Lunch with lawyer and asylum seeker advocate Shen Narayanasamy

Last year, when Shen Narayanasamy became the public face of the push to persuade investors to withdraw their money from immigration-detention-centre contractor Transfield Services, she was described in the press as a "Melbourne mum". But 34-year-old Narayanasamy, a founder of No Business in Abuse (NBIA) and the more recent Let Them Stay campaign, has been fighting political battles since 1998, when she helped organise a high-school walkout against Pauline Hanson.

We meet for lunch at Maha, an "unrestricted Middle Eastern" restaurant in Melbourne's CBD. Narayanasamy arrives mildly late and heavily apologetic, and launches directly into her story. She was born in the Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, one month after her family had migrated from England. Her parents were both Tamils of South Indian descent. Her father was a psychiatric nurse and her mother a hospice nurse who had once been a mid-wife: he was in Melbourne buying a car when she realised her baby wasn't moving in the womb.

"Because she was a midwife, she didn't faff around," says Narayanasamy. "She got on a bus and got to the hospital. They said, 'You've got to have a C-section right now.'"

Narayanasamy was born two-and-a-half months premature and was "really small" – "I still am," she says, with that strange way that short people have of drawing attention to their height – and her father arrived at the hospital to find the nurses had saved his daughter's life. In gratitude, her parents asked the nurses to tell them the most common Australian name.

Refugee advocate Shen Narayanasamy.Credit: Pat Scala

"And they said, 'Sharon,'" says Narayanasamy. "That's not a very Indian name, so my parents thought they'd mix Sharon with Shanti, and they made it Sherenthi. Shen is the short form."

She grew up in Doncaster and went to Beverley Hills Primary School, where her grade 6 teacher set her up for a lifetime of heartbreak by persuading her to barrack for Collingwood. "And not even for good reasons," says Narayanasamy. "It's just that everyone had to choose, and Mrs Nicola, who I adored, loved Collingwood, therefore I loved them."

Her mother was convinced by a newspaper report that Methodist Ladies' College (MLC) was the best school in Melbourne for girls, and told Narayanasamy she would need to win a full scholarship to attend. Her dutiful daughter complied. "My parents were typical ethnic parents," says Narayanasamy. "On holidays Dad would say that, every time he came home from work, we'd have to memorise a page out of the dictionary. As if we did it. But that was the aspiration."

The waiter at Maha serves a selection of mezze dishes chosen by the chef. He describes each one as he places it on the table, but neither Narayanasamy or I can understand anything he says. Narayanasamy has a compelling presence and a natural storyteller's manner, but I am shamefully distracted by the remarkable chickpea chips and the carrot-and-yoghurt Turkish dip.

Shen Narayanasamy.Credit: Eddie Jim

At MLC, Narayanasamy had a "really good time", she says. She was part of a group that organised walkouts against One Nation in July 1998, "at that time when some bad comment about Asians could actually mean that high-school kids would walk out", she says, "as opposed to where we are now". MLC allowed students to join the protests in school uniform. The next year, Narayanasamy was voted head prefect.

She briefly considered a career as a classical dancer, but instead went to Monash University to study law. She was elected president of the students' association in 2003, standing as an Unaligned Left candidate with other radical law students including Aamer Rahman, now caustic political comedian, and GLBTI-rights campaigner Anna Brown.

Narayanasamy and the Unaligned Left took part in the campaign against the mandatory detention of asylum seekers. At a demonstration at Woomera in 2000, the camp fences had been torn down and the refugees escaped. "And then there was absolute chaos," says Narayanasamy. "Then Aamer's genius idea was he could pretend to be an asylum seeker, by putting on a fake accent. It got him put in jail with all the asylum seekers. And so he met this whole group." The refugees explained to Rahman how to organise visits, and campaigners began to take busloads of students inside both Woomera and Baxter detention centres.

Narayanasamy was shocked to see that many of the asylum seekers were teenagers. "I thought, 'They don't need me, they need my mother,'" she says. "So I threatened my parents that if they didn't come just one time, I would never speak to them again. I knew if they just got in the door they would get it. And people literally fell at their feet. They were crying, and Mum brought curries she'd cooked, and fed them." Eventually, her parents adopted one of the boys.

Narayanasamy was drawn to asylum-seeker rights because she could see no bigger moral issue that could be solved simply by a change in government policy. "You very rarely meet these moral questions in real life," she says. "You walk into these detention centres and you think, 'As a human being, how could I not close these centres down right now?' You see babies rocking themselves behind the wire. It shocks everybody I've ever taken in there."

She graduated and took up a position with Norton Rose, a large commercial law firm, then a job as economic justice advocacy officer at Oxfam Australia.

She moved up to Sydney and into a shared townhouse in Redfern. "I wrote the weirdest application for housing on the planet," she says. "I promised all these things that I could supposedly do, most of which I couldn't – like cook custard." But she got on very well with her new flatmate, fashion designer Sophie Russo, and Russo and her mother decided Narayanasamy would make the ideal partner for Russo's brother.

"They did this six-month absolute stalk," says Narayanasamy. "His entire family orchestrated the set-up. They'd send me bits of his writing. We'd go out for dinner, and they'd go, 'Have you ever met Robbie? In Melbourne? He looks like Johnny Depp.'" When Narayanasamy had to travel to Victoria, they gave her a homemade salami to pass on to Robbie "because apparently they couldn't send it".

"I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to meet this weird son who clearly has no social life or partner, and hand over a fricken salami,'" she says. "Then he opened the door and within two minutes I was like, 'Oh my god, you're the love of my life.'"

Robbie does look "a bit" like Johnny Depp, she says, "if you squint".

"We never got married," says Narayanasamy. "My poor father gave us a translated version of the Hindu wedding ceremony. No one understands Sanskrit so we were, like, 'Oh, this is faintly quaint.' I've since read that there may be some better versions, but this one was atrocious. It was like, 'You will marry him and even if he is a donkey you will obey him.' A donkey? I looked at Robbie and I said, 'We can't do this.'"

Our main course at Maha is slow-cooked lamb shoulder, fantastic orange-crusted salmon, and a hefty serving of politics. Narayanasamy and Robbie Russo have two children, three-year-old Laksha and one-year-old Adesh. While Narayanasamy was on maternity leave with Adesh, she and some friends founded No Business In Abuse. As a student, she says, "I never took somebody into those centres who didn't come out converted." Now the asylum seekers were held out of reach, there was no way for people to see their conditions for themselves, so Narayanasamy turned to different tactics.

At Oxfam she had discovered that it was possible to pressurise corrupt palm-oil and logging companies in PNG by presenting evidence of their misdeeds to their bankers in Australia. "Banks are big beasts," she says. "If you bring a problem to attention in a particularly public – or private – way, I think quite often they say, 'It's going to be a PR issue. I've got this annoying activist who's going to keep fighting me there.'" So they simply drop the client and take on other businesses.

With this idea as their guide, NBIA began working to persuade super funds and investment advisers to pull out of Transfield. "Then Transfield started to get so nervous about what we doing," she says. "They pre-emptively sent out a paper to the whole market about our activities. Which I think was profoundly stupid, because by doing that, they essentially told everybody all these problems."

When Narayanasamy gave an interview to Fairfax in September 2015, she unwittingly came to personalise the campaign. "I thought the story would be in the business pages," she says. "They took a photo, and I thought, 'Oh, they might have a little photo with it.'" But the piece appeared on the front page of The Age, and Narayanasamy was headlined as the "Melbourne mum" behind the movement.

Narayanasamy became the human rights campaign director at community advocacy organisation GetUp in August last year, and GetUp adopted NBIA. Transfield changed its name to Broadspectrum in September. The company has lost millions of dollars in value, even though its financials have improved. Narayanasamy thinks NBIA must take a large share of the credit (or blame) for this.

But she says she is more comfortable with the new Let Them Stay campaign, which ​focuses on the 267 detainees – including 30 babies – currently in Australia who risk being sent back to Nauru. For Let Them Stay, the media uses images of the babies rather than photographs of Narayanasamy.

Let Them Stay has scored some success, with no one deported to Nauru and the release of all families into the community. However, despite all the campaigners' efforts, mandatory-detention policies remain unchanged. "You don't win this kind of thing usually," she says.

So how does she cope with that?

"I've got a long time," she says, "I'm younger than most of the people in this area. I can wait them out."

She pauses to eyeball invisible opponents. "Turnbull, Scott Morrison," she says, "I'm younger than you."

TIMELINE

1982: Born in Melbourne

1998: Helped organised MLC student walkout against One Nation

2003: Elected president of Monash University Student Association

2008: Completed law degree

2010: Finished articles at Norton Rose; appointed Oxfam Australia's Economic Justice Advocacy Co-ordinator

2012: Daughter Laksha born

2014: Son Adesh born; began to work on No Business in Abuse (NBIA) while on unpaid leave

2015: Appointed executive director NBIA; Human Rights Campaign Director, GetUp