SLAVERY IN THE SUBURBS

There is a common misconception that slavery is a matter for the history books, but millions of people are still enslaved today – shockingly, some of them right here in Australia.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

In the winter of 2015, an ambulance responded to an unusual call-out to a home in the well-heeled Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley. A working mother of three, Kumuthini Kannan, had called triple-0 to say her house guest was lying on the bathroom floor. Paramedics arrived at the large house to find an older Indian lady barely conscious in a pool of urine. She was bone-thin, weighing only 40kg, and cold to the touch. They rushed her to Box Hill Hospital where she was placed in the intensive care unit and found to be suffering from septicaemia, hypothermia and untreated diabetes. She couldn’t speak English, but a doctor noticed she had lesions on her hands and feet, and multiple pressure sores. He would later describe her as “fading away”.

“She was in a bad state,” says Detective Sergeant David MacGregor, the former head of the Australian Federal Police’s Victorian Human Trafficking team. “I don’t think [the doctors] would have seen people in that condition very often. That state of malnutrition. She had septicaemia. All of those things led us to the suspicion that this was not something that happened over a few weeks, this was something that has happened over a long period of time.”

A few hours after the woman was admitted, on July 30, a doctor phoned Mrs Kannan to get a better understanding of what had happened. She told a strange story, saying the only thing she knew about her house guest was that her first name was Harita* and she had relatives in Sydney who did not want her living with them. She gave the impression Harita drifted in and out of her family’s life, saying, “Someone would call or write stating they were picking her up and she would pack her bags and go.”