- Tony Delamothe, retired deputy editor, The BMJ
- London
David Isaacs was considered the father of paediatric infectious diseases in Australia and New Zealand12 but he is probably best known in his adopted country for speaking out about the detention of children in Australia’s offshore refugee camps.
Isaacs had already set up the Health Assessment for Refugee Kids (HARK) clinic with colleagues in 2005 in response to the needs of refugee children arriving in the country when the Australian government began cracking down on asylum seekers who arrived by boat. They were sent for “offshore processing” on remote islands, including Nauru, a tiny country in the Pacific. Isaacs’ son Mark worked in the Nauru detention centre for 9 months in 2012 and was horrified at conditions there. He based his book The Undesirables: Inside Nauru on his experiences.3 In 2014, International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the company contracted by the Australian government to provide healthcare on Nauru, asked Isaacs to consult on children in immigration detention. He agonised over whether to go and insisted on bringing Alanna Maycock, a HARK clinical nurse with him.
On their return they spoke out about what they found, despite the fact their contract forbade them from disclosing anything about Nauru. Human rights lawyer Julian Burnside reassured them that their defence was “exposing iniquity.”
In one of many articles, Isaacs wrote that he and Maycock “were utterly appalled by the spartan living conditions on Nauru and by the treatment meted out to detainees.”4 Asylum seekers were referred to by numbers, not names. They met a 6 …
