Priya Nadesalingam, the mother of the Tamil asylum seeker family at the centre of a four-year legal battle to stay in Australia, is writing a memoir of her family’s experience of being held within Australia’s immigration detention system.
Nadesalingam, her husband Nades, and their Australian-born daughters Kopika and Tharunicaa, were forcibly removed from their Biloela home in Queensland by Australian Border Force officials during a dawn raid in March 2018.
“The memoir will reveal for the first time details of the events that caused Pray and Nades to flee Sri Lanka,” Nadesalingam’s publisher Allen & Unwin said, as well as “their experiences on their journey to Australia, their personal story of detention in Melbourne and Perth and on Christmas Island by the Australian government, and the extraordinary efforts of Biloela supporters and their legal team to ensure the family could return home”.
Nadesalingam and her husband, who fled Sri Lanka’s civil war, initially had their protection claims rejected by Australia’s home affairs department.
The family was taken to immigration detention in Melbourne before the government attempted to deport the family to Sri Lanka in 2019.
The deportation was only halted by a mid-air court injunction – the plane taking them out of the country was told to land in Darwin – and the family was moved to the detention centre on Christmas Island where they spent two years. At one stage, they were the only people held within the centre.
The family was returned to the mainland of Australia – to Western Australia – after Tharunicaa fell seriously ill on the island.
Following May’s federal election, the new Labor government granted the family bridging visas in June, allowing them to return to their home in Biloela. In August, a further ministerial intervention granted the family permanent protection.
The family’s celebrated return followed an extensive four-year community-led campaign called Home to Bilo, national and international media interest, growing political pressure, and an intense legal battle through Australia’s federal court.
Allen & Unwin has acquired the world rights to Nadesalingam’s memoir. She will work with journalist Rebekah Holt, who has covered the story for more than four years.
“This story is important because there has to be a full record of what was done to these children and this family in the name of the Australian people by the last government,” Holt said.
“Especially if the current and future governments of Australia are truly serious about real change being effected in the immigration detention centres operated by this country.”
