Michael McKenna
12 May 05 Courier Mail

AN Australian woman wrongfully deported to the Philippines in 2001 wants to return to Queensland to see her two children.

Vivian Young, 42, yesterday spoke to The Courier-Mail through an intermediary from a convent near Manila where she has been living in a dormitory with dying elderly women since her deportation.

While Australian immigration officials yesterday claimed to not know her whereabouts, Mrs Young told an extraordinary tale of how she was taken into custody after she recovered from a car accident in northern NSW.

Mrs Young, who admits to still holding fears of imprisonment if she returns to Australia, said she was happy living in the Philippines but missed her children.

"I would like to go back to Australia to see my kids," she said. "But who will pay for me to fly back and how will I survive?"

The Philippines-born Mrs Young moves with the aid of a walking stick, has limited use of her hands and is reported to be "traumatised" by the car accident, near Lismore, and then her subsequent deportation.

Speaking through Australian Catholic priest Michael Duffin, Mrs Young was shocked to hear her young sons were in foster care.

Mrs Young emigrated to Australia in 1984 to live with her Australian husband, from whom she separated in the late 1990s. "I thought my husband was looking after them," she told Fr Duffin.

Mrs Young was surprised to learn she was the subject of an international hunt because it was Australian authorities, she claims, that organised for her to stay with the Missionaries of Charity convent, initially in Manila, after her deportation.

Two months after her arrival in the Philippines, she was moved to the order's convent in Olongapo City, about 125km northwest of Manila, where she remains.

Mrs Young told Fr Duffin that Australian Embassy officials had dropped her off at the convent in Manila.

She now resides in a run-down dormitory, occupied by more than 20 elderly women and has no access to television, radio or newspapers.

Fr Duffin, who lives opposite the convent, said Mrs Young and her carers only became aware she was being sought after he saw a report on Saturday night about the immigration scandal on television.

Her case and that of Cornelia Rau, a mentally ill Australian resident wrongly held at a detention centre for 10 months, is the subject of a Federal Government-commissioned inquiry headed by former federal police chief Mick Palmer.

Australian officials have suggested Mrs Young had been mentally ill at the time of her deportation.

When Fr Duffin informed Mrs Young on Sunday that Australian authorities were looking for her, he said she reacted by saying: "Will I go to prison?" Mrs Young said she had told immigration officials that she was an Australian citizen.

"I told them, but I did not have a passport to show them, I had been in a car accident," she said.

Fr Duffin said immigration officials who saw her at Lismore Hospital told Mrs Young, who spoke little English, that they could "help her".

"They were lovely people (Immigration) that came to look after me," she said.

"They said they would take me back to the Philippines, and then they took me to a unit in Brisbane where they kept me for about a week before I was taken to the airport."