‘They are just human beings’: The untold story of the Biloela family

Jay Ooi has long been fascinated by what it means to be Australian. The producer, best known as the host of Shoes Off, an award-winning podcast about Asian Australian culture, is puzzled by the way settlers feel compelled to decide who is worthy enough to make a home on this continent.

In 2020, Thinesh Thillainadarajah, a lawyer and writer who is Eelam Tamil, suggested to Ooi an idea for a podcast about Nades Murugappan and Priya Nadesalingam, Eelam Tamils who fled the threat of genocide in Sri Lanka to settle in Biloela in central Queensland. It became You Have Been Told a Lie.

Ooi and Thillainadarajah with the Nadesalingam family on a plane.

“I find it so odd that anyone who’s not Indigenous would claim any sort of entitlement over Australia and want to dictate who should or shouldn’t come,” Ooi says.

“We say, ‘we don’t know whether these people are good people’. Are we good people?”

The Nadesalingam family at the airport.

He pauses. “[I thought] how weird is it that a Queensland town that is typically conservative is fighting for a brown asylum seeker family to stay in this country? I applied for the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship and thought, ‘this story could be bigger’.”

In the national imagination, the Nadesalingams are often reduced to soundbites and symbols; platitudes that erase both their everyday humanity and the complexity of their circumstances.

“I was really frustrated by the one-dimensional portrayal of refugees seeking the sympathy of Australians without diving into the structural issues,” says Thillainadarajah.

He grew up in Canada, before moving to Australia at the age of 24, and his family were displaced around the world by the Sri Lankan Civil War. “The week the government tried to deport Priya and Nades was the same I received Australian citizenship and it’s not that their claims are any less relevant than my parents’,” he says.

You Have Been Told a Lie, which unfolds over six episodes, expands and complicates the Nadesalingams’ story. It draws on the tools of both art and journalism to position the family – so often spoken for and spoken over – as subjects rather than objects. Other voices feature: members of the Home to Bilo campaign team, academics, migration lawyers. But the Nadesalingams take centre stage.

Ooi and Thillainadarajah made the podcast, with funding and support from the Jesse Cox Fellowship, over two years.

In it, the producers trace the Nadesalingams’ trajectory from the forces that brought them to Australia, to the premature birth of their oldest daughter Kopika and their early days in Biloela. The podcast takes in the family’s time in offshore detention on Christmas Island, where medical care for Priya, then seriously ill, was delayed, and the moment when their youngest daughter Tharnicaa was hospitalised in Perth with a blood infection caused by untreated pneumonia.

Thillainadarajah conducted extended interviews with the Nadesalingams in Tamil. One of the podcast’s most compelling aesthetic elements is the way it weaves together the family’s testimony, spoken in their language, with an English translation.

“From a Tamil perspective, it allows them to convey their emotions,” he says. “[A listener] may not understand the direct words they are saying but you can hear the emotion. It allows someone to put themselves in their shoes as they are going through the experiences they are describing.”

The first episode, The Birth Lottery, charts the couple’s early courtship. Since the Tampa crisis, You Have Been Told a Lie argues, empty phrases – queue-jumper, illegal immigrant – have become part of a national rhetoric designed to distance and dehumanise refugees. But Ooi and Thillainadarajah were interested in revealing the ordinariness of the Nadesalingams.

“To me, there’s something beautiful about the everyday, and it was about being able to show a side of them that we never really hear about,” Ooi smiles. “They are just human beings who wanted to make a life and start a family.”

Ooi and Thillainadarajah were equally committed to “marrying story with theory”. The second episode, Bloody Pearl, zooms out. It focuses on how Australia’s strategic alliance with the United States and foreign policy spark questions about the way this country is implicated in the arrival of Eelam Tamil asylum seekers.

“On one hand, you have Australia saying, ‘we don’t want more asylum seekers’ and on the other you have Australia contributing to the situation that’s causing Tamils to flee,” Ooi says. “So, it was about showing the trickle-down effect of these relationships between countries.”

You Have Been Told a Lie, of course, also chronicles the power of the Home to Bilo campaign and doubles as an account of how communities rally together to take moral action. Speaking to people in Biloela, Thillainadarajah says, challenged the producers’ assumptions.

Supporters of the Nadesalingam family hold welcome signs ahead of their return to Biloela in June 2022.Credit: Dan Peled/Getty

“What it communicated to me is that people may have particular political views,” he says. “But that might not be connected to how they interact with people every day.”

Ooi and Thillainadarajah accompanied the Nadesalingams on the plane back to Biloela in 2022, the first flight the family took without the presence of the Australian Border Force.

“There’s this heavy media storm around the entrance of the airport,” he says. “Priya collapses to the ground and starts crying. She touches the ground and says, ‘I’m touching the place’. In South Asian culture, there’s this sense of paying respect to home. And seeing, literally on the bitumen of Thangool Airport, that paying respect to a place she called home was really emotional.”

All episodes of You Have Been Told a Lie are out now.

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