For an hour a day they ran around a playground.
For the remaining 23 hours the children experienced the prison-like reality of immigration detention.
Afghan Hazara refugee Sina* was 16 when he spent 10 months in immigration detention on Christmas Island and Darwin as an unaccompanied minor in 2010-11.
His family sent their only son away in the hope of giving him a better life.
Three years on, Sina, now a free man living in Sydney, is still traumatised by his detention.
"I saw people every day fighting ... people cutting their hands or their neck, sometimes hangings - it was scary," he told AAP.
Sina would hide away.
"I was depressed. I was in my room all the time," he said.
"I was always thinking about my family and my visa."
He said the younger children were given access to the playground for one hour a day.
But there was little to no solace for teenage asylum seekers.
"If I was trying to read a book or watch a movie, I was always distracted, always worried.
"I couldn't sleep, had to have sleeping tablets."
Sina believes it's too dangerous for children to be in detention, a conclusion also reached in a 2004 report by the Australian Human Rights Commission.
The commission launched a new inquiry this month because numbers of children in detention had risen beyond what they were during the Howard government era.
At the end of last year there were 1028 children in Australian immigration detention centres, 460 on Christmas Island and 116 on Nauru.
Fewer than half that number were in detention under the Howard government, when the commission first examined the issue.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott attacked the timing of the launch, blaming the previous Labor government for the increase in numbers last year.
But Commission president Gillian Triggs said she had been reluctant to start the new inquiry earlier for fear it would have been politicised in an election year.
The inquiry will visit all Australian detention centres and Christmas Island but it's not legally able to inspect Manus Island or Nauru.
Abbott believes the problem will go away as asylum seeker boat arrivals decline under Operation Sovereign Borders.
But in the meantime his government continues to send families and unaccompanied minors to Nauru under the "no exceptions policy".
The 2004 report shed light on how children were treated at Port Headland and the now defunct Woomera and Baxter detention centres.
It revealed detention staff commonly referred to asylum seekers by their numbers instead of names, a practice Sina said still goes on.
During a Christmas concert at the Port Headland centre in 2000, the officer distributing gifts donated by local church groups had to stop handing them out because the manager was embarrassed he was calling kids by numbers in front of the centre's guests.
The report recommended legislation to codify minimum standards of treatment for children in detention and called for an independent guardian to be appointed for unaccompanied minors.
Neither of these recommendations was taken up.
The report also called on the Howard government to release families within a month, which did not happen.
Then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone argued that releasing children would play into the hands of people smugglers.
In 2005, a group of rebel government backbenchers - Petro Georgiou, Judi Moylan, Bruce Baird and Russell Broadbent - won concessions to have families and long-term detainees released by making threats to cross the floor.
Three out of the four have since retired from parliament, leaving Russell Broadbent to fly the flag solo.
"I'm still as passionate as ever about this," Broadbent told AAP.
He said it was a disgrace that more children are in detention now than when the Howard government was in power.
He believes the immigration department is doing its best to cut numbers.
"Is it perfect? No. Are they trying? I believe so," Broadbent said.
Moylan recalls visiting detention centres and attempting to get a smile out of toddlers who had lived their entire lives locked up.
She's sickened by the statistics but believes the public mood may have shifted - perhaps as a result of the record number of asylum-seeker boat arrivals.
The cases of Australian resident Cornelia Rau, unlawfully detained in immigration detention, and Australian citizen Vivian Solon deported to the Philippines, gripped the public's imagination in 2005 and helped the push to free children, she said.
"Somehow it drove it home in a very graphic way," Moylan said.
"I've been at a bit of a loss to understand why there's a lack of interest or concern about it at the present time."
The Australian Human Rights Commissions will report back in late 2014.
* Name has been changed.
