Ghostwriter for Indians in Australia
784,000 people claimed Indian ancestry at the 2021 census. It is the fastest-growing diaspora in the country and the youngest, which is exactly why the elders need recording now.
Australia’s Indian community is unusual. It arrived late and grew fast. The 2021 census recorded 783,958 people of Indian ancestry, 3.1 percent of the country, with 673,352 born in India. Most families here are one generation deep.
That shapes the books. In Canada or the UK I am often writing about a family that has been there since the sixties. In Australia I am usually writing the first chapter of a family’s presence in the country, while the person who wrote it is still in their fifties or sixties.
What an Indian-Australian book usually contains
The student visa
A very large share of these families started with someone arriving to study, working nights, and staying. It is the founding chapter of the community and it is barely recorded anywhere.
The distance
Australia is far in a way the US and UK are not. Missed funerals, parents seen once every three years, a mother who has never met a grandchild in person. This is the emotional centre of many of these books.
The parents left in India
Often the second commission. A family in Melbourne asks me to record a grandfather in Hyderabad, because the visits are too short and too few to ever do it themselves.
The business built here
Medical practices, IT firms, restaurants, freight, property. Founders in their fifties who are only now realising the story is worth writing while they can still remember the hard years exactly.
Children with Australian accents
The reason it gets commissioned. A son in Sydney who has been to India four times and wants to know what his father actually gave up.
Where my clients are
Melbourne above all, then Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. The work runs over video and voice memo. Australia is four and a half to six and a half hours ahead of India depending on the state and the season, which makes it one of the easiest diasporas to schedule with. Mornings in Australia are early mornings in India, evenings work both ways.
The split-country commission
The most common shape of an Australian project. The client is in Melbourne. The subject is a parent in Chennai or Amritsar who is 80 and not travelling again.
I am in India. I sit with your father in his own house, in his own language, and record properly. You join the sessions you want to join. That solves the problem that the family in Australia cannot solve from twelve thousand kilometres away with a phone and two weeks of annual leave.
How it works
A first conversation, free. Then a paid page in your voice or your father’s, built from one recorded hour, so you judge the voice before committing. Then interviews, then six to twelve months of writing. One client at a time. My name goes nowhere unless you ask.
Defined engagements start at $2,500, quoted in US dollars. Full books are scoped after the first conversation.
Begin a conversation Ask for a page in your voice
Questions Australian families ask
Do you work with clients in Australia?
Yes, across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra, over video and voice memo. Australia and India overlap well, which makes scheduling easier here than for most diasporas.
Can you interview my parents in India while we are in Australia?
Yes, and this is the most common Australian commission. I am in India and can sit with them in their own house and their own language, with you joining the sessions you want to join.
My parents are in a Telugu or Tamil-speaking household. Does that work?
Yes. Interviews happen in whatever mix of languages the story lives in, with interpretation arranged where the language is outside mine. The book reads clean in English for the grandchildren.
We arrived on a student visa in 2003. Is that enough of a story?
It is the story. That arrival is the founding chapter of Indian Australia and almost none of it has been written down. Your children will not know what those years cost unless somebody records it.
How is the book printed and delivered?
Printing is arranged where the family is and copies ship to whichever countries the family lives in, which for Australian families almost always means at least two.
Twelve thousand kilometres is not a reason to lose the story.
Tell me where your family is and I will tell you how it would work. I respond within 48 hours.