After a four-year battle to stay in Australia, a joyous Tamil refugee family has finally returned to their chosen homeland.
On Friday afternoon, Priya and Nades Nadesalingam arrived at the Thangool Airport near their little hometown of Biloela in central Queensland with their Australian-born children Kopika and Tharnicaa.
On the tarmac, the family hugged, and the two daughters waved to the audience, which clapped and celebrated with placards and streamers.
Priya blew a kiss to friends and supporters who had been waiting for this moment since the family was arrested in March 2018.
When the Nadesalingams’ bridging visas expired in 2018 and they were placed in immigration detention, they were well-liked members of the community.
Authorities discovered they no longer matched Australia’s refugee requirements at the time.
In support of the family, nearly 600,000 individuals signed Angela Frederick’s petition, and more than 53,000 phone calls and emails were made and forwarded to Australian politicians.
However, with the election of the Albanese government, the family was eventually able to return home after the previous government’s stance was reversed.
While waiting on the tarmac with her family, Priya carried a stuffed cockatoo toy, the local bird after which the small town is called.
Once the crowd was reunited with the much-missed family, they hugged, sobbed, and danced together.
‘To finally be able to watch them walk into Biloela — it’s like a dream come true,’ Marie Austin, a local, told the ABC.
Bronwyn Dendle, a family friend, said she’d replayed the emotional reunion in her head’so many times’ and was happy to see the family again.
The family’s reunion falls on daughter Tharnicaa’s fifth birthday, her first since being released from detention, and Ms Dendle is looking forward to throwing her the celebration she deserves.
‘We’re having a birthday party in the park, as is customary in Bilo.’ She expressly wanted a pink party, so that’s exactly what she’ll get.’
On Saturday, their visit coincides with the Banana Shire’s Flourish Multicultural Festival.
Tharnicaa was nine months old when her family was detained in a Melbourne immigration detention center for the first time.
In 2019, the former coalition government attempted to deport the family on a commercial flight from Melbourne to Sri Lanka, but the plane was forced to land in Darwin due to an 11th-hour court injunction.
The four were imprisoned at the Christmas Island detention center for two years before being transferred to community detention in Perth by immigration minister Alex Hawke in mid-2021.
Tharnicaa was medically evacuated with a suspected blood infection, prompting his change of heart.
Following the May government transition, temporary Home Affairs Minister Jim Chalmers granted the family bridging visas to return to Biloela.