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He forged papers, jumped ship to realise Oz dream

Singh hails from a small city in Punjab, from where he left in 1966 as a 16-year-old to join the merchant navy in pursuit of adventure.

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Some men will go to extraordinary lengths in their pursuit of adventure and fortune. In Gurmeet Singh’s case, it meant breaking virtually every conceivable immigration law on planet earth…

I ran into Singh late one night, when I’d ventured out into Sydney’s winter night for a walk to the city’s famed harbour. It was a serene moonlit night, and I had an enchanting eyeful of the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. Retracing my weary way to the hotel, I noticed a Sikh man standing near a taxi stand, impeccably dressed in a suit. I greeted him with a ‘Sat Sri Akal’, and he, somewhat surprised, greeted me in turn. I lingered to chat with him, and was rewarded in turn with a most fascinating story, narrated in true Sardarji fashion with plenty of guffaws and chuckles.

Singh hails from a small city in Punjab, from where he left in 1966 as a 16-year-old to join the merchant navy in pursuit of adventure. To get around the minimum age provision to join the navy, he secured a passport based on false age certification. After sailing a fair bit of the world, he tired of it, and when his ship docked at an Italian port, he “jumped ship”. There, he worked on a farm for a year and a half as an illegal immigrant, and even learnt some conversational Italian. But again, he was drawn by the call of the sea.

Singh’s passport had been invalidated when he “jumped ship”, so he rustled up some alternative - and entirely fictitious - travel papers on the strength of a bribe, and joined another merchant navy, which brought him to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and finally Taiwan. Just when he was beginning to wonder if he should “come ashore” again, he got word that his ship would be sailing to Australia, where his brother, who had also been in the merchant navy, had “jumped ship” just two years earlier.

Upon reaching Sydney, Singh jumped ship - for the second time in his life. The year was 1984, and a tempest was raging in the Sikh community in India over the Army’s storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which later claimed the Prime Minister’s life. But Singh was blissfully unaware of all this, focussed as he was on making Australia his home.

That process was fast-tracked when he entered into a ‘marriage of convenience’ with a white Australian woman - which secured him Australian citizenship, and his first authentic travel document!

The couple soon parted ways, as agreed, without even a formal divorce; Singh then returned to Punjab to marry a woman from his village, and returned to Sydney, where he’s since bought a home and drives a cab, and where his two children go to school. Life’s good, he says, better than anything he could have secured had he stayed on in Punjab. He’s even sponsored an entire lot of his relatives, and so believes he has his richest treasures around him - his family, which means so much…

Some men will go to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of fortune. In Gurmeet Singh’s case, it only meant forging his passport (twice), jumping ship (twice), and entering into a marriage of convenience…

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