For almost a decade now, my day job has largely focused on trying to obtain compensation for a cohort of mostly Iranian former asylum seekers for the psychiatric injuries they suffered in the notorious Woomera and Baxter Detention Centres.

Those centres were in rural South Australia and as remote as the government of the day could make them. Eventually, they were closed, but replaced with the new horror of offshore centres on Nauru and Manus Island, and hotel rooms in capital cities.

Beyond a core of well-meaning Australians, I have struggled to get people to care about my clients’ stories. And so it is refreshing to see an artist like Chloé Charody striving to find new and innovative ways to draw attention to the destruction that immigration detention centres do to people who have done nothing other than to flee persecution, and in some cases, certain torture and death.

Chloé Charody’s Stories that Must be Heard. Photo © Rob Moore

The ambitious Stories that Must be Heard consists of two separate shows melding acrobatics, opera and classical music. The common thread is that each tries to capture the asylum seeker experience.

Truth in...