Turnell feasts on love and taste of freedom

Sean Turnell isn’t taking any Christmases for granted after spending 650 days locked in a windowless Myanmar cell.

Sean Turnell at Barangaroo enjoying life outside prison. Picture - Chris Pavlich for The Australian

It was a month shy of Christmas when economist Sean Turnell touched down in Melbourne in 2022 after having spent 650 days locked up in an oppressive, windowless Myanmar jail cell.

He remembers that first Christmas, spent at home with his beloved wife, Macquarie University economist Ha Vu, as being “a little surreal”.

“I still hadn’t come back down to Earth,” he tells The Australian. “The day before I was released, I’d had a phone call with Ha where we had given up on Christmas – there was no indication at all as to when I was going to be free. I thought, ‘Gosh, this is going to be another really miserable Christmas Day’.”

Professor Turnell was a special economic adviser to Myanmar’s then civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, when the military overthrew her government on February 1, 2021. He was detained by the military junta and sentenced to three years behind bars on trumped-up charges that he breached the state secrets Act.

When The Australian connects with Professor Turnell in a WhatsApp call, he is overseas, having had dental work done. “I broke some of my teeth in the prison. And as you know, dental expenses in Australia are off the scale,” he says.

The reason for the call is to talk about recipes he has contributed to The Australian’s summer cookbook series: My Last Meal, for which some of the nation’s best-loved novelists, actors, musicians, journalists and critics were asked to choose which meal would be their final, and why.

Turnell says it’s “surreal” to be spending another Christmas at home. Picture - Chris Pavlich for The Australian

Professor Turnell, who admits to “no intuitive feel for cooking at all”, chose a simple dish of steamed fish and Asian greens, which, he says, “stretches my culinary abilities to the max and then some” but one he prepares for the “undisputed love of my life” – his wife.

Though he says the Christmas he spent in the Myanmar prison was “easily my worst ever”, he fondly remembers a tender moment shared with the Burmese prisoners. “They felt really sorry for me on Christmas Day, but they didn’t know any Christmas songs, so they sang me ‘Happy Christmas to You’ in the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.”

He says his fellow prisoners did not want him to share that story, out of fear people would think they were uncivilised for not knowing any Western Christmas songs. “I remember saying to them that people on the outside won’t see that. They’ll just see this incredible act of compassion from you, reaching out to a culture unknown to you, in the most terrible circumstances.”

In his My Last Meal piece, Professor Turnell writes lovingly about the boozy fruit cakes his wife would send him in prison, via diplomatic pouches from DFAT.

“They were in vacuum-sealed bags, I’ll never forget the smell,” he says. “When you opened the bag, you’d just get this waft of dried fruit, spices and the unmistakeable smell of brandy. Smell is such a powerful sense for memory and location. Getting those packages, more than anything, would connect me to home.”