"I don't have interest in that. After two pages, I lose myself," Ragav says.

More than five years locked in Australia's immigration detention centres has left his mind feeling dulled. He forgets people's names in a way he never did before and still cannot remember his phone number.

But he cannot forget the reason why he was locked up for such a long time – because he has never been told.

"ASIO never gives reasons," Ragav tells me.

Indefinite detention

Ragav, 42, fled from Sri Lanka during the civil war only to become one of dozens of refugees lost in the black hole of Australia's legal system, a peculiar limbo known rather antiseptically as "indefinite detention".

He could not be returned home, after the United Nations judged he had a well-founded fear of persecution.

But he was not allowed a visa to live in Australia because of a secret ASIO assessment that branded him a threat to national security.

He was never charged with breaking any laws, but had no right to appeal the security agencies' adverse finding or even know the detail of the allegations against him.

And no other country would offer him a home. Not Canada or Switzerland, where his uncles live, or in Britain with cousins.

So he was trapped in detention, for the most part at a Broadmeadows facility that is ironically named Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation, where depression and suicide attempts have been disturbingly common.

"I didn't realise that I would lose my life like this," he said.

Sudden change

Yet suddenly, three weeks ago, his life was unexpectedly returned.

"Ragav" is not the man's real name, and Fairfax Media has agreed not to disclose his identity because his parents and four surviving siblings remain in Sri Lanka.

But he is among at least 12 refugees to be released from detention in recent months after ASIO changed its secret assessment.

He was not given any explanation other than he was now allowed to leave.

ASIO has previously said adverse assessments of refugees are under constant review and findings are updated with new information. At one stage 54 refugees were trapped in limbo, and more than 30 still remain.

"I was genuine to the government in the interviews," Ragav says of his asylum application, in English and with the help of a translator.

He tells me how he worked as a cameraman for a media organisation supportive of the Tamil Tigers in regions under Sri Lankan army control.

He says how he came to have a profile as a contact for local and international media about university student resistance, having his camera equipped smashed, until eventually in 2006 a "military intelligence officer" warned him to leave the country.

Fearing an "accident" he flew to Malaysia and joined UN camps in the country. But denied work rights or a future, he paid $16,500 – almost three times the going rate he later discovered – for an October 2009 passage to Australia.

He provided documents, he says, and after 18 months on Christmas Island, was sent to a camp in far north Queensland, where after another year he was told ASIO had made an adverse finding.

He was moved to Melbourne in 2012 in the months before an April 2013 hunger strike among the more than two dozen refugees held with negative findings.

"We did that hunger strike not to hurt the Australian people or government," Ragav says. "If there was inconvenience, I apologise."

But as much as a cry for help, he says, the aim of the protest was to bond desperate group together rather than sit alone in their rooms crying – and for some, attempt to end their lives.

No grudge

As the fog of indefinite days in detention recedes, Ragav looks to a future with aims to find work as a kitchenhand.

But he bears no grudge to country he asked for help.

"They told me to stay five or six years in the detention centre, and I stayed", he says. "The next day they came and told me to leave, so I left.

"I'm not angry. I'm grateful to you. I have lived with your tax money for the last six years – securely I lived. I have to be grateful to this country for keeping me comfortable."

"The normal life I was deprived, I didn't get that… but I believe in the Australian law and I trust the Australian people."