kylie moore gilbert in melbourne, welcome to hardtalk. thanks so much for having me. it s a real pleasure to have you on the show. it is pretty much a year and a half now since you were released from imprisonment in iran. how much distance do you now feel from that whole experience? it feels sometimes like it never happened. it feels like it was a very lengthy, especially vivid nightmare that ijust dreamt one night when i was asleep and have woken up the next day, and i still have those memories of that nightmare lingering with me. but because i m in the same familiarspaces, back at my home that i was in before i went to iran, sometimes i have to pinch myself and remind myself that i ve actually gone through that terrible ordeal and that experience in real life. you did say a little while ago, you said when you first released, you think that you re going to be shattered, you re going to be broken but actually, that s not really true. from my experience, at least, you say the
after 804 days behind bars. is it possible to heal after such a shattering ordeal? kylie moore gilbert in melbourne, welcome to hardtalk. thanks so much for having me. it s a real pleasure to have you on the show. it is pretty much a year and a half now since you were released from imprisonment in iran. how much distance do you now feel from that whole experience? it feels sometimes like it never happened. it feels like it was a very lengthy, especially vivid nightmare that ijust dreamt one night when i was asleep and have woken up the next day, and i still have those memories of that nightmare lingering with me. but because i m in the same familiarspaces, back at my home that i was in before i went to iran, sometimes i have to pinch myself and remind myself that i ve actually gone through that terrible ordeal and that experience in real life. you did say a little while ago, you said when you first released, you think that you re going to be shattered, you re going to be brok
that s made me a little bit more fearless. i want to get back to that in just a moment, butjust a quick word, if you would, on the diplomacy around your situation. the australian government told you, and indeed your family back in australia, to try to keep this quiet for a long time. they talked about quiet diplomacy being the best way out of this. you disagreed with them. but the truth is that australia knew very little about your case for many, many months, and this is mirrored with we ve already talked about nazanin zaghari ratcliffe the advice that was given to her by the british government, and to anoosheh ashoori and his family too. the advice always seems to be, in these situations with the iranians, keep it quiet, keep a lid on it. we ll do the diplomacy behind the scenes. trust in us. that s the best way out of this. that didn t work, did it? and are you angry that for so long you were given that advice? i m not angry at the australian government because i am grateful
so this is the message that s being given to families by the british government, by the australian government and others. if you speak out, your loved one in prison will be harmed. but my experience shows the opposite. if there is a media spotlight and a public campaign on that individual in an iranian prison, their prison conditions improve. right. ..their access to medical treatment is enhanced. so i actually think that the opposite is true. honestly, i m not. i am cynical of governments. i do think they have an interest in keeping things quiet, especially because no. and we re talking about bureaucrats here as well as foreign ministers and the like. nobody likes media breathing down their neck and asking, what are you doing, what are you not doing, to get this person out? are you doing enough? could you have done more? nobody wants that kind of scrutiny, but i don t think. i think it s up to the governments themselves to make the argument that this is in the person s interest
he was a seminary student, so he wasn t a refugee from bahrain or anything like that. he was doing clerical studies in qom, because of course qom is a centre of religious. it s sort of the vatican city of iran, in a way. so this individual is responsible for my arrest. right. and they told me that even on my first night. 804 days you eventually spent in prison, much of it in evin but some of it also in a public prison, a very difficult place a long way away from tehran. during the course of that imprisonment, you did some pretty amazing things. you did a rooftop protest. you time and again confronted guards you screamed in their faces. you staged protests of different sorts. what did you learn about yourself in those 804 days? i learnt that i am stronger than i thought i was. i learnt that i keep my head under pressure, that i can still. ..make difficult moral decisions under pressure that i saw others not be