What were you like when you were 10 years old?

Think back.

Were you mud-sliding with your friends? Riding bikes, discovering boys, and playing netball? Were you going to sleepovers where there was little sleep at all?

This is a story about another 10-year-old girl who couldn’t sleep, either.

Who couldn’t eat.

Who couldn’t get out of bed.

And whose only correspondence with her mother was a note bearing the words no mother should ever have to read:

“I want to die.”

Listen to her remarkable story, here:

When Maurice Blackburn human rights lawyer Katie Robertson went to Christmas Island for work, her mission was to remove any children from detention, and t

Nothing could have prepared her for the sadness and desperation she witnessed. But in the end, as she details on theFighting For Fairpodcast,it was the tiny, everyday moments that would be her undoing.

A child's drawing

It was a small moment while interviewing a young father for a legal claim. His daughter was sick, his wife had tried to end her life by drinking cleaning fluid, and Ms Robertson asked if he had any more questions.

“I have this recurring dream,” he said.

“I’m in a kitchen. It’s bright and it’s warm... I am standing at a stove and behind me my daughter and child are sitting at the kitchen table. I am making them breakfast and I am boiling my daughter an egg. Just like my father used to do for me when I was little...this is my dream”.

Christmas Island detention centre

It was then Katie Robertson realised; it's the little things that make us human.

In a week where the New York Times told the world about the human rights violations towards our country's asylum seekers, called Immigration Minister Peter Dutton a "little Trump", and exposed an alarming rate of self-harm in detainees, Katie Robertson's story shows the human toll.

There are no more children on Christmas Island anymore.

But there are still, as of today, 49 children in Nauru.

And that means 98 parents who just want to cook breakfast for their kids.