By Sanmeet Bhatia – a westside dad and tech executive
Many of us arrived in Melbourne’s west carrying more than suitcases. We carried the weight of decisions made quietly. Parents who told us to work hard and keep our heads down. Goodbyes that happened quickly, because lingering made leaving harder. Some of us arrived decades ago, some only recently, but the feeling was familiar — the hope that our children would grow up with more choices than we had.
Reading Where the Mustard Fields Meet the Southern Cross by Manmeet Bedi I felt that recognition immediately. Not nostalgia exactly, but something steadier. A sense that this story understood the parts of migration we don’t always explain, even to each other.
At one level, the book traces a Punjabi journey: mustard fields in Punjab, an ocean crossing, and a new life built under the Southern Cross. Told through gentle language and warm illustrations, it follows Teja from childhood to old age — from village lanes to Australian towns — guided by faith, family and a quiet determination to belong without losing himself.
But beneath the simplicity of a children’s picture book lies something deeper. This is a story about starting again. About carrying history forward without being trapped by it. About learning how to live between places without feeling divided by them.
Many Punjabi families in Melbourne’s west will recognise this instinctively. We live in suburbs shaped by movement — Tarneit, Truganina, Point Cook, Melton — places where languages mix easily, where children move between worlds without effort, and where parents sometimes pause before answering questions their kids ask without hesitation.
“Where are we from?”
“Why is our name different?”
“Why do you say it that way?”
These are not challenges. They are invitations — moments when identity is being shaped in real time.
What this book understands, gently and without instruction, is that belonging does not require forgetting. The mustard fields are not something to be erased or romanticised. They are simply part of the inheritance. The Southern Cross does not replace them — it sits alongside them.
For first-generation migrants, there is quiet recognition here. The long hours. The loneliness that never quite made it into conversation. The pride in watching children adapt more easily than we ever could, even when that ease sometimes felt like distance.
For the second generation, the story feels like reassurance. That it’s possible to be fully Australian without flattening your background. That honouring where your parents came from does not make you less of where you are now.
And for our children — perhaps the most important readers — the message is clear without being heavy: you don’t need to choose which parts of yourself to keep.
There is something deeply moving about a fifth-generation Punjabi Australian, now a Niddrie dad, sitting down to write the journey his grandfather once made without knowing how it would end. Many of our elders crossed oceans without language, without certainty, without guarantees — only belief. That belief now lives on in homes, schools, parks and dinner tables across Melbourne’s west.
By putting this story on the page, the author has done more than honour his grandfather. He has given children a way to understand that living between two worlds is not confusion — it is inheritance.
What struck me most was what the book doesn’t try to do. It doesn’t explain migration. It doesn’t justify difference. It simply allows it. That confidence matters in a region like Melbourne’s west, where growth is rapid and identity is still being negotiated.
As I sat with the story longer, it became clear that this is not just a Punjabi story — even though many of us will feel it first and deepest.
It is also the story of Italian and Greek families who once built lives here with similar hopes. Of Vietnamese, Lebanese, Sudanese, Chinese, Filipino and African families who arrived with their own versions of mustard fields — different landscapes, same courage. Of newer arrivals from South Asia, the Middle East and beyond, raising children who will one day ask the same questions.
In Melbourne’s west, we live under the same sky, but we carry different beginnings. The strength of this region has always been that it makes room for those beginnings — not by asking people to shrink them, but by letting them exist side by side.
A Niddrie dad telling his grandfather’s story has reminded many of us that we don’t belong to one world or the other. We belong to both.
The book is available on Amazon via
Alternatively, direct from the author manmeetbedibooks.com
