Sikh matrimony in Australia

How fast this community has grown

A community of 26,000 could look for matches through the gurdwara and the phone book. A community of 210,000, most of it under forty and most of it arrived since 2010, cannot, and that is the whole reason this page exists.

Where Sikhs live, at the 2021 Census: Victoria 91,745, New South Wales 47,165, Queensland 27,713, Western Australia 18,583, South Australia 17,259, the ACT 4,323, and the rest across Tasmania, the Territory and the regions. About four in ten Sikhs are in Greater Melbourne, two in ten in Greater Sydney and one in ten in Greater Brisbane.

The gurdwaras, by suburb

The first gurdwara in Australia opened at Woolgoolga in 1968, among the banana-farming families on the New South Wales north coast. Today the big ones are where the community lives. Melbourne: Craigieburn, Blackburn, Keysborough, Tarneit and Officer. Sydney: Glenwood, Revesby, Parklea and Austral. Brisbane: Woolloongabba, the oldest in the city, and Eight Mile Plains. Perth: Canning Vale and Bennett Springs. Adelaide: Allenby Gardens and Glynde. The regional gurdwaras, Shepparton, Griffith, Woolgoolga, Mildura, Bendigo, serve the farming and food-processing towns where Punjabi families have settled for decades, and the Australian Sikh Games, first held in 1988, move between them every Easter.

The questions a Sikh family asks

Sikh parents in Australia ask the same five things their own parents asked, in the same order: kesh, Amritdhari, which gurdwara, which community, and whether the Anand Karaj will be done the proper way. What has changed is where the answers come from. On the India-built sites they come by phone, days after the biodata has gone round, and they are sometimes not what the photo suggested.

Rishta puts them on the profile itself. A Sikh man says whether he keeps kesh and wears a turban before anyone writes to him. Every Sikh member says whether they are Amritdhari and how observant they are. Community, Jat, Khatri, Arora, Ramgarhia, Saini, Ravidasia or another, is there for the families who want it and absent for the families who do not, with no preference always on the list and the choice hidden from everyone else. Diet, mother tongue, where the family is from and whether someone is a citizen, a permanent resident or on a visa complete the picture. Mark any of them a must-have and the search simply does not show you anyone who fails it, which is how the awkward question gets asked without anyone asking it.

Why Sikh women are not on the other sites

The 2021 Census counts about 112,000 Sikh men and 97,000 Sikh women in Australia, close to even. The largest matrimonial site, searched from here by our founder on 19 September 2026 on a paid plan, offered 51 Sikh women in the whole country, 48 of them in Victoria, and 14 who had grown up here; over six months he saw about ten men for every woman in the age group he searched. The gap is not demographic. It is the women of Craigieburn, Glenwood and Canning Vale looking at a site where any paying member can scroll their photo, where their phone number is the product on sale, and where the family next door at the gurdwara could stumble on them, and deciding against it.

So Rishta removed the things they were deciding against. A woman’s photo is shown to one man at a time, after she approves him, and the two photos then open both ways. She sets who can find her at all: every approved man, only the men who fit her preferences, or nobody except her own matchmaker, and that setting is hers alone. A man cannot send interests in bulk because each one needs a written message. No phone number or email appears on any profile at any price. And nobody appears at all until their ID has been checked, document and live selfie, and our quality team has read the profile.

From a match to the Anand Karaj

When the families agree, the ceremony here has its own rules. Gurdwaras in Australia follow the Sikh Rehat Maryada and the 2007 directive of the Akal Takht, and generally ask that both partners be Sikh; the lavaan are sung in the morning; and where the gurdwara has an authorised celebrant, the Anand Karaj is also the legal marriage, provided the notice of intended marriage went in a month before. Our guides cover the Anand Karaj at an Australian gurdwara, registering a marriage in Australia, and, if the match is in Punjab, the Prospective Marriage visa.

Sikh, Punjabi, both countries

The Punjabi matrimony page for Australia covers Hindu Punjabi families as well. The Melbourne and Sydney pages go suburb by suburb, and the Sikh page for New Zealand is the other side of a search that, for many Sikh families here, runs across the Tasman as a matter of course.