In August 2016 the Guardian uploaded to the internet more than 2000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s asylum seeker detention centre in Nauru. The reports are represented on the Guardian’s website as a kind of calendar. Each report is shown as a blank square of grey, yellow, orange or red. The effect is like an Advent calendar; each square is a door and behind each door is a story. Unlike an advent calendar, the stories are not about angels or candy canes;¹ click on a date and up pops a text written by officers at the centre. Sometimes the text is linked to a scan of the original paper form, sometimes not. Together the texts record all the things that went wrong at the centre over a period of just under three years.

When I first opened the Nauru files site, I was overwhelmed by the volume of stories. Insignificant events and everyday complaints sit beside incidents of physical harm, self-inflicted and otherwise, and reports of people in extreme distress. They range from mould in the food to rape to riots. The only thing they have in common is that they are the reports of the captors—however well meaning the staff may be—on the behaviour of captives. Like many but not all Australians, I was shocked at what I read. My strongest reaction was to wonder how it was that I remained unaware of all this while I went about my mundane daily life: how there was so much in the newspapers, on Twitter, on radio and TV about everything happening everywhere, all the time, in real time, but these events on Nauru were only known after the fact. I wondered what else was happening in darkness right at that moment, not just on Nauru but also in other secret places.