When Jatinder and Neerja Ahuja arrived in Australia from Mumbai in 1991, they did so at a time of economic recession.
“We came here with less than a thousand dollars in our hands. Even though we came here as professionals, under skilled migration, initially we just worked in restaurants, cleaning,” Neerja tells SBS News.
“The recession meant that there were plenty of people who weren’t employed, so no one was willing to give a break to someone they didn’t know.”
Jatinder had worked as an engineer for an oil company in India, while Neerja arrived with a masters degree in mathematics.
But finding a job and adjusting to a new life in Australia was challenging.
Jatinder and Neerja Ahuja arrived in Australia from Mumbai in 1991. Source: SBS
The couple found themselves using public phone booths to stay connected to family back in India.
“Once we moved into our home and got the phone connected, then we could use landline to call our families,” Jatinder says.
“It was not a concern even though the cost of the call was $2 per minute. For us it was important, we value that quality time with family.
“But for the first 10 years in Australia we didn’t see our family, it was just a telephone call.”
Emails and webcams
By the early 2000s, the couple had started communicating with family in India via email, which was slowly becoming more common.
But the real challenge was making video calls, a technology Jatinder and Neerja wanted for their small business but which was not yet widely available.
Video conferencing from home meant the couple had to connect six phone lines to their house, and pay thousands of dollars for two cameras to enable video calls.
“I remember paying more than $20,000 a year to Telstra for the phone bills, because you have to pay for six lines to get the video quality,” Neerja says.
“(That camera) became a piece of junk as soon as the webcams came.”
The couple, who have two children born and raised in Australia, are still as passionate about keeping in touch with relatives today.
'Heart connection'
But in 2020 the task is much easier.
“From here in Perth, I’ve taught my mother in Delhi how to do FaceTime. She was given a smartphone…she has now picked up (how to use it) and we can speak everyday,” Neerja says.
“But also now with my siblings, because there’s a lot more videos happening with the technology that is there, so we know who is cooking what – I can even see the plate.
“There is more connection there, even in spite of the physical distances. That’s what’s there, the heart connection. You don’t want to drop it just because you are in another country.”
The video calls back to India at the moment are even more frequent than usual. Jatinder’s father was visiting Perth when the coronavirus pandemic spread to Australia.
He’s trapped here until international travel resumes, and misses life in India and speaking Hindi.
“With lockdown, and my father is here, there are even more communications happening on the phone and videos so he can speak to his other children,” Jatinder says.
“I think in a video, you convey your emotions, you convey your facial expressions.
“Sometimes you don’t have to say much. But that small video connection is more powerful than a longer audio connection.”
Rituals and routines
Jatinder and Neerja’s story is one familiar to many Australian families of migrant backgrounds, who have stayed connected to family while physically distant.
Now, researchers in Western Australia have looked into this piece of national history, to see what other Australians can learn from their experiences.
“Migrants are highly innovative. Thirty years ago that meant finding the cheapest phone card,” the University of Western Australia’s Social Care and Social Ageing Living Lab Professor Loretta Baldassar says.
“The statistics show that migrants have higher rates of digital literacy than non-migrants. We think that is clear evidence of the fact that migrants are highly motivated to use this technology.”
Professor Baldassar and a team of researchers reviewed 30 years of data that included the experiences of 400 migrant families, to examine how they cared for each other across physical distances.
The Ahuja family makes daily calls to relatives in India. Source: Aaron Fernandes/SBS News
“Migrant families are really good at developing ritual ways of using the calls,” Professor Baldassar says.
“It might be once a day for a story book reading, sharing a meal together or to teach the kids the homeland language.
“The key here is to develop rituals and routines because that helps everyone feel connected. And it also provides the avenues to share information and to check in, to establish that sense of feeling connected even when you’re physically distant.”
The combination of routine, ritual and crisis communication, Prof Baldassar says, creates not only an important sense of connection in the digital world, it also means relatives are more likely to make an actual visit in the real world.
“The more time you spend together in person, the more time you spend together online, and the more time you stay together online, the more motivated you are to make a visit,” she says.
“So those families that meet for the first time on Skype, they’re more motivated to meet their family members in person.”
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