Australia's First Gurdwara at Woolgoolga

Labourers, then banana growers

By the early 1940s there were a few Punjabis on the New South Wales north coast, working as labourers on banana farms, mainly on a casual basis, and living where they could, mostly in sheds on the plantations. Some elsewhere were hawkers, and others grew and sold vegetables.⁵ Through the 1950s they gradually began to buy their own farms, usually small plots in partnership with relatives or close friends; the first dated purchase in the sources is 1951, when Jagir Singh bought nine and a half acres of bananas, according to his son.⁵

By 2001 the editors of a community history reported that Punjabis made up more than 90 per cent of the banana industry at Woolgoolga.⁵ The barriers the community met were mostly of other kinds: the dictation test applied to Indians, a rule that wives could join only after the men had lived in Australia continuously, a government policy until 1956 of not registering British subjects of non-European background for citizenship, and exclusion from local clubs.^5,6

A gurdwara with no dome

The First Sikh Temple, at 6 Hastings Street, opened in June 1968.^1,2 The sources do not give the exact day. The 1968 ABC broadcast names the minister who opened it as Senator Wright of Tasmania, and Reg Wright was Minister for Works that year; a 2001 memoir in the community history names him as Senator Reg Withers, who was not a minister in 1968, so this entry follows the broadcast.^5,6 The State Heritage Register, as quoted on the temple’s site, calls it the first Sikh gurdwara built in New South Wales and in Australia; before 1968 Sikhs in the area worshipped in homes and at work.¹

It is a simple single-storey rectangular brick building with a pitched roof, and it has no dome. The plans lodged in April 1967 show a concrete-tile roof and a cost of $10,800; the roof is iron now.⁷ The temple’s own history calls the design Australian vernacular in style, open plan and in brick and tile.¹ The community history says some committee members wanted it built along the lines of a Western place of worship, to cater to non-Punjabi guests, and others wanted a traditional Punjabi gurdwara; the traditionalists broke away and formed a second committee. Other people interviewed said those differences over design arose only after the split, and the author found no single overriding reason for it.⁵ The 2014 heritage inventory adds that the plainness reflects the late 1960s and the small size of the community then.⁷

The night before the opening, someone threw a brick through a window of the temple. The broadcast says no one seemed to know who did it, and that nearly everybody denied it had to do with racial intolerance.⁶ After the ceremony the minister took the temple committee into the town’s bowling club, which the broadcast says was the first time a group of Indians had visited it. It was a visit and not membership: the club’s members were absent, and the broadcast reports that Indians could not join the bowling club or the RSL club.⁶

Two gurdwaras, then three

The other committee opened its own gurdwara, with domes and arches, on River Street on 3 January 1970; it was reconstructed in 1994.^1,5 In 2019 the First Sikh Temple’s community opened a new gurdwara beside the original hall, which was kept. SBS reported ten domes on it in 2017, while it was being built.^1,2 In 2020 the 1968 temple and the new gurdwara were listed together on the State Heritage Register (SHR 02044).⁸

A Sikh community in a country town

Woolgoolga is unusual in the diaspora: a large Sikh community in a country town rather than a neighbourhood within a city. The 2021 census counted 1,059 Sikhs among its 6,151 residents, about one in six.⁴

Australia’s Sikh population has since grown very fast, largely through skilled and student migration to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The 2021 census counted 210,400 Sikhs, 0.8 per cent of the country, almost triple the 2011 figure, with a median age of 30.³ Almost all recent Sikh arrivals were born in India.³