CHRISTMAS ISLAND is a weird place to begin with: a big rock in the Indian Ocean, much of it covered in high grade phosphate, inhabited by about 100 million red crabs. The island’s peculiarities are not limited to its natural environment. People travelling to this Australian outpost on a direct flight from Perth depart from the international terminal and go through customs at both ends of the journey. But surely the strangest feature of Christmas Island, a landmark that reminded me of an oversized version of the new elephant enclosure at the Melbourne Zoo, is a state-of-the-art, high security immigration detention centre, surrounded by sea on three sides and a national park on the fourth.

In fact Christmas Island currently houses four detention facilities: the North West Point immigration detention centre, built by the Howard government for a staggering $400 million; Lilac and Aqua compounds, a comparatively cheap extension of the North West Point facility built by the Rudd government; the so-called Construction Camp at Phosphate Hill for families, unaccompanied minors and Indonesian crew, which makes use of the dongas used to house the workers building the North West Point centre; and another, smaller detention facility adjacent to the Construction Camp with demountables and tents for single men. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship currently holds more than 2400 detainees on the island.

As far as I could tell after guided tours of all four detention centres and meetings with detainees in three of the four facilities, the department is doing a good job on Christmas Island. There did not seem to be any tangible tension between detainees, on the...