At 7:30 in the morning on 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru had not yet spoken. Delhi had not yet woken into freedom. The tricolour had not yet climbed the Red Fort.
But in Canberra, it was already midday. And on a quiet lawn outside a building called India House, a man named Sir Raghunath Paranjpye – India’s first High Commissioner to Australia – pulled a rope, and the saffron, white and green rose into a cold Australian winter sky.
Because of the seven-and-a-half-hour time difference between Canberra and Delhi, the Indian flag flew over Australian soil before it officially flew over free India itself.
Sit with that for a second. Before the ink was dry on independence. Before the parades. Before the speeches every Indian schoolchild can recite. A small crowd of Australians and Indians stood together on a lawn eleven thousand kilometres from home, and watched a new nation announce itself to the world — from here.
That is the story most of us were never taught. And it is only the beginning of a much bigger one: the real history of India and Australia, and the people who quietly built the bridge between them long before either government shook hands on it.
Happy Independence Day, India 🇮🇳
To every Indian and Indian-Australian reading this today — in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Harris Park, Parramatta and every town in between – this day belongs to you, and today, so does this piece of Australian history.
Happy 79th Independence Day. Jai Hind.
The Camel Men Who Built the Outback
India’s connection to this continent didn’t start with a High Commissioner in 1947. It started decades earlier, on foot, in the desert.
From the 1860s, men from Punjab, Sindh, Rajasthan and the North-West Frontier came to Australia to work the camel trains – the only transport that could survive the dead heart of the country before there were roads or railways. History flattened them into a single word, “Afghans,” regardless of where they were actually born. They strung together Adelaide, Alice Springs, Broken Hill, Marree and Broome, carrying the mail, the wool, the water pipes and the survey teams that built modern Australia’s interior.
Many married into Aboriginal families, because colonial law made it almost impossible for them to marry anyone else. Their children were among Australia’s first-ever multicultural families — a quiet, undocumented meeting of two of the world’s oldest civilisations, on the world’s oldest continent.
Monga Khan: The Hawker Who Became an “AUSSIE”
Alongside the cameleers came the hawkers — Indian traders who walked hundreds of kilometres between remote homesteads, selling fabric, lace and haberdashery to farming families who might not see another face for weeks.
One of them was a man named Monga Khan, who arrived in Victoria in 1895 and spent decades walking between Melbourne, Ballarat and Ararat with his goods. In 1916, sick and ageing, he applied to the Australian government for permission to visit his family back home and be allowed to return. His neighbours vouched for him in writing – “honest and industrious, sober and most respectful.” The exemption was granted. He came home. He died in Ararat in 1930, in the country he’d spent half his life building.
For a hundred years, his photograph sat quietly in the National Archives of Australia. Then, in 2016, an Adelaide artist named Peter Drew found it, and pasted a thousand copies of Monga Khan’s face across the country – under one word: AUSSIE.
He wasn’t being provocative. He was correcting the record.
Because that’s the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath this friendship: for much of the twentieth century, the relationship between India and Australia was carried by ordinary Indian hands, while Australian law told those same hands they didn’t fully belong. The White Australia Policy, in force from 1901, restricted the very people who had helped build the outback, who traded honestly, who served this country. It is not a footnote. It is part of the story, and honouring the friendship means not looking away from it.
But history rarely stays where the law leaves it.
1944: Before Independence, a Friendship Was Already Forming
By the early 1940s, as India’s independence movement gathered its final momentum, Australia was already watching closely and moving.
In 1941, India opened a trade office in Sydney, years before independence was even certain. In 1944, Australia sent Lieutenant General Iven Mackay to New Delhi as its first High Commissioner to India — making India the first country in Asia with which Australia exchanged full diplomatic representation. Mackay met Nehru while Congress leaders were still being released from British prisons. He was there, quietly, at the birth.
And so, three years later, when freedom finally came, it made sense — almost poetically — that it touched Australian soil first. Not because Australia earned that moment. Because geography gave it that moment, and history had already tied the two nations together tightly enough for it to matter.
From Cricket Pitches to Suburban Sydney: India in Australia Today
Today, close to a million Australians trace their heritage to India. It is now Australia’s fastest-growing community of new citizens doctors and drivers, students and shopkeepers, cricketers and coders, aunties running weekend Hindi and Punjabi classes in suburban school halls.
Cricket, which began between the two nations as a colonial import, is now one of the most-watched sporting rivalries on Earth, filling the MCG with saffron, white and green every summer.
None of that is an accident of the present. It’s the second half of a story that started with camel bells in the desert and a flag rope in Canberra.
Where the Story Continues: Community, Not Just History
History isn’t only kept in archives — it’s kept alive in community. If you’re an Indian Australian in New South Wales, one of the places that history lives today is Indians in Sydney, the largest Facebook community of its kind in Australia. What began as a small group in 2007 has grown into a home for over 135,000 members, a place to celebrate festivals, find support as a new arrival, share small wins, and simply be seen. It’s a modern-day version of what the hawkers and cameleers never had: a community that has your back the moment you land.
If this story moved you, that’s a good place to keep the conversation going l and to meet the people carrying this history forward, one shared post at a time.
A Friendship Still Being Written
So today, as India turns 79 free years old, we don’t just say happy Independence Day from a distance. We say it as two countries that have been quietly, imperfectly, stubbornly building each other for over 150 years through injustice and through friendship, through exclusion and through welcome, through hawkers’ footpaths and diplomats’ handshakes.
To every Indian-Australian carrying both flags in their heart today: your story isn’t a footnote to Australian history.
You were there when it rose.
Happy Independence Day. Jai Hind. 🇮🇳🇦🇺
— Indians in Sydney
Just for your information ..
When did the Indian flag first fly in Australia?
On 15 August 1947, at India House in Canberra, at 12:00pm local time which, due to the time difference, was before the official flag-raising in Delhi.
Who were the first Indians in Australia?
The first documented Indian migrants arrived in the late 1830s. The largest early wave came from the 1860s onward — Punjabi and North-West Frontier cameleers who built Australia’s inland transport network, followed by Indian hawkers and, later, agricultural labourers in Queensland.
How many Indian-Australians are there today?
Close to one million Australians now trace their heritage to India, making Indian Australians one of the country’s fastest-growing migrant communities.
