After 10 months living among the horrific self-harm and despair of Australia's notorious Christmas Island detention centre, Ronald Nielson gave in.
He signed his deportation papers to New Zealand, a place he barely knew beyond his Maori parents, having spent his whole life on the Gold Coast.
"It's not good mentally Christmas Island. It honestly did, it broke me. I didn't want to come back to New Zealand," told Mark Crysell on TVNZ1's Sunday
It was a desperate choice, forced on him by Australia's controversial deportation laws for residents with serious criminal histories who are foreign citizens.
Christchurch woman Filipa Payne pays her own way to visit New Zealander’s in the immigration detention centre.
Born and raised on the Gold Coast to New Zealand parents, Nielson had spent his entire life in Australia, but that didn't necessarily make him a citizen.
The country of his birth detained him on Christmas Island, then deported him, after he'd served time for armed robbery and grievous bodily harm.
He was 17, and it was his first crime.
Where he has landed and is now living, Palmerston North, is a foreign land in every sense.
"I didn't know anyone in New Zealand except for a few people and this wasn't where I wanted to come," he says.
"But this was my choice, this was the only option I had off that island, and sometimes you've got to take it."
"I messed up in the past, I was young, but I was born there, do they not get that. I was born in that country, I see myself as an Australian.
Christchurch woman Filipa Payne pays her own way to visit New Zealander’s in the immigration detention centre.
"It was home for me, it is still home."
Three years ago, Neilson spent 10 months in Christmas Island detention centre, alongside asylum seekers, and what he witnessed made him willing to abandon his home.
"I remember this one fella had this razor blade and officers were coming near him and he was saying 'go away, go away' and they kept coming up to him and he just started cutting his head, cutting his body, cutting everywhere, and he was just bleeding everywhere.
"When I see things like that I think 'this guy's doing this to himself, what hope do we have, are we going to end up like him, sitting here for years just wanting to give up on life?'"
Now in Palmerston North, what's hardest is not being able to visit his seriously ill mother on the Gold Coast.
"I try not to get upset," Neilson says.
"It's not like once you get separated and ripped apart form your family and sent to another country that you can just be happy. It's a long process."
But living with his little girl, Brooklyn, has changed his outlook in New Zealand for the better.
"Yeah it's changed a lot for me, makes me do everything for my daughter, provide for her and give her the life that I could never have," Neilson says.
"And wouldn't mind teaching her the Maori language, where she's from, where my family's from.
"Those are the things I never got taught. I was born and raised in Australia and I never had that opportunity so I want to give her that."
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