SYDNEY (AFP) - It was the most unlikely Australian residence for the world’s number one tennis player, Novak Djokovic: a grim, five-storey former hotel with no check-out allowed.
For four nights, Melbourne’s infamous “alternative place of detention” for migrants became his abode: no tennis courts, no swimming pool and no leaving.
Dozens of journalists and scores of fans, anti-vaccination mandate protesters and migrant rights activists rallied outside daily.
But the 34-year-old ace reportedly was not seen by his fellow residents: about 32 people held under Australia’s stringent immigration policy, some of them for years.
And a day after the Serbian superstar left the detention centre as celebrating fans sang and danced, his cancelled visa restored by a court, the media glare left with him.
On Tuesday morning, there were only two television reporters outside and no protesters.
A lonely cardboard sign read: “Free Novak and all the refugees”. Chalk scrawled on the front of the hotel said: “#gameover free the refugees”.
Days earlier, people had been scrawling graffiti on the walls, hanging pro-refugee banners from the building, singing and dancing.