Tamil matrimony in Australia

Two Tamil communities

The 2021 Census counted 95,404 people speaking Tamil at home in Australia, up from 73,161 in 2016 and 50,151 in 2011. Roughly four in ten were born in Sri Lanka and three in ten in India, with the rest born here or elsewhere, and the Indian share has grown fastest with the IT and health migration of the last decade.

The Sri Lankan Tamil community is the older one: families who came from the late 1970s and in large numbers through the war years, settled in Melbourne’s south-east around Dandenong and Glen Waverley and in Sydney’s west around Wentworthville, Pendle Hill, Girraween and Toongabbie, and built the temples and the Tamil schools. The Indian Tamil community is newer and more spread, engineers and doctors from Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai in the same suburbs and in the newer ones further out, and in Brisbane, Perth and Canberra.

Both speak Tamil. Both are mostly Hindu, with Christian families in each. Beyond that they are different communities with different histories, and the people in them know it. The standing complaint about the big matrimonial sites is that they treat Tamil as one thing: a Sri Lankan Tamil family asks for Sri Lankan Tamil and is sent Indian Tamils from Coimbatore.

Where the community gathers

The Murugan temple at Mays Hill in Sydney and the Shiva Vishnu Temple at Carrum Downs in Melbourne are the two centres, with the Selva Vinayakar Kovil in Brisbane and the Sivan temple in Perth serving the smaller communities. Thai Pongal in January, Thaipusam and the temple festivals through the year bring the whole community out, and the Tamil associations in every state run the schools, the Saturday classes and the community halls where families still meet.

Not filed under the wrong Tamil

Rishta asks where the family is from as its own question, apart from language and apart from religion, and lets you write the place as you would say it: Jaffna, Batticaloa, Colombo, Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai. Tamil is the mother tongue on every one of those profiles; the origin is what separates them, and a search can take one side, the other, or both. Around that sit the filters Tamil families reach for first: Hindu or Christian; community, if it matters to you, with no bar always there and your answer never displayed; diet; whether the person is a citizen, a resident or on a visa; and whether they would live in another city, which for families strung between Dandenong and Wentworthville is often what decides it.

Why a Tamil woman in Sydney is not on the other sites

Because Tamil Sydney and Tamil Melbourne are each a handful of suburbs and two or three temples, and a photo on an open matrimonial gallery is spotted at Friday pooja by someone who knows her mother. So the daughters refuse, sensibly, and the parents go back to the sangam notice board. Rishta is built for the daughter rather than the notice board: her photo goes to one approved man and then opens both ways; whether anyone can find her, and which men, is her private setting; no profile carries a phone number or an email; an interest cannot be sent without a written message, so there is no firehose; and nobody appears until an ID check, document and live selfie, has passed and a person on our quality team has read the profile.

Families, horoscopes and the wedding

The family can run the profile from the start if it prefers, show it to relatives who are not members through a Family View page, and bring in a matchmaker once the member agrees. Horoscopes are left to the families and their own astrologer; we would rather say so than pretend to match a jathagam from a form. When a match is settled, the Australian paperwork is a Notice of Intended Marriage to an authorised celebrant at least a month before the ceremony, covered in our guide to registering a marriage in Australia, and for a match in Chennai or Colombo the Prospective Marriage visa is Home Affairs’ route, with its rule that the two must already have met in person.

Tamil Hindu families may also want the Hindu page for Australia; Tamil Christian families the Christian page; and families with relatives across the Tasman the Tamil page for New Zealand. Joining is free until 31 December 2026 for everyone who joins now.