The story begins in hardship. Sikhs had reached New South Wales and Queensland before 1901, when the new federation slammed the door with the White Australia Policy and barred non-European migration. Many who were already here were pushed to the margins of the north coast, working as hawkers and labourers, families left behind in Punjab. Then the Second World War created a labour shortage, and the bananas needed cutting. Woolgoolga's steep plots required no machinery and little capital - only the willingness to work hard in the heat. Quietly, that opened a door that had been shut everywhere else: the chance to lease, and then to own, land. After the war, Sikh growers bought their plantations outright. Today they are said to own around 90 percent of the district's banana farms, and as the market shifted they planted blueberries too.

By the 1960s the community was large enough to want a place of its own. For 25 years the faithful had driven hours up the coast for communal prayers; in 1967 they bought land on Hastings Street, and in June 1968 the First Sikh Temple opened - the first gurdwara in Australia. It was deliberately modest, brick and tile in the plain vernacular of the region, a Punjabi institution wearing Australian clothes. A split in the committee soon led to a second temple, the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple on River Street, raised in 1970 and rebuilt in 1994 with the bright domes that now signal the town from a distance. Two gurdwaras for one small town - a measure of how deeply this community has put down roots.

Once a year the whole town turns out to celebrate that heritage. Curryfest, launched in 2006 with a push from local actor Jack Thompson and the chamber of commerce, fills the streets with around 180 stalls and some 16,000 visitors. There is cooking and bhangra dancing, a children's area, a stage for music and a quiet space for meditation. It is the largest single gathering Woolgoolga holds all year - a town that was once told it did not belong now inviting everyone to its table. The festival has even been studied as a case study in how community events evolved in the twenty-first century.

For all its Punjabi character, Woolgoolga is still a classic Australian beach town, bypassed by the highway and the better for it. Two beaches face the Pacific, and the headland makes a fine grandstand for the winter whale migration, when humpbacks pass close on their way to warmer calving waters. At the mouth of Woolgoolga Lake lie the bones of the Buster, a 39-metre, 310-ton timber ship built in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1884. It had come from Sydney to load timber for New Zealand when, in February 1893, a southeasterly gale snapped its anchor cable, parted its chains and drove it stern-first onto the sand. For well over a century its ribs rose from the beach at low tide - until 2019, when vandals in a stolen four-wheel-drive smashed the most visible timbers, a careless act of destruction against a landmark that had outlasted everyone who built it.