BACK TO BILOELA at last

Meet Priya, Nades and their girls, the Sri Lankan family who, for four years, were shunted from pillar to post by the Australian government. And meet the Queensland country town that fought a David and Goliath battle to get them back.

- BARRY DIVOLA

On the surface, everything seemed normal. It was a sunny, blue-sky day in early May, when Priya and Nades welcomed The Weekly to their temporary townhouse in East Cannington, Perth.

They ushered us in and served homemade snacks and sweet tea. Being a weekday, their daughters, Kopika, who was turning seven that week, and four-year-old Tharnicaa, were at a nearby primary school. A gaggle of sulfur-crested cockatoo toys – the symbol of their much-loved former home in Biloela, Queensland – was perched on top of the TV.

Priya and Nades were polite and warm. But within minutes of starting our conversation, Nades was passing tissues to his wife as tears flowed and her voice rose with emotion, a torrent of sentences tumbling over each other in her native Tamil, an interpreter asking her to slow down and patting her hand in comfort.

As it turns out, everything was far from normal for the Nadesalingams (who are also known as the Murugappan family). And it had been that way for some time.

Nades and Priya, both 45, had come to Australia from war-torn Sri Lanka, in 2012 and 2013 respectively. They’d met and married in Sydney in 2014. It was an arranged marriage, and although they had spoken on the phone, they’d not seen each other before their wedding day. But as Nades says, “I always thank God because he has blessed me with Priya as my wife. Through thick and thin, and no matter what we have been through in life, we stand by each other.” They have been through a lot.