Rishta in Sydney

How to read a Sydney profile properly

Three waves in one city, and why two Pakistani families here want different things

Sydney is the only place in Australia with a Pakistani community old enough to have layers, and a family searching here should know which layer a proposal is coming from, because the expectations attached to each are genuinely different.

The first wave came from the nineteen-seventies and eighties — doctors, engineers, academics and a scattering of businessmen, a small group who arrived when there was almost no community here at all. Their children were born in Sydney, went to school here, speak English as a first language and often Urdu imperfectly, and are now in their thirties and forties. These households are usually settled, own property, and are comfortable with a daughter who works, drives and has her own views. They also tend to be fewer in number and socially quite dispersed.

The second wave, through the nineties and two thousands, is the largest settled group: skilled migrants and family-stream arrivals who came as adults, raised children here, and built the mosques, schools and associations that now exist. Their children are Australian-raised but grew up inside a Pakistani household rather than outside one. This is the broad middle of the community and most proposals in Sydney involve it on one side or both.

The third wave is post-2010 — students, graduates and skilled migrants, many still on temporary visas, most of them younger, concentrated in the north-west and south-west. They arrived from a Pakistan that is not the Pakistan the first wave left, and in some respects they are more religiously observant and more socially conservative than families who have been here thirty years, which surprises people who assume the arrow only points one way.

Why this matters in practice. A proposal between an Australian-born daughter of a first-wave family and a recently arrived third-wave engineer is a cross-cultural marriage, even though both are Pakistani Muslims living in Sydney. The two sides may differ on what a wedding should cost and who is invited, on whether the couple live separately from the start, on whether she continues working after children, on how much contact there should be before the nikah, on what is expected of a daughter-in-law day to day, and on how much money goes back to Pakistan. None of those differences is a reason to refuse. All of them are reasons to talk, in detail, before anybody agrees. Our Edmonton page sets out the same conversation at the level of the two individuals; this is the version that runs between the two families, and in Sydney it is the one that breaks proposals late.

So ask plainly, and without any sense of ranking: when did the family come, who was born here and who was not, and what do they actually expect the first two years of this marriage to look like.

The money that goes back to Pakistan

No page on this site has dealt with this properly and it is one of the two or three most common sources of trouble in an overseas Pakistani marriage. A great many households here send money home, and a great many have bought or intend to buy property in Pakistan. Both are honourable. Both need to be discussed before the nikah rather than discovered in the second year.

Start with the monthly obligation. Supporting parents is a duty and nobody sensible disputes it. But in practice the sum is often not fixed, not discussed and not visible: it may also cover a brother at university, a sister’s wedding, a father’s medical treatment, a nephew’s school fees, and a run of emergencies that never quite stops. A new wife who discovers in month four that a quarter of the household income leaves the country has a legitimate grievance, and so does a husband who is made to feel ashamed of supporting his own parents. The answer is the same in both directions: say the figure out loud before the wedding, agree who decides when it changes, and agree what happens when a request arrives that is larger than the usual. If she is also sending money to her own family, the same applies to her.

Then the property, which is where the real money is lost. Buying land or a house in Pakistan from Australia is extremely common in this community, and it goes wrong often enough that it is worth writing down the ways. A file in a housing society is not the same as a registered plot, and societies have been known to sell files for land that is not developed for a decade or is never developed at all. Instalment plans run for years and the value sits with the developer rather than the buyer until possession. Title registered in a relative’s name — a brother, an uncle, a cousin who handled the paperwork — is informally understood to be yours and legally is not, and this has cost overseas Pakistanis a great deal of money and a great many relationships. Money transferred for a purchase is almost impossible to recover if the sale does not complete. And it is slow: a dispute over land in Pakistan can take many years to resolve from Sydney.

So, practically. Register title in the name of the person whose money it is, and no one else’s. Use a properly executed and attested power of attorney if somebody must act on your behalf, rather than an understanding. Verify the development and the approvals independently and not through the person selling. Keep every receipt and transfer record. Prefer registered, developed, possession-ready property to a file in a scheme. And on a matrimonial site the particular point: a couple should agree before the wedding whether property bought during the marriage from joint income is joint property, and whose name goes on it, because an Australian court and a Pakistani land registry may take quite different views of that question, and a wife who has contributed for years to a house registered in her brother-in-law’s name is in a poor position in both countries.

Nobody is buying here, so understand how renting actually works

Sydney is the most expensive housing market in Australia, and for most young couples in this community the first home is rented, not bought. Our Melbourne page deals with buying and building on the city fringe. Here the realistic question is different, and families from Pakistan rarely understand how the Australian rental system works or why a newly arrived spouse cannot simply take a flat.

A rental here is competitive and applied for, not arranged. Properties are advertised, inspected at a scheduled viewing with a dozen other people present, and let to whoever submits the strongest application. That application asks for identification, proof of income, employment details, and — the part that defeats new arrivals — a rental history: previous addresses, previous agents, and a ledger showing rent paid on time. Somebody who landed in Australia eight months ago has none of that. A bond of several weeks’ rent is paid at the start and is lodged with the state authority rather than held by the landlord, and rent is usually paid a fortnight in advance on top, so the money required on day one is substantial.

What actually works, and families should plan for it. Most couples start by living with his family or sharing with relatives for the first six to twelve months, which is normal here and carries no shame — but it should be agreed in advance, with an understanding of how long and what the arrangement is, rather than drifting. Where a couple do apply on their own, a strong application is built from a permanent employment contract and payslips, a clean rental ledger from whoever they lived with or rented from before, savings visible in a statement, and written references from an employer and a previous agent. Agents may accept a guarantor or extra rent in advance from an applicant with no local history; that is worth offering rather than waiting to be asked. And a first lease, even a modest one in a cheaper suburb, is worth taking, because it creates the rental history that makes the second one easy.

Two things to settle before the wedding, then. Where exactly the couple will live for the first year, and whose name is on the lease — because a tenancy in his name alone leaves a wife with no standing in her own home if things go badly. And what the housing cost actually is against the household income, because in this city rent commonly takes a third of it or more, and a family in Pakistan reading an Australian salary has no way of knowing that.

The schooling question, and the coaching nobody warns you about

This belongs on a matrimonial page because it is one of the earliest real disagreements in a marriage here, and because New South Wales does something no other Australian state does on the same scale.

There are four routes a Pakistani family in Sydney might take. The ordinary local public school, which is free and zoned, so the address decides it and people move suburbs for a catchment. The selective system, which is particular to this state: a competitive examination sat in the final year of primary school for entry to academically selective high schools, with opportunity classes two years earlier, and places decided almost entirely on the test. A private or Catholic school, fee-charging. Or an Islamic school — Sydney has the largest network in Australia, concentrated in the south-west and west, charging modest fees and offering Quran, Arabic and Islamic studies alongside the standard curriculum.

The selective examination deserves its own warning. In western Sydney it has produced an enormous private coaching industry; children are tutored for years, weekends are given over to it, and the money involved is not small. Families from subcontinental backgrounds are heavily represented among those who do this and among those who get in. Whether it is good for children is genuinely debated by people who know more than we do. What is not debatable is that it costs money and years, and that two parents who have not discussed it will discover their disagreement when a child is eight.

So the questions, asked before the wedding rather than after the first child. Public, Islamic or private, and who is paying. If Islamic schooling matters to one side and not the other, say so now. Is the selective route something either of you wants, and are you prepared for what it involves. Will the children learn Urdu, and from whom, because in a city this large and this English-speaking it survives only where a family decides it will. And where will you live, since in the public system the address is the school. None of these has a right answer. All of them have an answer the two of you should reach together.

The deepest pool in the country, and the coast on either side of it

This and Melbourne are the two markets where a Pakistani family in Australia can usually find what it wants without leaving the city — inside its own biradari, sect, city of origin and mother tongue. The instruction here is therefore the opposite of most pages on this site: do not widen early, read carefully instead. But do open the whole of Sydney rather than your own quarter of it, because Lakemba, Auburn, Blacktown and Campbelltown are four different worlds and an hour and a half apart, and most families search only the part they live in.

Beyond the city there is a point worth knowing. Sydney is classed as a major city for migration purposes and is not a designated regional area, while Newcastle, the Central Coast, Wollongong and Canberra all are — which, as our Brisbane page explains for the equivalent line in Queensland, pushes a steady number of Pakistani families out to those places on regional visas. Wollongong is an hour and a half south, Newcastle two hours north, the Central Coast between them, and Canberra three hours inland. Further out, Wagga Wagga, Dubbo, Tamworth, Orange and Albury hold small numbers of Pakistani doctors, nurses and pharmacists, almost all of them on regional visas and almost none of them ever searched for.

Interstate, Melbourne is eighty-five minutes by air with flights every half hour, and between the two cities sits the great majority of the Pakistani population of Australia; treat a Sydney–Melbourne match as entirely ordinary. Brisbane is ninety minutes, Adelaide two hours, and Perth around five and two time zones west.

For Pakistan, Sydney has more routes than any other Australian city, all of them one stop through the Gulf or South-East Asia, and the journey is the better part of a day and a half each way. New South Wales observes daylight saving, so the gap to Pakistan moves between five and six hours across the year and the evening call home shifts with it; families who settle on a fixed daily time and adjust it twice a year do far better than those who leave it to chance. Set your own city to Sydney and the partner preference country to Pakistan, and the pool opens to every district there — but establish the Sydney side’s status by subclass number first, as our Australia page explains, because in this community that single fact shapes the next several years more than anything else on the profile.