Family fear held woman lost to them

CANBERRA - New details emerged yesterday of the imprisonment of a mentally ill woman at the grim Baxter immigration detention centre in remote South Australia.

Cornelia Rau, 39, a former Qantas flight attendant diagnosed with schizophrenia several years ago, spent four months at Baxter after being transferred from a Queensland jail where she had been detained for the previous six months.

"Our greatest fear is that these months of incarceration - any restrictions on freedom are anathema to her - have irretrievably tipped her over the edge and we will never find her again," Rau's sister, Chris, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Although Rau's family has refused to blame authorities and Prime Minister John Howard has announced a formal inquiry, Labor and refugee activists have continued bitter attacks on a system that failed to recognise Rau's condition and which they said fostered mental illness among detained asylum seekers.

And though refusing to apologise on legal grounds, Howard conceded that the "tragic situation" posed serious questions about the system.

"This case raises questions not only about the immigration detention system, which has attracted all the critical attention, but it also raises some questions about the mental health policies that this country has followed for a long time," he told Sydney radio station 2GB.

German-born Rau, who arrived in Australia as an infant and is a permanent resident, was released from Baxter last Friday as her identity was finally confirmed, six months after she had been listed as a missing person.

Her release came at the end of a bizarre and disturbing chain of events that began after her condition began to deteriorate following an initial diagnosis in 1998 of bipolar disease and, several years later, of schizophrenia.

In a first-person account in the Sydney Morning Herald, Chris Rau said Cornelia had previously been a vibrant, gregarious, empathetic person whose work for Qantas matched her restless nature.

"But that has changed. Where once she would seek hugs and reassurance from us, now she is telling nurses at Glenside, the Royal Adelaide Hospital's psychiatric wing, that she would rather go back to Baxter than be hospitalised," Chris Rau wrote.

Cornelia Rau had undergone treatment at Manly Hospital's psychiatric unit but discharged herself in March last year and disappeared.

Because of earlier disappearances and a history of eventually contacting her family, she was not reported as missing until August.

Queensland police had picked her up shortly after she vanished from Manly, apparently in possession of a false passport, and were convinced by her fluency in German, accented English, and a detailed story, that Rau was a German overstayer.

Rau gave her name as Anna Schmidt - an identity she continues to use - said she was a German citizen in Australia on a temporary visa, and insisted she had no family, details that could not be confirmed by German officials.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said that while extensive inquiries were being made, psychiatric care and assessments were provided.

"From the moment she came into immigration detention she was provided with medical care, including psychiatric care which ultimately led to her admission to a psychiatric facility in Brisbane for assessment," Vanstone said.

"This found that, while having some behavioural problems, she did not meet the criteria for a mental illness."

Refugee advocate Claire O'Connor, a lawyer acting for three other Baxter inmates seeking transfer to a psychiatric facility, said her clients had told her of Rau's condition but she had been unable to act because of regulations at Baxter.

"They said, 'there's a poor woman here, she's screaming, she's yelling, she's eating dirt and sometimes she runs around without her clothes on'," O'Connor told ABC radio.

Chris Rau said her family did not intend to sue the Government.

"We don't blame [John Howard], Amanda Vanstone, assorted officials or anyone individually for the damage done to Cornelia ... no one is immune from mistakes," she said.