BILOELA FAMILY UPDATE
AUSSIES ARE CALLING ON THE GOVERNMENT TO RETURN A TAMIL ASYLUM-SEEKING FAMILY TO THEIR QUEENSLAND TOWN
On June 12, Tharnicaa Murugappan celebrated her fourth birthday while being treated for sepsis caused by untreated pneumonia at Perth Children’s Hospital – a change from her previous three birthdays spent behind wire fences in immigration detention. Her only wish – likely for herself and her mother Priya – is to be reunited with her father Nades and older sister Kopika on Christmas Island, where they have been held since 2019. But Tharnicaa’s deteriorating health and hospitalisation has brought considerable public attention to the family’s plight to return home to Biloela.
Nades and Priya both separately fled the civil war in Sri Lanka, seeking asylum in Australia in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The pair then met and married in Sydney, before settling in the small town of Biloela, in central Queensland, in 2014. They threw themselves into community life, with Nades volunteering while awaiting a work visa and Priya regularly bringing curries to the local hospital and attending crafting classes.
It’s in Biloela that they also welcomed their two precious daughters. “Biloela is home. It’s where my life started,” Priya said of her adopted home town last year. “This is where I got to be a wife, to fall pregnant. To be a happy person.”
But in 2018, the family of four were taken from their home the day after Priya’s visa expired. After being denied refugee status they were sent to immigration detention in Melbourne, where a government attempt to deport them back to Sri Lanka in August 2019 was halted by a last-minute injunction. Since then, they’ve remained in the mostly empty detention centre on Christmas Island while a legal battle over their rights to stay in Australia continued.
It’s no place for a kid to grow up, with Kopika and Tharnicaa currently the only two children in an Australian immigration detention centre. “We are extremely concerned that this family has been held in indefinite detention for more than 1000 days … This is most of Tharnicaa’s life,” Royal Australasian College of Physicians Acting President, Dr Jacqueline Small, said in
a statement. “Being held in detention presents an extreme and unacceptable risk to children’s health, development and mental health.”
As a result of Tharnicaa’s hospitalisation, pressure is continuing to mount to let the family stay in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has hinted that his government could be finally backing down on their hardline stance. “There are options that are being considered that are consistent with both health advice and the humanitarian need and the government’s policy,” he said recently.
However, he wouldn’t budge on the idea of allowing them to stay permanently. “That is not the government’s policy,” he added.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese, on the other hand, remains firm the government should make a discretionary decision to return them to Biloela for good. “You have a local dad who works at the meat factory,” he said. “You have a local mum who is a volunteer in local charities, and these two beautiful little girls have spent almost all of their life now in detention … Enough is enough. We’re a better country than this.”
As WHO went to print, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke had confirmed the family would soon be reunited and allowed to “reside in the Perth community” while Tharnicaa receives ongoing medical treatment and they pursue ongoing legal matters.
But all the Murugappans and their close-knit Biloela community want is for them to return home. “Priya and I often talk and say this is where they belong,” social worker and Biloela local Angela Fredericks recently shared. “We don’t know what the journey is, but we are both firm in that faith that this is where they need to be.” •
“This is where they need to be”
– FREDERICKS