Melbourneਮੈਲਬਰਨ

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city of Victoria, Australia, built around the Yarra River on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, with 4,917,751 people in Greater Melbourne in the 2021 census. It is Australia's Punjabi capital by numbers: the census counted 97,684 people using Punjabi at home in Greater Melbourne, the fourth most used language in the city after English apart, and across Victoria 91,745 people gave their religion as Sikh, most of them in the capital's growth suburbs of Craigieburn and Tarneit.

Where is Melbourne, and why do Punjabis live there?

Melbourne spreads across 9,993 square kilometres of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay, through 31 municipalities towards the Yarra Valley, the Dandenong Ranges and the Macedon Ranges. The area has been home to the peoples of the Kulin nation for over 40,000 years. The city was founded on 30 August 1835 by free settlers from Van Diemen's Land, declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847, and became the capital of the new Colony of Victoria in 1851. Gold in the 1850s turned it into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world, and after federation in 1901 Melbourne served as the interim seat of Australia's government until Canberra took over in 1927. Today it is Australia's second most populous city, a finance and university centre with the country's busiest seaport and its largest tram network.

Punjabis live in Melbourne because that is where modern migration to Australia landed and multiplied. Small numbers of Sikhs reached Australia in the 19th century as farm workers, hawkers and cameleers, but immigration restrictions kept the community tiny for most of the 20th century. Melbourne's Punjabi story in its present form begins in the late 1970s: Sikh families were meeting in private homes and school halls by 1977, and the community then grew with each wave of skilled workers, students and family migration from Punjab, above all after 2000, settling where new houses were affordable, in the northern and western growth corridors. Melbourne opens this series' map of Punjabi places in Australia.

What do the numbers say?

Greater Melbourne counted 4,917,751 people in the 2021 census. Punjabi was used at home by 97,684 of them, 2.0 per cent, making it the fourth most used language other than English, after Mandarin, Vietnamese and Greek, and ahead of Arabic. Across Victoria, Punjabi speakers at home almost doubled in five years, from 56,166 in 2016 to 104,949 in 2021, the clearest single measure of how fast the community is growing. India was Greater Melbourne's largest overseas country of birth, with 242,635 residents, 4.9 per cent of the city. For religion, the census counted 91,745 Sikhs across Victoria, 1.4 per cent of the state, against 210,400 across Australia: Victoria holds more Sikhs than any other Australian state, and most Victorians live in Greater Melbourne, so the capital is where the great majority of them are, even though the census tables opened for this entry publish the Sikh count at state level rather than for the city alone.

Craigieburn and Tarneit: the new Punjabi suburbs

The map of Punjabi Melbourne is a map of its newest suburbs. In Craigieburn, on the northern edge along the Hume Highway, the 2021 census counted 65,175 residents, and Punjabi was the suburb's most used language at home other than English: 7,127 people, 10.9 per cent. Sikhs numbered 6,142 in Craigieburn, 9.4 per cent of the suburb, and 3,631 residents gave Punjabi ancestry, within an Indian ancestry group of 8,085. In the west, Tarneit tells the same story a decade on: the Sikh Community of Western Victoria was set up in Werribee in 2001, and in 2008 the sangat bought bigger land at 560 Davis Road in Tarneit, where Gurduara Sahib Tarneit now holds daily diwans of nitnem, Asa di Var, Sukhmani Sahib, kirtan and katha for the western suburbs. Between the two corridors sit the Punjabi shops, grocers, restaurants and trucking and warehouse jobs that growth suburbs run on.

Gurdwaras and Punjabi institutions

Melbourne's first gurdwara grew out of home gatherings. Families had met in private homes from 1977, then in Rathdowne and Box Hill primary schools; the Sri Guru Nanak Satsang Sabha was set up in 1981 to carry the sangat's religious affairs, and in 1984 the pioneering families bought the Uniting Church in Fern Tree Gully and set it up as the first Gurdwara in Melbourne. In late 1993 the Sabha moved to its present home at 127 Whitehorse Road in Blackburn, where the Khalsa Punjabi School teaches Punjabi every Sunday, Punjabi is offered as a VCE subject, and a Gurbani Kirtan School teaches kirtan and tabla. The growth suburbs have their own anchors: Gurdwara Sahib Craigieburn, at 344 Hume Highway, serves the northern suburbs with daily kirtan and Punjabi language sessions; in the southeast, Gurdwara Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji at 198 Perry Road in Keysborough is described as one of Melbourne's largest Sikh temples and a leading cultural centre; and gurdwaras at Tarneit, Plumpton, Werribee, Lynbrook and Officer carry the same work of worship, langar and teaching across the city's edges.

Melbourne is where Punjabi Australia is being built at scale: close to a hundred thousand Punjabi speakers at home in one city, a Punjabi language count that nearly doubled across Victoria in five years, and gurdwaras that began in living rooms in 1977 now standing in suburbs that did not exist a generation ago. For the full map as this series grows, see Punjabi places in Australia.