Nades Nadesalingam took one small item from Christmas Island when he and his family were transported to Australia after two years in the remote detention centre.
With his wife, Priya, and their two young daughters, the Tamil asylum seeker family had been locked up at the mostly empty 400-bed facility under 24-hour surveillance, at a cost of $6.7m to Australian taxpayers.
On his way out, Nades took some seeds for a murunga tree. The family was initially put into community detention in Perth – but Nades would hold on to the seeds and eventually plant them a year later in the family’s back yard in Biloela, Queensland.
“From the day Nades picked up those seeds, he said, ‘We will plant these in Biloela,’ and he kept on maintaining that positivity all the way,” says Priya ahead of the release of her memoir about her family’s plight.
“Even at times when I would throw coffee on the floor [in despair], he would just clean it. He would be very calm and he would tell me don’t lose hope, be positive, we will get to Biloela.
“It is because of the support that Nades gave that I’m able to now live a decent life without being a very broken person … He has inspired me in many ways.”
It was hard for Priya to stay positive after multiple deportation attempts. In detention, her children, Kopika and Tharnicaa, faced a litany of health concerns, including rotting teeth, language delays and behavioural issues.
Priya has written her full story with the journalist Rebekah Holt in a new book, Home to Biloela: The Story of the Tamil Family that Captured our Hearts.
“When I was writing this book, the main challenge was going through the painful memories. Despite this, I wanted to tell the struggles refugees go through, and that’s what motivated me to keep going,” Priya says.
Priya and Nades arrived in Australia separately by boat in 2012 and 2013 and met and married in 2014. Kopika was born in 2015, followed by her sister Tharnicaa in 2017. The family were detained in a Melbourne detention centre after an early morning raid in 2018 at their Biloela home over a visa that had expired by a single day.
In 2019, after the government’s second failed deportation attempt, the family were transported to Christmas Island where they stayed for two years. In 2021, they were moved to Perth but were forced to remain in community detention because all members of the family except the youngest daughter, Tharnicaa, were granted bridging visas.
After more than four years in detention, the family – Priya, Nades and their young daughters, Tharnicaa, 6, and Kopika, 8 – were granted permanent residency last August, an election promise of the Albanese government.
But it remains a mystery why the family was targeted in that raid, in the rural mining town in central Queensland. Their lawyer, Carina Ford, was flummoxed, after hearing many cases of asylum seekers living on expired visas for decades.
“I have one [case] where a man has been unlawful for 20 years. So why this family?” Ford asks in the book.
The raid at Rainbow Street took Priya straight back to the terror of her volatile early years, as a Tamil woman living in war-torn Sri Lanka.
“I had watched helplessly as soldiers turned up at our house at dawn and took my mother and grandfather away. I had not imagined that a similar scene would play out here in Biloela, Australia,” she writes. “But we were now refugees, a status less than human.”
Priya was raised in a conservative family where speaking back to those in positions of authority was frowned upon. But the inhumanity the family experienced while in detention would drive her to fight with everything she had.
It was Priya’s determination that delayed the family’s deportation in 2019, granting her lawyer time to lodge an injunction, with the plane eventually being turned around.
Priya was badly bruised and tore a ligament after she was eventually dragged on to the plane by officers. But her family was safe.
“My husband genuinely faced threats to his life in Sri Lanka. We did not want to go back to danger,” Priya tells Guardian Australia.
Priya put up another fight while on Christmas Island, when she smashed a computer and phone on the floor. She had been left frustrated after staff at the centre ignored her repeated requests for medical help for her toddler, Tharnicca.
“At that moment, I don’t even know what happened,” Priya says. “Later Nades told me that I smashed the computer. What I did was wrong but when I was panicking about saving my children, I had no other option. When you’re in a state of depression, you do extreme things.”
Holt is the only journalist to have regularly visited Australian immigration detention centres, and has followed the Nadesalingams’ story since the beginning.
When she discovered there were children in a Melbourne immigration detention centre – and it wasn’t just Tharnicaa and Kopika – she was “incredulous”.
“The audacity of the government to keep saying there were no children in detention … it was ridiculous. It felt sisyphean for a while, like you’re pushing this enormous boulder to keep telling these stories,” she says.
“Australians have made it very clear what they want … the current government needs to make it very clear they would never put a family with children in [immigration] detention ever again.”
For years, asylum seekers such as the Nadesalingams have been at the centre of a toxic and divisive political debate, which has dehumanised those seeking safety. But it was the country spirit of the people of Biloela that tore through this narrative and brought the Tamil family home at last.
The Nadesalingams now live an ordinary Australian suburban life in a three-bedroom red-brick home. Next to the murunga tree are thriving spinach and eggplant crops. Priya, an avid gardener, has launched a Facebook page and is working to get her driving licence and improve her English.
The girls have started school and Nades works at the meatworks and as a contract cleaner. He dreams of opening his own Sri Lankan food truck.
“I feel like I’m home when I’m in Biloela. Everybody talks to me and we are very happy,” Priya says.
She hopes her story will spare other asylum seekers from a life of trauma. “I dedicate this book to everyone who supported my campaign. And I beg everyone … to fight for every other refugee who is in a similar situation.”
Home to Biloela: The Story of the Tamil Family that Captured our Hearts by Priya Nadesalingam is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia ($34.99)
