THE CONTROVERSIAL CASE OF THIS FIVE-YEAR-OLD FIJIAN-INDIAN GIRL SIGNALLED THE INEVITABLE END OF THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY, WRITES MATTHEW BENNS
Nancy Prasad is as Australian as you can get. And as patriotic as well. But she could also be excused for feeling less so given the events of 50 years ago.
She endured what no five-year-old girl should have to live through, a pawn in a bigger political and social agenda that would change the shape of this country.
She was a cute five-year-old Fijian-Indian girl with a heartwarming smile but, in   August 1965, she became the face of society's push to end the White Australia policy established by the Liberal government of Robert Menzies. 
Exactly 50 years ago this week, Nancy Prasad was standing in front of the media at Sydney airport as immigration officials prepared to deport her.
A young Aboriginal activist called Charlie Perkins emerged from among the placard-waving student protesters and posed for photographs with Nancy before unexpectedly picking her up and whisking her out to his car.
"Nancy kidnapped" screamed newspaper headlines the next day. "It was quite frightening when the event was actually happening because he was running with me," recalls Nancy this week.
"Then he placed me in a Volkswagen with himself and another man and took me to an apartment where there was lots of toys and food. They were kind and friendly and I felt safe," she says.
At the time, Perkins said: "I feel very strongly about it personally because it's a colour question. Nancy is being deported because of one criterion alone - and that's colour, and that's bad and immoral as far as I am concerned." The abduction had been a stunt to highlight Australia's White Australia policy and it became one of the pivotal events that helped turn public sentiment against it.
"The Nancy Prasad case was really seen as symbolic of the injustices of the system," says Dr Gwenda Tavan, politics lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Two hours after her "kidnapping", Nancy was returned, safe and sound, to her family. The next day the Immigration Department got its way and the little Indian girl was put on a plane to join her parents in Fiji.
Fifty armed police were at the airport to ensure she got on the plane in a show of heavy-handed force that was a public relations disaster for the government of Prime Minister Menzies. Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman had already shown how out of touch the government was by attacking Nancy's family for stage managing the publicity stunt with a group of "lawless people". But he had a point.
Nancy's father, Shiri Prasad, made no secret of the fact he wanted to move his family to Australia. Two of his daughters were already legally living here after marrying Australian citizens.
In 1962 he came to Australia on a tourist visa with his wife, four other children and his mother-in-law. When the visa ran out they stayed on and were eventually deported, but Nancy was ill at the time and stayed on with her sister.
Once the Immigration Department began its efforts to deport her, Nancy's family went to the media and played on her smiling charm for every iota of sympathy it could win her cause. It was a difficult time. Nancy's brother Sam told SBS: "Every time we saw a government vehicle in the street we thought it was the Immigration Department looking for Nancy. We were really paranoid about it." However Opperman, a cyclist who was one of Australia's most acclaimed sportsmen before entering politics, was not a man for turning. Nancy was deported to Fiji on   August 7, 1965.
"We couldn't really comprehend the Australian government was going to that extent to remove a little child from her family that loved her," Sam says.
In Fiji she did not speak the language and would be living in poverty. She had become an Australian celebrity after the abduction but it had not changed government policy.
"Although I was only a little girl I will never regret that it happened because it highlights the bravery of the family against all odds to keep together, it's human nature to fight for what we believe is right," Nancy says.
"The incident escalated events for me. In the struggle to try and reunite the family, my sister and English brother-in-law decided to take me to England and, after some years of schooling there, we returned to try our luck with immigration again, so in a way it was a catalyst for my journey to where I am now." Things were moving in Australia. In the week she was deported, South Australian politician Don Dunstan successfully argued to the ALP at its national conference that it needed to remove the White Australia policy from its platform. Gough Whitlam came to power in 1972 with that pledge to end the White Australia policy. His Immigration Minister Al Grassby was asked on national television if it was time for Nancy to come home.
"If she's still as nice as she was when we deported her when she was five, I'll be delighted to welcome her back," he said.
Nancy's return in   March 1973 was also stage managed - a perfect publicity tool for the Whitlam government to display its new multicultural credentials. She was later joined by her parents.
Dr Tavan says the family defied their critics, who feared they had orchestrated their application with lies and would offer nothing to their adopted country. Instead they became valuable members of society: "They just got on with it and had a life. They settled here and to all extents and purposes they were a success. The father bought a house after just two years." The family also had its fair share of modern Australian tragedy. Nancy's 16-year-old sister Carol was raped and murdered in the Campsie flat they shared. Nancy found her body on the living room floor.
Her sister Irene, 33, died in a car accident 20 years later. She has married a man of Greek origin and had four children: "It makes me so proud of our children, to see them all grow up to be so tolerant and caring towards others because of their parents' backgrounds. This is and should always be the Australian way." But she questions if the lessons have really been learnt: "  Maybe immigration and asylum seeker policymakers should remember they are dealing with human beings that are desperate, so desperate they risk so much to travel here in the hope of a better life for their children," she says.Nancy Prasad does not regret one moment of her journey. "I am so very happy here, this is my land, my country, my Australia. I have travelled to many places and I would not live anywhere else in the world," she says.