CAPTION: Escape from Woomera (2003), screen grab. Image courtesy Katharine Neil.

2003

Escape from Woomera

Katharine Neil & Team

Escape from Woomera is a working prototype of a controversial first-person point-and-click computer game situating the player in an asylum seeker's shoes. The goal: to escape from a simulacrum of the bitterly real, and now mothballed, Woomera Detention Centre in the remote Australian desert. A team of moonlighting professional game developers (some working incognito), artists and a journalist chose the medium to highlight the experiences of asylum seekers, subjects whom the government systematically silenced, misrepresented and demonized during the brutal punitive phase of a post 9/11 immigration regime whose currency was cruelty and secrecy. Artist Stephen Honneger, who recreated Woomera in the game, used reference images, stock footage, maps of the detention centre and drawings detainees had done of the actual camp, [which] were the closest some people came to seeing the conditions of Woomera. Some was material leaked by immigration system insiders. The government retaliated, and the Immigration Minister accused the national arts funding agency as lend[ing] its name to the promotion of unlawful behavior. For VNS Matrix, Escape from Woomera remains a vital critique of the shameful and ongoing history of Australia's oppression of those seeking asylum from violent and discriminatory regimes. Woomera was but one tool in the arsenal of carceral punishment applied to refugees. Postscript: In 2024, Australia continues its so-called Pacific Solution of warehousing asylum seekers offshore and further out of sight in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180210155922/http://cheapdrunkgames.com/escapefromwoomera/(game walk-through & credits)
https://www.polygon.com/2014/5/16/5717520/escape-from-woomera-immigration-australia