Category Features

Ten years after Pokhran N-Test, turnaround in Australia-India ties

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By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 15.05.2008 (IANS): Australia-India bilateral relations have a whiff of spring about them as the two countries strive to take the relationship to a “new level” 10 years after the frosty snapping of defence ties in the wake of the 1998 Pokhran nuclear test.

The Labour government wants to make the India relationship a priority, adding “depth and vigour” to it. One of the three pillars of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s foreign policy is “a comprehensive and revitalised engagement with Asia”, a far cry from the ousted John Howard-led Conservative government’s United States-centric approach.

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At home in the world: Indian diaspora in Australia

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Ian De Mellow pointing at India on an antique map. Photo Credit: © Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 07.11.2007: Nestling amidst the unkempt undergrowth of native shrubs, a haven for Rainbow lorikeets, kookaburras, bush rats and possums, Ian De Mellow’s home in the Sydney suburb of Wahroonga has kept alive his memories of a childhood spent in a Delhi bungalow with sprawling gardens.

“When you live in Australia for some years, as in India, the land itself permeates your soul”, says De Mellow, who arrived on the shores of Sydney in 1948 at the age of 13 with his mother and half-sister. His father, whose career as a superintending engineer in the central Public Works Department was bluntly nipped with all senior posts in independent India going to Indians, joined them four years later.

“There was a tremendous sense of betrayal and disillusionment with the British Raj”, he says. “My mother was part of the secret committee for air evacuation of Europeans, in case the post-partition riots spilled over to consume the European population”.

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Only one Hindu in 1828 New South Wales Census

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By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 19.09.2007(IANS): Hinduism may be the fastest growing religion in Australia. But there was only one Hindu amongst the 36,000 or so residents in the 1828 census of the state of New South Wales.

Australia’s first Hindu stockman, Ramdial, who was born most probably in 1788, arrived in Australia aboard the ship Mary in 1818 with Sophia Browne, the wife of his employer William Merchant Browne, and three of Browne’s children from Calcutta (now Kolkata).

“William Browne of the Browne & Turner firm, which was a tea company in Calcutta, was born in Lucknow, educated in Britain and was employed in the East India Company before he took over the family business. In 1810, he decided to come to Australia for the opportunities offered by the relatively new British colony,” said Brad Argent, a spokesperson for Ancestry, the world’s biggest provider of family history data.

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