Contact with Detainees
Villawood Visitors Program in Sydney
Visiting Maribyrnong in Melbourne
Other contact
Visitors guide
Villawood Visitors Program in Sydney
If you are interested in becoming a visitor to the Villawood detention centre in Sydney, please view our guidelines: MS Word or PDF format or below.
Please send email to Leonie Gardner if you would like to participate in the Villawood visitors program. Regular visitors testify to the difference their visits can make to the lives of detainees, and how, as visitors, they have themselves been changed by their experience.
Villawood visits are taking place on Saturdays or Sundays at present. Please see our Events page for the latest visiting dates.
Ann Morrow is a visitor to the Maribrynong detention centre in Melbourne. If you are in Melbourne and are interested in visiting a detainee please email Ann at to arrange to meet up with her.
Please view our guidelines before visiting: MS Word or PDF format or below.
If you are unable to visit a detention centre you can write letters to detainees instead.
And through Spare Rooms for Refugees you can assist in providing accommodation for detainees on their release.
Visitors guide to visiting people at Villawood
Download the guide in MS Word or PDF format, convenient for printing.
How to Get to Villawood Immigration Detention Centre
Get onto Woodville Road that runs across the Hume Highways and Parramatta Road. Turn into Christina Road and from there into Birmingham Avenue. Continue to the end into the Villawood IDC where you will see the double razor wire fencing. Follow signs to Stage 2.
By train the closest station is Leightonfield, which is on Christina Road and follow above instructions.
What To Expect
- A possible 1 hour wait to get into the visitors compound.
What To Bring
- A hat and sunscreen / in winter wear a warm jacket and perhaps a thermos of tea/plastic cups. It gets very cold in the visitors compound
- A small gift for the detainee you are visiting fruit, biscuits, flowers, a pot plant, a toy for the little ones (and object that will not be deemed a possible weapon by ACM). People from the Middle East enjoy dates, figs, dried apricots and the like). This is of course, optional. No glass or metal is allowed.
- Phone cards are very useful gift also and are much appreciated.
- Identification - Your current driving licence is easiest.
To enter the detention centre you must have identification with your name and address. It must be issued by a government department or authority. All documents must be current.
This may mean you may require more than one form of identification.
- Current Drivers licence
- Current Passport
- Forms of Identification Address and Government ID
- Birth certificate original or extract
- Electoral Roll acknowledgement of receipt
- Public utility records e.g. Bill issued within the last 6 months.
gas or water electricity telephone
- Registration papers (current for car or boat)
- Marriage certificate
- Naturalisation or Citizenship certificate
- Current Entitlements card issued by government department or authority
- Immigration Papers or other documents issues by the Department of immigration.
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You are not allowed to enter the visitors compound with a mobile phone and more than $10 in cash. Drivers licences are often required to be left at the desk or in a locker.
Please note that ACM provides them with all their clothing and personal hygiene requirements.
Please Be Sensitive
It is important for us to be aware that most of the detainees, adults and children alike, suffer from depression. To an untrained eye, they may not look or behave that way on first meeting them. However, on subsequent visits, you may realise that it depends on whether youve caught them on a good day or a bad day. Occasionally, some of them may not even feel up to meeting you. If you or a friend or family member have ever experienced depression, you will understand that sometimes, even making it out of bed is an achievement. Please do not be offended. We can go home and go to the beach or park, they cant.
Please, please do not give them advice they have not asked for. Firstly, whether you are a healthcare professional or not, you do not know their full case history. Secondly, the last thing they need is for any of us well-meaning visitors to act in a patronising or condescending way. They do not need to be told what to do, as none of us can fully understand what they have gone through, and what they continue to go through.
Their cultures generally are such, that they will be polite and courteous to the extreme. They will never indicate if they have been offended or upset.
ChilOuts dear friend Tricia Highfield has said, even being there sitting amongst them is support for them. We do not have to feel the pressure to talk continuously and to put them under that same pressure. They may feel tired by the same barrage of questions from visitors. Act as if were amongst friends, as that is possibly what we will be to them in time.
You may notice that they may be uncomfortable with gifts placed in their hands. After all, we are strangers. Regular visitors have observed that the adults tend to pool the gifts and share it out in their own time when the visitors have left. Its important that we respect their dignity and sense of pride, whatever is left that the brutalising system has not torn from them. We can give things, we can give of ourselves, without making the recipients feel as if they are charity cases.
Visitors have often asked if they would like anything specific on their next visit. Please do not press them if they appear shy or embarrassed. As you gain their trust and friendship, they will be more forthcoming. We are often reminded, what they really want most, we cannot give them their freedom.
The Visitors Program
The idea is for first-time visitors to go "escorted" so that access can be smoother. After that, please feel free to visit on your own steam. Some visitors may find that they would like to go with a group for their fist two or three visits.
Please try and visit at least semi-regularly. Detainees who have been accepted in the past have stated that their visitors were their "lifeline to the outside world" something that helped them to keep going.
Do remember that the programme is for them. It feels too much like abandonment if we just visit once or twice and disappear out of their lives as quickly as we came into them. Do keep this in mind if you wish to get involved in visiting.
Thank You
Lastly, thank you for your interest, your concern and your willingness to connect with the detainees. We would like to hear from you after your visit if you care to take the time to share your thoughts, impressions, and feelings about visiting.
You see, once we meet them, hear their stories, share their pain, it is impossible to ever view them as a faceless entity again as queue-jumpers, as boat-people, as illegals and criminals. For they have a name, a face, they had a life once, they are someones father, daughter, brother, friend. They hurt and feel pain just as we do. They deserve our empathy, our help. When we look at them, do we see ourselves looking back?
