Hope you enjoy this as much as I did:
He harvests bananas with his golden Sikh dagger strapped to his side, his never-cut beard and hair wrapped inside his turban and his friendly carpet snakes asleep in a shed.
Welcome to the life of Bhupinder Lalli, one of the 500 or so banana- growing Sikhs of Woolgoolga. Bhupinder symbolises the synthesis of two worlds.
There's the Sikh side: the conservative life, an arranged marriage, the importance of praying at Woolgoolga's Sikh temple. Then there's the Australian side: the hard yakka of a lifetime cutting bananas on a plantation north of Coffs Harbour, the bond he knew with his neighbours in Queensland, the joy of living in a land relatively free of religious violence.
"Australia is my home," he says in a Punjabi accent that's accepted the odd stretched Aussie vowel.
"When I go back to India, I can only stay for a couple of months because I get too homesick. This place is where my heart is."
Occasionally, those worlds conflict. Until five years ago, the local RSL club refused to allow turban- wearing Sikhs inside. "We have to wear hats when we go into their temple," they said. "Why shouldn't they take their turbans off inside the RSL club."
The dispute was finally resolved after the threat of court action.
Sikhs arrived in Woolgoolga in the 1960s. They'd been in Australia since the early years of the century, cutting cane in Queensland and gradually moving south. But in the first half of this century Queensland laws prohibited many migrants from owning land, so the Sikhs ended up around the northern rivers district of NSW, following the work until they moved to Woolgoolga. They stopped seeing Australia merely as a place to make money when the Whitlam Labor government made permanent migration a possibility.
They've built two temples and made Woolgoolga the biggest community of Sikhs in rural Australia.
Almost all the men work as cane cutters, blueberry pickers or banana growers. Bhupinder chose banana growing because he can work his crop alone if he needs to harvesting all year round. Some days on his property it's just him and the five carpet snakes that live beneath the warm tin roof of his banana shed.
Woolgoolga's still a pretty conservative town, says Rashmere Lynette Bhatti, a Sikh woman who has just won a grant to co- author a book about the Sikhs of Woolgoolga.
"It's as though it's stuck in that era that existed when the first migrants arrived," she said. "When I speak to some of the brides who come here straight from India, they say, 'It's like India was in the 1950s'."
Things change, slowly. Every day, Rashmere does things that Sikh women are not supposed to do. Like speaking to a Telegraph reporter in a closed office or talking at a public meeting.
"I think that I'm a good role model for some of the women here. I say to them, 'You can be Indian and you can be Australian you can do both, this is what it's about."
I may be wrong, but this may be more of an old cultural restriction on females of the subcontinent than religion based. In India and Pakistan, including the Punjab region, and you get the sense it's considered polite not to corner females alone (unless it's urgent business) but it's not infringing on their religion unless they are from the RoP. Sikhism was formed as a rejection of islam. Women can attend their temples (unlike most mosques who do not accept females, and even the "progressive" ones that do segregate them) and have way more rights than muslim females who get treatment and limited rights based on the way the mohamMAD treated his wives.
In areas Hindu areas outside of the Punjab, the locals seem to like having Sikhs around, but not the RoPers. Sikhs are usually armed with their kirpan (one of their "five k's") and have appear to have settled in to a "traditional" role as armed guards. In some areas, all the stores were owned by Hindus, but every single one had a Sikh guard outside armed not only with kirpan, but with shotguns or revolvers too. The modern day equivalent I suppose.
Most Sikhs have been told, from the time they learn to speak, of muslim barbarity, torture and violent forced conversions to islam of both Sikhs and Hindus. After the islamic slaughter of their spiritual leaders, Bhai Mati Das, of wave after wave of Sikhs, they learned to stay armed and watch their backs. They also seem adept in taking in the best aspects from other cultures and assimilating too.