Talk:Sikhism in Australia

Australia Mid‑importance

	Australia portal Sikhism in Australia is within the scope of WikiProject Australia, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Australia and Australia-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.AustraliaWikipedia:WikiProject AustraliaTemplate:WikiProject AustraliaAustralia articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	Need help improving this article? Ask a Librarian^{What's this?} at the National Library of Australia.
	The Wikimedia Australia chapter can be contacted via email to helpwikimedia.org.au for non-editorial assistance.

Sikhism Start‑class

This article is part of WikiProject Sikhism, an attempt to promote better coordination, content distribution, and cross-referencing between pages dealing with Sikhism. Please participate by editing the article, or visit the project page for more details on the projects.

Guidelines: Manual of Style - Naming conventionsSikhismWikipedia:WikiProject SikhismTemplate:WikiProject SikhismSikhism articles

Start

This article has been given a rating which conflicts with the project-independent quality rating in the banner shell. Please resolve this conflict if possible.

Tip: Anchors are case-sensitive in most browsers.

This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.

[[Australian feral camel#cameleers|cameleers]]

Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. | Reporting errors

Moved from Gurdwaras in Oceania

this material should be sourced and then added here or to Sikhism in New Zealand, etc. the home of this text is really just a list of gurdwaras.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:22, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The first Sikhs to come to Oceania arrived in Australia and Fiji in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. They came to both nations as labourers to work on the cane fields, although some came to Australia as cameleers, with some going to Fiji to work in the police forces. Despite their early arrival it was only in 1922 that the first Sikh gurdwara (place of worship) was built in region. The Gurdwara Sahib Samabula was located at Samabula part of the greater Suva metropolitan area in Fiji. In Australia the first gurdwara, the First Sikh Temple in Woolgoolga would be built only in 1968, the time lag due mainly to the enactment of the restrictive White Australia Policy which came into effect in 1901.

As Sikhs make up only a small minority of the population of Oceania, the term 'temple' is often used in place of 'gurdwara' especially by those not in the Sikh community. The names of the gurdwaras are usually used only for official purposes, with the Sikh congregation usually differentiating between gurdwaras using location. Oceania contains the most southern gurdwara, the Wellington Gurdwara in Porirua, Wellington, New Zealand.

The architecture of gurdwaras in the region varies from magnificent domed buildings, like the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple in Woolgoolga to utilising former churches, like that of the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar in Allenby Gardens, South Australia or simple rectangular buildings like the Sikh Gurdwara Newcastle in Shortland, New South Wales.