Vasant Sheth arrived in Australia on 6th July 1959 from Bombay, India (now Mumbai) with her 18 month son, to meet her husband who was working for the New India Insurance Company.
"I was stunned by the beautiful wide streets, the scrupulous cleanliness of the streets. You couldn't even find a paper flying around, or a matchstick, or anything - and the emptiness. Because even in those days, '59, Mumbai was a busy place and you'd never find a street with nobody there. Here when we were driving from Melbourne airport to Brighton, which was about 40 minutes in those days, there were streets where there was nobody, not a soul outside in their gardens, nobody in their houses."
"When we first came to Australia and we said we were Indians, people said, 'Oh, did you go to school on elephants and did you find snakes in your house?' And I could very honestly say that I did not think you went to school on a kangaroo or anything; I knew what Australia was all about."
"If we'd never left we would have continued living in a joint family system. I would not have had the independence I have here. I wouldn't have been able to drive my little car and go where I want to. I would be very much under the social mores that dictate the lives of young wives over there. Maybe I wouldn't have the independence of thought or a say, complete say, in the way my children were being brought up because my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, everyone who lived under the same roof would have a say in the matter. My duties would have been different, my duties as a daughter-in-law. ...I wouldn't have had the freedom to pursue all these things I love doing."
