The tourist sees the name Priya Nades Kitchen on the side of the food van as he passes through the Queensland town of Biloela, stops the car and turns back.
It’s not just the promise of a vegetable samosa that lures him but those names — names forever linked to this gutsy town and one of the most turbulent chapters in Australian immigration history.
“Are you the famous Priya and Nades?” the man from Armidale, NSW, asks the food vendors as Australian Story captures the moment.
One passing tourist couldn’t miss the opportunity to meet the famous couple. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
They shake his offered hand and confirm that yes, they are Priya Nadesalingam and Nades Murugappan, the Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers whose fight to stay in Australia with their two Biloela-born daughters captured the nation’s attention for four years.
Priya beams as she tells him about life back in “Bilo”. Nades is back working at the local meatworks and she’s busy looking after the kids.
“Children good, everything’s good,” she says. “Happy.”
Priya says life has settled back to normal after years in the media spotlight. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
After so much drama and pain in the Nadesalingams’ lives, such interactions are the simple moments they embrace.
And it’s largely because of the people of this small central Queensland town that the family is back, building a life in Bilo.
The tourist knows this. “Congratulations on the win after such a long struggle,” he says.
“But I think it would not have been possible without the support of the people of the town.”
In March 2018, immigration officers arrived in Biloela in the pre-dawn hours, removing Priya, Nades and their girls, Kopika, then two, and Tharnicaa, then 11 months, from their home and placing them in detention.
The tiny regional Queensland town became the focal point of a years-long immigration debate. (Australian Story)
Priya and Nades, both members of Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil group, did not know each other before arriving separately in Australia by boat. Priya had fled to India during Sri Lanka’s civil war after her then-fiancé was burnt alive.
Nades, who says he was forced to join the rebel Tamil Tigers, claimed fear of persecution if he returned to Sri Lanka and its new government.
Nades and Priya moved to Biloela in 2014 to start their life together. (Supplied)
The couple met and married in Sydney and moved to Biloela in 2014, welcoming Kopika and Tharnicaa while trying to achieve refugee status, which was denied.
The immigration raid in 2018 came one day after Priya’s bridging visa expired.
The campaign to bring the Nadesalingams home
What followed was a politically charged saga, filled with court cases, aborted deportation flights, transfers from one detention centre to another — and a monumental battle to convince Australia and its politicians that the Nadesalingams were worthy of being granted residency.
The epicentre of that fight was not a flashy PR company in a capital city but the kitchen tables of Biloela, as a band of determined women united under the campaign, “Home to Bilo”.
The Nadesalingams spent more than four years in detention, away from their home in Biloela. (Supplied)
These political novices stripped away the legalese and bureaucratic jargon and told of the good character of the Nadesalingams and what they meant to the town.
They gathered 600,000 petition signatures. They crowdfunded more than $750,000 to pay for legal fees and billboards. They organised protests and lobbied politicians.
And in June 2022, the Nadesalingams came home to Bilo, a turning point for Nades, who described feeling like he’d been “resurrected and reincarnated”.
As Banana Shire Mayor Neville Ferrier says: “It would have been 1,000-to-one to win this fight for these people. But you know, sometimes a little person can win.”
Less than 6,000 people live in Biloela in Central Queensland. (Australian Story)
Public pressure mounts after iconic photo
Kopika and Tharnicaa are picking vegetables in their backyard, skipping from eggplant to chilli bush as the Hills Hoist sways gently in the breeze.
“This is a good one,” says Kopika, 10, picking a ripe chilli and dropping it into a basket as Priya watches on.
“I’m getting this one,” eight-year-old Tharnicaa says.
Kopika and Tharnicaa are at school now after years in detention. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
This happy scene is a long way from those traumatic days in detention on Christmas Island in the middle of 2021, when Tharnicaa was struck down with undiagnosed pneumonia, eventually being medically evacuated to Perth.
Photos of Tharnicaa, crying in a Perth hospital bed as her sister bent over to kiss and comfort her, became a lightning rod for many Australians who had followed the by-then three-year detention of the family and decided enough was enough.
Tharnicaa was medically evacuated to Perth in 2021. (Supplied)
“That’s when we really did start to see people crossing political lines,” says Bronwyn Dendle, who, along with Angela Fredericks and Simone Cameron, was a key driver of the campaign.
“The public pressure was enormous”, says then-immigration minister Alex Hawke, who’d taken on the portfolio in December 2020.
“A lot of Liberal colleagues were in my door … A lot of Labor people were as well.”
A family trapped in a political tug-of-war
Under pressure, the Morrison government softened its stance a little. Minister Hawke allowed the Nadesalingams to stay in Perth in community detention after Tharnicaa left hospital, giving them the right to work and attend school.
The campaign was buoyed by rallies and protests across Australia calling for the family’s return to Biloela. (AAP: James Ross)
But while Priya, Nades and Kopika were granted bridging visas, Tharnicaa wasn’t, which meant the family remained on the other side of the country to their adopted town.
Hawke doesn’t recant his decision to keep them in Perth.
He maintains his advice was that Thaarnica needed to be near the Perth Children’s Hospital and says that if they lost their legal battle to stay in Australia, it’s better “for them to be in a major metropolitan centre, so that … it was easier for that to take effect”. That is, easier to deport them.
Anthony Albanese vowed to release the Nadesalingams from detention as part of his 2022 election campaign. (Twitter: @alboMP)
A clear division between the two major parties was established and as a federal election loomed, the Nadesalingams and Home to Bilo team pinned their hopes on a Labor win.
“That night, when the government changed, I gained some confidence that I will return to Bilo,” Priya says.
The journey back home to Bilo
It all happened fairly quickly after that.
The Nadesalingams’ arrival at the tiny country airport on June 10, 2022, is etched in the memories of all those who campaigned so hard for that day.
The atmosphere was euphoric, with a crowd of locals singing and dancing as Priya, Nades and the girls stepped off the plane.
The family was overwhelmed with emotion as they walked across the tarmac of the tiny airstrip. (Supplied)
In their hands, the girls held soft toys of sulphur-crested cockatoos, a bird abundant in Biloela, which is named after the Aboriginal word for cockatoo.
As cheers went up, Priya dropped to her knees and kissed the ground.
“At the time, I could not thank each and every one,” she says. “I bowed down and touched the Bilo earth, thanking them.”
Life back in ‘a loving community’
After all the years of stress and campaigning, the Nadesalingams and the Home to Bilo team are revelling in the sweet ordinariness of life in a small town.
“Now, when Priya and I catch up and talk, it’s about what’s the best lunch box food that we can get fussy kids to eat?” Bronwyn says.
Bronwyn Dendle was one of the Nadesalingam family’s biggest supporters. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
School is a joy for Kopika and Tharnicaa — so much so that they can’t wait for holidays to end so they can get back to their friends and teachers.
“School is good,” says Priya. “Making friends and happy. Teachers is very kind.”
Nades works nights at the meatworks and plans to move to day shift so that he can spend more time with Priya and their daughters. On Saturdays, the couple takes the food van out to “provide healthy food to the community and friends here in Biloela”.
“We have no plans to leave Biloela and go anywhere else because we like living in this town,” Nades says. “Our community is a loving community.”
Nades and Priya say they have no plans to leave Biloela any time soon. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
The story of this little town has entered Australian folklore with a play based on the family’s story, Back to Bilo, set to premiere at the Brisbane Festival next month.
Although the Nadesalingams have settled back into the town well, the memories of their detention and the years of anxiety about their future have taken a toll.
Priya has an antidote for those days when the bad thoughts flood in. She heads out into her garden, an oasis of calm filled with curry plants and banana trees, and the gently swaying Hills Hoist.
Under the big, open, blue sky of country Australia, “my heart is a little bit relaxed”, Priya says, and she can give thanks that her family are safe and with friends, at home in Biloela.