Gunnedah recently welcomed 15 new citizens at an official ceremony but many of those people have been calling the shire home for years or even decades.
Rajendran Krishnan Mudaliar (known by all as Raj) has been in Australia since 1989.
Many may be surprised to find out the familiar Gunnedah face of 20 years received his Australian citizenship just a few weeks ago.
He was born in Fiji, where he grew up on the beach and worked on his family’s sugarcane farm.
He came to Australia as an exchange student for his Year 11 and 12 studies. His future wife, Wendy, was at that high school, but he would not realise it until later when she was a customer at Woolworths. He studied accounting at TAFE and worked at Woolworths after school.
The couple married in 1993 and had four girls: Chelsea, Chloe, Candice, and Rose.
Wendy wanted to move away from the coast and settle into bush life, so Raj requested a transfer.
The family moved to Gunnedah in 2004, just after the drought had broken.
He remembered travelling with a removalist through the Breeza Plains and seeing how dry it was.
The removalist had asked, “why would you move to a desert?”.
Despite those not-so-comforting words, the family continues to live in Gunnedah two decades later.
“We like the lifestyle, we like the country,” Raj said.
“We do not have any other family here – this is it. Everyone embraced us and helped us along the way.
“I could not speak more highly of Gunnedah, to be honest. I genuinely love it.”
After 36 years, he acknowledged it was “about time” to become an Australian citizen.
Some at the ceremony received their citizenship alongside their family members and among them was the Weilbachs.
The young South African family consisting of Fritz, Dinkie and Kayla landed in Australia during Christmas time in 2019.
The family have been living in Gunnedah since and have happily settled into country life.
“We love it here, we love the small community, we love the agricultural setup,” Dinkie said.
“A better future for the kiddie and more security.”
Daughter Kayla is a Year Three student at Carinya Christian School, enjoying learning with her friends there.
She is a proud member of the local Physical Culture Club and mother Dinkie has dived into responsibility as the club’s secretary.
Others may recognise her from working at Whitehaven Coal while Fritz is the maintenance manager at the Gunnedah Leather Processors.
Fritz, Dinkie and Kayla Weilbach became Australian citizens as a family recently at Gunnedah’s citizenship ceremony.
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