The truck driver who answered racism with food and became Australia’s Local Hero

A man leaned out of a passing car in Sydney and called Amar Singh a terrorist. Singh, a turbaned Sikh who drove trucks for a living, had heard versions of the insult for years, on the road and on worksites around Wollongong. This time, in 2014, he decided to do something with the anger. He invited the Sydney broadcaster Ray Hadley to visit his gurdwara, told his story on 2GB radio, and the man who had abused him later apologised on air. Singh has said that exchange was the catalyst for the charity he would go on to build. Within a year he had founded Turbans 4 Australia, a Sikh-led organisation that now packs and hands out food to thousands of strangers, most of them not Indian, many of them people who might once have eyed his turban with suspicion.

A name changed, a place lost and found

Amar Singh was born in 1983 and arrived in Australia in 1998, aged 15, from the Nabha area of Punjab. He came with his mother, two older sisters and an older brother, and took citizenship in 2000. Belonging did not come easily. A teacher at his school in Sydney’s south-west decided his name was too hard to say and started calling him David. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, turban-wearing Sikhs across Western countries were confused with the very extremists they had no connection to, and Singh felt the shift on the street and behind the wheel.

The abuse he met while driving trucks wore him down until, by his own account, it became the last straw. Rather than retreat, he set out to make the turban ordinary. He reasoned that people fear what they cannot place, and that a Sikh handing over a box of groceries was harder to hate than a caricature in someone’s head. That instinct, to answer hostility with usefulness, became the working method of everything that followed.

From one van to 450 hampers a week

Turbans 4 Australia began in 2015 as a committee of five or six people and a single delivery van borrowed from Singh’s transport business. The idea drew on a principle at the centre of Sikh life, seva, the giving of selfless service with no expectation of return. In practice it looked like food. Volunteers packed hampers of staples and drove them to households that could not stretch to a full week of meals.

The operation grew steadily and then quickly. By the time Singh was recognised nationally, the charity was handing out up to 450 food and grocery hampers a week to food-insecure families in Western Sydney, with volunteers numbering in the hundreds; some accounts put the Sydney total at between 400 and 500 a week. A second base opened in Melbourne in 2023, and hampers now leave a headquarters at Clyde, on that city’s south-eastern fringe, every Sunday morning. “People are lined up outside the door to pick up a hamper,” Singh told a regional newspaper after his award, adding that donations had grown harder to find because many of the people who once gave were themselves under strain.

When the country burned and flooded

The charity found its national purpose in disaster. During the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, Turbans 4 Australia ran meals, water, groceries, toiletries and tools to gutted communities on the New South Wales South Coast and across the Victorian border, at one point sending two semitrailer loads of supplies. It was part of a broad Sikh effort that summer. Groups including Australian Sikh Support, United Sikhs and a string of local gurdwaras coordinated hot meals, pallets of bottled water and tens of thousands of dollars in donations for towns such as Cobargo and Bairnsdale. “It has been an honour and a privilege to serve our great nation,” said Manpreet Singh Sapra of Australian Sikh Support. “We follow the true Aussie spirit of help and mateship.”

When record floods struck the New South Wales Northern Rivers in early 2022, Turbans 4 Australia sent more than 250 pallets of essential goods to Lismore and the towns around it. When fire returned to Victoria in January 2026, the same networks moved again. Sikh Volunteers Australia deployed food vans to relief centres at Seymour and Mansfield from 10 January, cooking freshly made vegetarian meals for evacuated families and firefighters. The Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, singled the group out for praise, saying its members were “out every single day, feeding families, emergency crews and neighbours.” Turbans 4 Australia again mobilised from Sydney to reach fire-affected communities in the state’s north.

The langar goes on the road

The food carries meaning in the faith itself. Every Sikh gurdwara runs a langar, a free kitchen where anyone, of any background or none, sits together and shares a vegetarian meal as an equal. Australian Sikh charities have taken that kitchen out onto the road. During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Turbans 4 Australia cooked and delivered 80 to 100 meals a day around Canberra from a restaurant kitchen lent for the purpose, alongside dozens of grocery hampers, run largely by local volunteers who fitted the work around day jobs in real estate, security and aged care.

Sikh Volunteers Australia turned the same idea into one of the country’s better-known relief operations. Founded in 2014 and based in the City of Casey in Melbourne’s south-east, the group cooked and delivered hundreds of hot meals a day when the pandemic shut the city down. It counts more than 270,000 free meals delivered across its long lockdown response, which began on 18 March 2020, and has since driven food to flood zones from central Victoria to Lismore and, in 2025, to Taree on the New South Wales mid-north coast, sometimes covering more than a thousand kilometres in a single run. Its founders were first-generation migrants who wanted, in one member’s words, to build something their children could rely on.

Service as a way of belonging

For the diaspora, this work carries a second meaning beneath the first. Singh has said that Turbans 4 Australia “helps Sikhs acknowledge themselves as locals, and not as immigrants.” The people collecting the hampers are, for the most part, from outside the Sikh and Indian communities. They are farmers caught by drought, pensioners short at the end of the fortnight, flood survivors on the Northern Rivers, families burned out of homes in the bush. Help is offered, in the charity’s own words, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity, and that principle has quietly recast how some non-Indian Australians read a turban.

That reach is what the country chose to mark. On 25 January 2023 in Canberra, Amar Singh was named the 2023 Australia’s Local Hero, one of the four national categories in the Australian of the Year Awards run by the National Australia Day Council, having first been named New South Wales’ Local Hero. The honour sits within that awards program and is distinct from an Order of Australia; no Medal of the Order of Australia has been recorded for Singh. What the recognition captured was quieter than a medal in any case. A man once renamed David, once called a terrorist from a passing car, had spent eight years making a plain argument with groceries and a van. “We’re all equal,” he said. “We all come from different lands, from a wonderful First Nation people to our newest migrants, we’re all equal.” A charity that started as one man’s answer to being told he did not belong has become a fixture of Australian civic life, turning up, food in hand, whenever the country is at its worst.