Punjabis reached Australia in the nineteenth century as hawkers and cameleers and were largely excluded under the White Australia policy from 1901.
A community persisted at Woolgoolga in New South Wales, working in banana plantations, and built a gurdwara there in 1968, which is the oldest in Australia and sits in a small coastal town.
Since the 2000s Punjabi migration to Australia has been very large, on student and skilled visas, and Punjabi is now among the fastest-growing languages recorded in the Australian census. Melbourne has one of the largest Sikh populations outside India.
New Zealand's Punjabi community also dates from the early twentieth century, with a gurdwara at Hamilton from 1977 and a much larger recent migration.
The pattern is the same in both: an early small community excluded by law, then a large recent one arriving on education visas, with almost no institutional memory connecting the two.
The cameleers came from Punjab, Sindh and Afghanistan from the 1860s and worked the inland routes before the railways reached them. The word Afghan was applied to all of them regardless of where they were from, and the Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin is named for them.
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and its dictation test, and the White Australia policy that outlasted them, held the numbers down until the early 1970s. Men already in the country could stay but could not bring wives, so the early community aged and thinned instead of growing, which is why there is no continuous line from it to the present one.
Punjabi is now among the fastest growing languages in the Australian census, and the arrivals are students, nurses, drivers and tradesmen rather than farm labour. Almost none of them knows there was a Punjabi in that country a hundred and fifty years ago.