take responsibility for the story. To avoid bias, you have to question yourself, reassess the facts, strive for impartiality or transparency. Likewise, on questions of representation, Muller contends that a journalist ordinarily shouldn’t show an interviewee the work. If you’re unsure whether something is correct, or fair, or intrusive, or may put someone at risk, seek clarification from them on that point, rather than approval for the whole piece. “Otherwise I think you’re passing too much responsibility for the story onto the subject and not shouldering it yourself.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Danny Teece-Johnson, a journalist with NITV in Sydney. He’s a Gomoroi man from Moree in northern New South Wales, but began his career in the Northern Territory. He approaches his work expressly as a collaboration. “The NT mob are very different in their tradition and connection to country, so I always took the position that they’re the experts,” he says. “The communities hold the answers. They know the problems, they know how to fix them.”

Teece-Johnson aims to make the community feel like they’re controlling the story and asks interviewees to drive the narrative. “Generally, for Aboriginal people, the mainstream media has been pretty negative,” he says. “So I decided I’d do the opposite of what they do. My notion is that everything is off the record until someone tells me to put it on record. I think it’s absolutely ethical to show people the stories before they go to air, because it’s their knowledge you’re taking and putting out there.”

It’s his practice to speak openly with people about the content of his stories, show them the material, and seek clarification. Teece-Johnson believes it’s possible to use this collaborative approach even when a story is unflattering, or involves conflict, or when someone isn’t being honest.

For me, it’s about not hiding behind your keyboard, but going to see that person and talking about it. I think that alleviates a lot of the stress.”

Although he’s conscious of the power dynamics dissected by Janet Malcolm, Teece-Johnson says he’s guided by a belief that journalism should empower people and communities to make change. He counters with a different quote, from Ethel L Payne, an African-American journalist celebrated for her coverage of the civil rights movement: “the black press is an advocacy press”.

Although his approach is shaped by his conception of Aboriginal journalism, he argues all journalists can work collaboratively with their interviewees, where the stories permit. It’s a way to avoid the long history of appropriation and misappropriation, especially when journalists are outsiders to the communities they’re writing about.

Collaboration does not necessarily mean the resulting stories are “softer”. Take Anjali Nayar, a Canadian journalist who has reported extensively from Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. For her, collaboration not only affects how people are represented, or even which side of the story is told, but whether an important story gets told at all. In the early scenes of her new documentary Silas, about illegal logging and corruption in Liberia, Silas Siakor is sitting in the back of a car that passes a truck hauling logs. There should be no forestry in that region, so he leans out the window to take a photo.

That was in 2011. The logging was happening in secrecy, so it was difficult to figure out how much of an issue it really was. In the years that followed, Nayar collaborated with Siakor to develop an app to collate evidence of an extraordinary land grab that saw nearly a quarter of Liberia handed to private logging companies in just two years. “The only real solution to [investigating the scale of the illegal logging] was to give people the ability to participate in that narrative,” Nayar says. “To use technology to help groups be part of the storytelling.”

The app, Timby, is a closed system, enabling people to upload, gather and share evidence such as geolocated photos, videos and notes with a group of trusted people over time. Nayar calls it community journalism, because it facilitates investigations of long-term issues (in contrast to citizen journalism, which operates for flash crises or incidents). In Silas, the evidence people collected using Timby changed the story. It went from the smaller issue she’d set out to cover, about logging companies and communities, to an exposé of corruption that implicated the country’s Nobel Prize-winning president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Nayar’s lesson was that collaboration teaches you the right story to tell. “We don’t know what we think we know,” she says. “If I walk into a Liberian community, I’m never going to get this story. I can’t be there and experience it in the way it happens on the ground.”

Back to The Journalist and the Murderer — if the first lines are too glib, let’s skip to the last page instead. In her final paragraph, Malcolm writes: “There is an infinite variety of ways in which journalists struggle with the moral impasse that is the subject of this book. The wisest know that the best they can do… is still not good enough.”

Like the other journalists I spoke to, I take this not to mean that betrayal is inevitable, or that collaboration implies compromise, but that chroniclers should sit uncomfortably at our keyboards, our power vexing us like a stiff neck. Malcolm’s ending seems like the right place for the discussion to begin.

This story was published in The Walkley Magazine, July 2018, and online at Medium with great illustrations by Tom Jellett.

The ongoing abuses of Australia’s refugee policy

LIGHTENING flashed behind the fiberglass banana boat, but ahead of us the night sky was clear and the water was calm. Ezatullah Kakar, a Pakistani refugee, and I were in the South Pacific Ocean, 2 degrees shy of the equator, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. As we cut smoothly through the flat sea, one of the men aboard passed the skipper a beer. The mood was tense and quiet, the three-man crew speaking only when necessary. Kakar didn’t share their apprehension. He took out his phone, ran one hand through his wavy hair, threw his arm around me, and snapped a moonlit selfie of the two of us. I must have looked nervous, because Kakar smiled encouragingly at me. “I believe if we are doing good things, no one will catch us,” he said.

Read this article in Harper’s Magazine, July 2018

Benham Satah and Behrouz Boochani in Lorengau, November 2017. (Photo by Michael Green.)

Lorengau town centre at dusk. (Photo by Michael Green.)

Provincial Police Commander David Yapu at his desk in Lorengau, Manus Island. (Photo by Michael Green.)