Coordinates: 31°11′7″S 136°48′27″E / 31.18528°S 136.8075°E / -31.18528; 136.8075
The (former) Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (IRPC) was an Australian immigration detention facility near the village of Woomera in South Australia. Unauthorised arrivals, which had exceeded the capacity of other detention facilities. It was originally intended to hold 400 people, however at its peak in April 2000 it had nearly 1,500 detainees. After ongoing public pressure in response to several well publicised riots from 2000, accusations of human rights abuses, and capacity issues, the centre closed in April 2003.
The site was rebuilt during 2003, and then handed back to the Australian Department of Defence. The facility was renamed "Camp Rapier" in 2004 and has only supported Defence activities on the Woomera Test Range since that time.
For much of its operation during the time the facility was an immigration detention centre, it was run by Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), a subsidiary of Wackenhut Security Corporation, under a contract with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. ACM was criticised over various practices, including failing to staff the Centre adequately, and concealing evidence of child abuse.
Read more about Woomera Immigration Reception And Processing Centre: Background To The Creation of The Facility, Operation of The Woomera Facility, Further Controversy
Famous quotes containing the words immigration, reception and/or centre:
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)