Cate Blanchett to bring TV series about Cornelia Rau’s wrongful detention in South Australia

Hollywood Oscar winner Cate Blanchett is heading to Adelaide to produce and star in a TV series about Cornelia Rau, who was wrongly detained as an illegal immigrant.

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett is bringing to Adelaide a television series about Cornelia Rau, the mentally-ill Australian woman wrongly detained as an illegal immigrant in South Australia’s Baxter detention centre.

Blanchett, the winner of two Oscars during a two-decade Hollywood career, was initially attached as director but will produce and appear in the series, although it is understood not in the main role of Cornelia Rau.

An announcement on casting is believed to be some time later this month.

Blanchett has been in talks with her support crew about the series which has a working title of Stateless and recently scouted locations in South Australia, including along the south coast.

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett will bring the series to South Australia. Picture: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Cornelia Rau was detained in South Australia’s Baxter detention centre.

Rau, who is German-born, worked as a Qantas air hostess but was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She denied her illness and periodically went missing but in 2004 she absconded from Manly Hospital. Her family, who reported her missing, had no idea of her whereabouts.

Baxter has since closed but held hundreds of asylum seekers behind razor wire fences outside of Port Augusta. Inside, other detainees told refugee advocates about a woman who needed help who was screaming, crying and resisting guards. After a story appeared her family contacted police and Rau was flown that day to Glenside psychiatric hospital.

Her Adelaide barrister Claire O’Connor, SC, said Rau’s plight highlighted the inhumanity of the treatment of those in detention.

“We had been saying for a long time that people in immigration detention with serious mental health problems were being left undiagnosed and untreated,” Ms O’Connor said. “She clearly had a very serious condition and the fact she had spent so long in the 24-hour care of the Government proved what we had been saying.”

Rau was awarded $2.6 million in compensation and can no longer leave the country after she was forcibly hospitalised in Germany and jailed in Jordan on a disastrous 2009 trip.

First announced in 2015, Blanchett’s high-end TV series is being produced by Matchbox Pictures which came to South Australia to film Deadline Gallipoli with Sam Worthington and Charles Dance. It will continue a strong run of film and TV production in the state with Daniel Radcliffe’s political drama Escape from Pretoria here for an eight-week shoot, overlapping with Jacki Weaver and Jack Thompson in the black comedy about an escape from a nursing home, Never Too Late.