The Manus Island detention centre was one of the great blights on Australia’s conscience. It may be gone, but similar institutions, and the systems which bring such horrors into being, are unfortunately still very much with us. This is why artists must continue to speak out in the best way they know how: through their art.

Composer Chloé Charody is remarkable not just for her genre-defying music or the gravity-defying nature of its performance – a combination of classical music, circus and opera – but for her commitment to highlighting the plight of refugees in her work.

Mohammad Ali Maleki is an Iranian refugee who had the unenviable honour of calling Manus home for 10 years. It was during this time that Maleki wrote the poems, originally in Farsi and using his mobile phone, which would later form his powerful debut collection, Truth in the Cage. (Fellow detainee Mansour Shoushtari translated the poems into English.)

Charody’s song cycle Truth in the Cage sets these poems, in...