Gold on the Sails, and the Recognition That Should Follow

One evening in mid-October 2025, a little more than a week before Diwali, the sails of the Sydney Opera House turned gold above the harbour, the white shells washed in the colour of oil lamps. A short train ride west, Harris Park was doing the same thing at street level. In the pocket of Parramatta that locals have long called Little India, families walked out in new clothes, sweet shops traded well past their usual hours, and footpaths glowed with rows of small flames. One festival, two settings. Neither the country’s most photographed building nor an ordinary suburban street now counts as a surprising place to find it, not in the Australian spring.

A festival that outgrew the community hall

Diwali, the festival of lights marked by Hindu, Sikh, Jain and many other communities, next falls on Sunday 8 November 2026. Australian holiday calendars and Hindu religious almanacs line up on the date. They also line up on something else. Nowhere in the country is it a gazetted public holiday.

For most of its life here, Diwali belonged to temple grounds, community halls and family living rooms. In about twenty years, that has turned around. The festival is now projected onto national monuments and staged in the civic squares of every mainland capital. Prime ministers and premiers write it into their diaries. The reach raises a sharper question. Has official Australia moved from decoration towards real recognition, or has it stopped at the photograph?

The harbour turns gold

The Opera House is the most visible sign of the change. Its sails have been lit gold for Diwali for about a decade, part of an annual New South Wales government program of Diwali events that dates back to 2011. The state marked the occasion with a reception at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where about 200 community members, faith leaders and dignitaries gathered. Premier Chris Minns tied the festival to the state’s diversity. He said “the symbolism of Diwali couldn’t be more relevant in our multicultural society than right now”, and described its central message as good triumphing over evil and communities coming together to overcome darkness and division.

Steve Kamper, the Minister for Multiculturalism, treated the lighting as a signal that reached past the guest list. He called Diwali a time “to honour tradition, celebrate community, and share in the warmth of connection”. That same week, Multicultural NSW recorded celebrations in Harris Park, Blacktown, Queanbeyan and Newcastle.

Federation Square and the Melbourne model

Melbourne runs the country’s longest continuous public Diwali. The Victorian Festival of Diwali has been staged at Federation Square by the volunteer group Celebrate India since 2006, when its first event drew about 25,000 people to the square. Co-founder Arun Sharma still remembers the gamble of that opening year. The organisers “had no idea how many people would turn up”, he said, calling it “completely unknown territory”.

The 2025 edition was billed as the twentieth. It ran across 10 and 11 October, with live music, classical and Bollywood dance, a market bazaar and the fireworks that close each night. Recognition from the state has trailed the crowds rather than led them. Victoria’s Multicultural Affairs Minister, Ingrid Stitt, has called Diwali “one of the favourite festivals for all of us in Victoria”. Premier Jacinta Allan turned up in person, appearing as chief guest at a Deepavali gala dinner in her home city of Bendigo on 27 October 2025 and telling the room it was “so special to celebrate Diwali right here”.

Every capital, every October

The pattern repeats around the country. In Adelaide, the South Australian chapter of the Hindu Council of Australia staged the city’s largest Deepavali festival on 4 October 2025 at the Adelaide Showground in Wayville, with a Ravan Dahan effigy burning, fireworks and rangoli competitions.

Perth took its festival to the water. The Indian Society of Western Australia held its Diwali Mela on 4 and 5 October 2025 at Langley Park, a central riverside reserve, with backing from the state’s Office of Multicultural Interests. The year before, it had drawn more than 40,000 people. Each night ended with fireworks over the Swan River.

Brisbane brought the festival into the heart of the central business district. The Federation of Indian Communities of Queensland ran its Festival of Lights at King George Square on 24 October 2025, an event listed on the Queensland government’s own multicultural events calendar. Community groups organise all of it. Yet each now leans on council permits and state funding that were not on offer a generation ago.

Politicians in the frame

Federal leaders treat Diwali as a fixed entry in the political calendar now. In his 2025 message, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wished “everyone a very Happy Diwali”, adding that “as you gather to celebrate the great festival of lights, may this special time uplift you with hope for a bright future”. Foreign Minister Penny Wong marked the day by celebrating “the spirit of unity, renewal and hope” as Diwali “lights up homes across India, Australia, and the world”.

Both sides of politics turn up, and that is the catch. A gala dinner and a warm social media post cost a politician almost nothing. The danger is that recognition settles at the ceremonial while the working needs of observant families go unanswered.

The numbers behind the lamps

The demographic case is no longer a marginal one. Figures the Australian Bureau of Statistics released on 29 April 2026 put the number of people born in India at 971,020 as at June 2025. That made India the largest overseas country of birth for Australians for the first time on record, narrowly ahead of England on 970,950 and well clear of China on 731,540. The India-born population had grown by about 522,000 across the decade to 2025, the biggest increase of any origin.

Religion tells the same story. The 2021 Census counted Hindus at 2.7 per cent of the population, about 684,000 people, up 243,700 since 2016. Sikh numbers had nearly tripled since 2011, to around 210,400. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade calls the Indian community Australia’s fastest growing large diaspora and treats it as a national asset in the bilateral relationship. Trade has moved in step with migration. The Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement came into force on 29 December 2022 and cut tariffs across most of the two-way trade.

The case for real recognition

Against that backdrop, the push for firmer civic recognition has grown louder, and so has the argument about what recognition ought to mean. A long-running petition on Change.org, with more than 16,000 signatures, asks the government to make Diwali a national public holiday. It points out that the festival already holds that status in India, Nepal, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

The idea has its opponents. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has argued against new national holidays on the ground that extra penalty rates hurt small business, and it points instead to existing rules that let workers swap one public holiday for another. Those softer levers are real. The Fair Work Ombudsman confirms that employers can agree to leave, to changed hours or locations, and to acknowledging such holidays at work to promote awareness and inclusion, and that accommodation cannot be refused on the basis of religion or national origin.

Advocates care more about the workaday than the symbolic. They want schools to mark the date, so children are not marked absent without explanation, and managers to free staff who would rather spend the evening at the temple than at a desk. Most of all, they want councils and states to fund the celebrations every year, not stage a single night of coloured lights.

What the lights leave behind

A gold-lit Opera House and a premier at a gala dinner are worth having. Visibility on the country’s grandest stages tells nearly a million India-born Australians and their neighbours that the festival belongs in the national story. But the lights switch off by morning, and inclusion that ends there can read as ornament.

The measures that last are quieter. They look like a teacher who plans around the date, or a council that funds the mela in the ordinary years and not only the election ones. Diwali marks light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. A country that has learned to spell the festival across its monuments could fairly be asked to learn the rest of it too.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.