A man has been tortured. Not just any man, though: an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who came to Christmas Island by boat, and spent six months in detention there before being transferred to Australia.

These days it can be pretty hard to tell a Brooklyn hipster from a Sydney hipster. Beards have crept down Sydney’s jowls, and incongruous tattoos – rearing vipers and 'Day of the Dead' skulls and fantastic flying machines – have crept up the forearms of our bike mechanics and baristas.

The BBC has become the first news organisation to be granted access to the reopened detention facility at Nauru. Far from signifying a shift in policy, however, the arrival of the press at the site shows the government’s determination to legitimise and maintain the current system of indefinite offshore detention of asylum seekers.

A recent article by Jeff Sparrow draws comparisons between the US base at Guantánamo Bay, and the Broadmeadows detention centre in suburban Victoria, underlining that the cruelty of keeping detainees in the limbo of ‘indefinite detention’ has led to hunger strikes at both sites.