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Woolgoolga

New South Wales, Australia

A coastal banana-farming town in New South Wales where Sikh growers built Australia's first gurdwara, a plain brick hall, in 1968, and where about one in six residents is Sikh.

By the early 1940s a few Punjabi men were working as labourers on banana farms around Woolgoolga, living mostly in sheds on the plantations. Through the 1950s they gradually began to buy their own farms, and by 2001 Punjabis made up more than 90 per cent of the banana industry in Woolgoolga.5

The First Sikh Temple on Hastings Street opened in June 1968 and is Australia’s first gurdwara. It is a plain, single-storey brick hall with no dome.1,6 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 gurdwara; the traditionalists formed a second committee, which opened its own gurdwara with domes on River Street in January 1970.5 In 2019 the temple’s community opened a new gurdwara beside the original hall, which was kept.1 The full account is in Australia’s First Gurdwara at Woolgoolga.

Woolgoolga is unusual in the diaspora for its density: the 2021 census counted 1,059 Sikhs among its 6,151 residents, about one in six, in a country town rather than a city.4 Australia’s Sikh population has grown very fast in recent decades, reaching around 210,000 by the 2021 census.3

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Events here

Eras: Era 6 — The Modern Era

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Sources

Numbers in the text link to the work the claim rests on. Naming a work is not the same as checking every sentence against it; how entries are checked.

  1. Sikhs in Woolgoolga — Historical Notes. The First Gurudwara of Australia. First Sikh Temple, Hastings Street; opened for worship in June 1968; new gurdwara adjacent in 2019
  2. Australia's First Sikh Temple gets a new building. SBS (2017).
  3. Religious affiliation in Australia, Census 2021. Australian Bureau of Statistics. primary source for Australian Sikh population figures
  4. Woolgoolga, 2021 Census All persons QuickStats. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Religious affiliation: Sikhism 1,059 of 6,151 people (17.2%)
  5. Rashmere Bhatti and Verne A. Dusenbery (eds). A Punjabi Sikh Community in Australia: From Indian Sojourners to Australian Citizens. Woolgoolga Neighbourhood Centre (2001). chapters 2 and 3; online text is an OCR transcription
  6. Coffs Harbour City Council heritage inventory and planning proposal. Coffs Harbour City Council (2014). inventory entry of 2014, quoted in the 2018 planning proposal