When I was behind bars, time stopped. But you could never hide from the new year

2 months ago 14

When you’re a prisoner time passes differently to life outside. Individual days drag by, but the relentless monotony of it all dulls your ability to keep track of the months and years. That is, until holiday season arrives.

When I was first arrested in Iran and thrown into a solitary confinement cell in Evin prison I would carve a line for each day into the soft plaster of the wall and try to work backwards to figure out the date. Many months later, letting go of this habit was strangely empowering. Not knowing the day of the week or the month of the year represented a kind of surrender to the perpetual tedium of prison life, but there was also strength in no longer giving a damn.

Perhaps letting go of time was a survival instinct, too. I had received a 10-year prison sentence under wholly unsubstantiated charges, with no guarantee that the Australian government would come to my rescue (spoiler alert: they did). The only way to digest this was to numb myself to the days, months and years and dampen any thoughts of the life that I could have been leading outside.

The holidays were the greatest challenge to this cultivated indifference. Even in a country as insular as Iran, both my captors and my fellow prisoners were aware of Christmas. Nowruz, the Iranian new year, falls in March – yet everyone knew when 2018 became 2019, and somehow too quickly afterwards, became 2020.

Was I imagining the sarcasm when the prison guards wished me a Merry Christmas? I spent my first in Evin listening to the shrieks of a prisoner in a neighbouring cell and imagining the worst forms of torture (I later found out she was simply angry about being transferred from elsewhere, and screaming the place down was her form of protest). I was on hunger strike during my second Christmas, a joint effort with another prisoner who was also a foreign academic. We made grandiose statements about our innocence and the right to academic freedom. The pain in my body dulled the heart-pain of being kept apart from my loved ones for yet another set of holidays.

Some prisoners would mark the days off with scratches on the wall.

Now that I’m free and staring down the barrel of another new year, I can’t help but think of the other Australians wrongfully detained abroad under similar conditions.

There is Dr Yang Hengjun, who formerly worked for China’s Ministry of State Security before getting disillusioned, migrating to Australia and becoming a successful blogger, author and democracy enthusiast. Yang has spent more than seven years in a Beijing prison on vague charges of espionage and in 2024 received a suspended death sentence.

Spare a thought too for former Sydneysider Gordon Ng, who has served five years of a seven-year sentence under Hong Kong’s controversial National Security Law for the “crime” of advocating for democracy.

Then there’s Oscar Jenkins, the Australian teacher who was captured by Russian forces after volunteering to fight for Ukraine. His family was subjected to the trauma of news reports of his death before clips appeared on Russian social media showing Jenkins weak, injured but alive. Jenkins was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment following what Foreign Minister Penny Wong has referred to as a “sham trial” and is thought to be being held in a gulag somewhere in Russia.

For many prisoners, the new year is a bitter reminder that no matter how successful you may have been at ignoring time, another year has passed and you are still not free.

Australian mining executive Mo Munshi spent seven years behind bars in Mongolia after falling afoul of powerful Mongolian business partners, and remains trapped in the country on an indefinite travel ban. According to Mo, the worst part of missing the holidays is “not to be able to share the joy, laughter and happiness of one’s loved ones … to see them enjoying themselves can at times be very hard, when you know that you should be there, sharing those precious moments.”

Another Australian, engineer Robert Pether, is similarly banned from leaving Iraq, where he spent four years in a Baghdad prison. Pether told me of his devastation at missing out on seeing his kids grow up. For him, being incarcerated during the holidays was like “being erased from your own life while everyone else’s carries on”.

In time of hardship, however, as always, we are reminded of the power of the human spirit. During my Christmas Day hunger strike I took strength from the solidarity of my friends and cellmates, some of whom nursed me back to health afterwards.

My friend Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who was wrongfully imprisoned in Myanmar following the country’s 2021 military coup, speaks movingly of the Buddhist inmates at Naypyidaw prison who alerted him that it was Christmas Day. Let out of his cell for exercise time, a group of them had gone to considerable effort to co-ordinate a joint rendition of “Happy Christmas to you”, sung to the tune of Happy Birthday, as they didn’t know any actual Christmas carols. In Sean’s words, “It was a moment, a day, that reflected the event it was commemorating. Of purest love and goodness.”

In Yang Hengjun’s letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, written to mark the new year in 2025, Yang spoke of his profound gratitude “at this moment of seeing out the old year and bringing in the new”. Optimistic that he would be able to contribute to “peaceful coexistence”, “seeking common ground and reserving differences,” Yang was hopeful that he would one day be free to “sit side-by-side with my readers … sharing laughter, tears and dreams.”

Cheng Lei, an Australian journalist imprisoned for more than three years in China, told me that for her the holidays are about “making up for the years of nothingness”, a time in which she deliberately seeks out “new destinations and creating unique memories, adventure and colour”.

There is nothing like being able to celebrate the holidays and other family milestones as a free person, having had this taken away from you.

This year, I hope that time speeds up just a little bit more for those Australians wrongfully imprisoned overseas. And that the new year will bring with it much longed-for freedom for them all.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow at Macquarie University and is the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

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