The Geography of Care: Regional Solidarity and the Home to Bilo Archive

This blog was written by 2025 John Oxley Library Fellow, Dr Zhila Gholami as part of her fellowship project, Voices of Diversity: Collecting and Preserving the Refugee Experience in Queensland.

In Australia, refugee advocacy is often imagined as the domain of inner-city activists, legal centres, universities, and metropolitan protest movements. The geography of solidarity is presumed to be urban – concentrated in capital cities, shaped by institutional networks, and amplified through national media headquartered in metropolitan centres. Yet this narrative obscures another, equally consequential history: the sustained, deeply relational forms of advocacy emerging from regional and rural Australia. 

Since the 2001 Tampa affair, which marked a decisive turn in Australia’s border regime, refugee politics has been defined by increasingly punitive federal policies. At the same time, however, campaigns for asylum seekers and refugee justice have unfolded across small towns and regional communities – not as abstract policy debates, but as intimate, place-based commitments. In these settings, solidarity has been lived and practised through schools, churches, workplaces, sporting clubs, and everyday encounters. Regional advocacy has mobilised a language of neighbourliness, mutual obligation, and shared futures, reframing asylum seekers not as distant “others” but as members of local communities. 

A defining example of this regional mobilisation is Rural Australians for Refugees, a grassroots network linking towns and regional centres nationwide in support of people seeking asylum. Its archives, held at the National Library of Australia, document years of community organising, letter-writing campaigns, public forums, petitions, church gatherings, school initiatives, and interventions in local media. These materials reveal a form of advocacy grounded not in spectacle but in persistence – a politics of care emerging from places often stereotyped as socially conservative or politically marginal. 

It is within this broader landscape of regional solidarity that the “Home to Bilo” campaign, now archived at State Library of Queensland, must be understood. The four-year, community-led effort to return the Nadesalingam family – Tamil asylum seekers Priya and Nades, and their Australian-born daughters – to the Queensland town of Biloela (or, “Bilo”) challenged dominant assumptions about who advocates for refugees and why. What unfolded in Biloela was not simply a local campaign. It became a national reckoning over belonging, border policy, and the meaning of home. 

The story of Biloela demonstrates how a small regional community can reshape public discourse and influence political outcomes. Through sustained advocacy, strategic media engagement, legal persistence, and unwavering local support, the campaign ultimately succeeded in returning the family to the town they, and the community, called home. In doing so, it exposed the limits of a border regime premised on deterrence and revealed the transformative potential of regional civic action. 

The recent acquisition of the “Home to Bilo” campaign archive by State Library marks a significant moment in the documentation of community-led refugee advocacy in Australia. By formally preserving the records of this four-year campaign, the Library acknowledges that what unfolded in Biloela was not merely a local story, but a nationally significant chapter in contemporary civic history. The archive secures for future researchers, students, and community members the documentary traces of a movement that reshaped public debate about belonging, protection, and the meaning of home. 

The collection brings together a wide range of materials that testify to the layered and evolving nature of the campaign. It includes posters, placards, photographs, clothing, artworks, and other materials associated with the protest and support activities of the Home to Bilo campaign. Equally significant is the extensive correspondence preserved within the collection: letters exchanged between community members; handwritten messages and paintings by schoolchildren; postcards written by the family to campaigners, as well as by supporters to the family and to the campaigners. Photographs document the family’s life across different stages of their displacement and return, alongside images of community gatherings and press conferences.  

The archive also contains artistic responses to the story of the family, many of which were created for, or later featured in, the 2022 exhibition Long Way Home: The Home to Bilo Story at Banana Shire Regional Art Gallery. Together with other forms of campaign ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, these materials offer a textured record of a movement sustained not only by legal and political strategy, but by care, creativity, and enduring local commitment. 

The Bird of Bilo: Symbol of the “Home to Bilo” Campaign 

Among the most powerful visual elements of the “Home to Bilo” collection is the recurring figure of the Bird of Bilo – a stylised cockatoo that came to represent the campaign’s public identity. The cockatoo is widely regarded as the symbol of the town of Biloela. Appearing across postcards, children’s drawings, T-shirts, placards, and printed materials, the bird is repeatedly rendered with its yellow crest raised, often marked with a heart, and frequently accompanied by the names “Priya & Nades” or “Kopi & Tharni.” As an Australian native bird, the cockatoo evokes locality, environment, and belonging. It symbolically situates the family within the landscape of regional Queensland. Yet in the hands of schoolchildren and community members, the bird moves beyond national iconography. It is coloured, decorated, reimagined with craft materials, and signed — transformed into a participatory object shaped by collective care. 

Within the archive, there is a folder containing colourful notes and children’s drawings with messages of support for the Nadesalingam family. The materials include drawings signed by the schoolchildren, such as “illustrated by Aarush,” “from Eloise,” and “by Samantha,” alongside handwritten notes addressed directly to the daughters and cards expressing hope for their return. Each signature represents a small yet meaningful act of solidarity, affirming connection and care. As one message states: “we want you to come back. we really miss you”. 

The postcards sent to the family and to campaign organisers further demonstrate how the bird mediated communication across distance. Often depicted holding a heart or accompanied by brief phrases, the cockatoo operates as a carrier of emotion and connection. It translates a complex legal and political struggle into a visual language accessible to children, while remaining politically resonant for adults. In this sense, the bird functions as a vernacular political icon: locally produced, collectively reproduced, and deeply affective. The bird of Bilo indeed condenses the campaign’s central claim – that the family belonged socially, emotionally, and locally in Biloela. Its repeated presence across multiple media forms illustrates how shared symbols can sustain collective mobilisation, particularly in regional contexts where advocacy is grounded in relationships, community ties, and lived connection rather than abstraction. 

Dutton’s Drawers of Inequities (2021) by Jenny Mulcahy, which is one of the two drawers in the collection (the other one is titled Biloela Girls), stages a miniature archive of state cruelty. Composed as a small chest of four drawers containing ceramic fragments, inscribed shards, and childlike portraits etched onto stones, the work materializes the bureaucratic logic that has governed Australia’s offshore detention regime. The title’s play on “drawers/draws” evokes both furniture and the act of drawing, suggesting that policy is not neutral administration but an active inscription upon vulnerable bodies. The ceramic shirts and disembodied head resting on fabric atop the cabinet read as tokens of absent lives, reducing the figure of the refugee to an object catalogued and contained. Inside, references to Nauru, Manus, prolonged detention, and the dispersal of detainees across hidden sites form a taxonomy of exclusion. By invoking the tenure of Peter Dutton across Immigration, Home Affairs, and Defence portfolios, the piece locates responsibility within a continuum of hardened governance. The drawers indeed expose the moral dissonance between official rhetoric and lived suffering, confronting viewers with the quiet, systematized inequities embedded in contemporary border policy. 

In striking contrast to the bureaucratic violence evoked in some of these materials archived, the postcards, children’s paintings, and Christmas messages surrounding the family’s return  articulate a counter-archive of care. For example, the handwritten cards sent from across the country – welcoming them home, celebrating their safety, and affirming that they were not forgotten – transform the impersonal medium of the postcard into an instrument of solidarity. Many bear the marks of ordinary hands: uneven lettering, bright colours, small drawings of houses, hearts, and flowers. Alongside these are the daughters’ own paintings– works shaped by years of confinement yet alive with colour and imagination – which reclaim authorship over a narrative long dominated by state discourse. Particularly moving are the postcards the girls sent to campaigners, including “Aunty Angela”, offering thanks and warm Christmas wishes. 

What has been archived at State Library of Queensland reveals the “Home to Bilo” campaign not as a single event but as an evolving infrastructure of care, persistence, and negotiation. Importantly, the archive expands our understanding of rural political agency. Too often, regional and rural communities are positioned in national discourse as politically passive, culturally homogenous, or resistant to progressive change. The “Home to Bilo” materials complicate this narrative. They show how a small Queensland town mobilised relational networks to advocate for a family facing deportation under federal border policy. The documents capture how advocacy in Biloela was grounded not only in abstract principles of human rights but in everyday relationships: shared workplaces, children growing up together, neighbours caring for one another. The archive therefore challenges metropolitan assumptions about where political transformation originates and demonstrates how regional communities can shape national conversations and policy outcomes. 

Preserving these materials also matters deeply for refugee studies and memory studies. Much scholarship on asylum in Australia focuses on legislation, detention regimes, and high-level political discourse. While these remain crucial, the “Home to Bilo” archive foregrounds another dimension: the social afterlives of policy at the level of community life. It records how people respond when state decisions intersect with intimate geographies of belonging. The archive offers insight into how communities narrate and document their own acts of solidarity and how they create records not only of suffering but of collective resistance and hope.  

Finally, as part of the broader documentary heritage of Queensland, this collection contributes to contemporary Australian history. It preserves evidence of a moment when regional civic action intersected with national policy, media attention, and legal struggle – and ultimately influenced political decision-making. By safeguarding these traces, State Library ensures that the story of Biloela remains accessible as a complex, multi-voiced archive of community action. 

Dr Zhila Gholami
2025 John Oxley Library Fellow

The John Oxley Library Fellowship is proudly supported by the Queensland Library Foundation's President’s Circle patrons.

Read the other blog by Dr Zhila Gholami: Whose History Gets Remembered? Unearthing the Past to Shape the Archive of Now. Collecting Queensland's Refugee history.

Watch Dr Zhila Gholami's presentation of her project at Research Reveals (recorded 7 March 2026).