The Hindu Business Line : Singed & scorched but willing to move on

Among the hundreds devastated by last month’s bushfires in Victoria State is Charnamat Singh Dulay, a first-generation immigrant from Partapura village near Phillaur in Jalandhar district of Punjab.

The 47-year-old Singh’s entire nine-member family — wife, two daughters and an elderly father, besides an older brother with his wife and two children — managed to survive Australia’s deadliest bushfires that had claimed nearly 250 people.

On the ‘Black Saturday’ of February 7, Singh’s family along with 10 employees at their farm at Kinglake, about 60 km from here, miraculously escaped the fires fanned by winds of up to 100 km-an-hour. They drove up right into the isolated middle of the farm, from where they saw everything burn down within minutes.

“We lost property of about $1.5 million — office building, machinery sheds, cold storage units, ice-makers, tractors, trucks and water pipes — apart from stored crop worth $300,000. All we could do is watch helplessly from our cars and thank the holy Waheguru for sparing our lives,” said Singh in his thick Punjabi-accented English.

Singh landed in Australia in 1986, courtesy his wife who belonged to an already third-generation settled Sikh immigrant family. “It was the uncertain environment following the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that prompted me to leave my village and our 20-acre farm. I started as a labourer in a flower farm in Brisbane and also worked in a garment factory, before taking up driving taxis and trucks,” he recalled.

In 1996, Singh decided to do what comes naturally to his community — “you know we are basically farmers wherever we are”. Driving extensively through Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales had exposed him to the Australian countryside and “I finally bought a 92-acre plot at Kinglake from my savings and borrowings from relatives”.

The choice of location was good. “It had natural underground spring water. And being hardly an hour from the city-centre, it was ideal for growing broccoli and snow peas, which I could sell directly to agents and supermarkets here. Farming wheat and other commodity crops makes sense in Australia only if you have 1,000 acres-plus,” he pointed out.

Ten years later — by which time his father and brother, Mukhtiar, had also joined in — Singh had acquired another 52 acres just five km away from the existing property. “We were doing business of $500,000 to $600,000 annually and our plan was to cultivate mushrooms as well, which would have taken us past $1 million. But then, all this happened,” he said in a tone betraying little emotion.

So, what next? “Life has to go on and we will start all over again. If Waheguru gives us grief, he also gives us the strength to withstand it,” he observed.

What about insurance? “Barring my 13 tractors and six trucks, there’s not much that insurance can recover. What I am looking for is a soft loan to help us rebuild and which can be repaid over time. My problem is I have no real assets now to pledge with banks,” Singh said.

“He is too proud to seek charity. When the Gurdwara here raised $50,000 in his support, he refused saying that the money be used to help all the affected families,” according to Perminder Rayat, a family friend.

“From what we hear, he is quite a popular man active in sponsoring kabaddi tournaments and organising the annual Australian Sikh Games. We have also seen him photographed with prominent politicians, including the Victorian Premier, Mr John Brumby,” said the Indian Consul-General in Melbourne Anita Nayar.

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