Little Lanka: Sri Lankans in Melbourne, by the numbers

Half of all Sri Lanka-born Australians live in one city. One in five of them arrived in the last five years of the count.

Walk through Dandenong, Clayton or Glen Waverley on a Saturday and you can buy hoppers, find a Buddhist temple, and hear Sinhala and Tamil in the same queue. The census explains why: Melbourne is the centre of Sri Lankan Australia.

Who they are

Nearly half (48.6%) of Melbourne’s Sri Lanka-born residents are Buddhist. The most common type of work is professional, at 28% of those employed. Most speak another language at home as well as English, and arrivals have come in waves: the largest group, 29%, came between 2001 and 2010.

Two cities, one community. Most of it lives an hour from the CBD.

Why it matters for Colombo

This community doesn’t just live in Melbourne. It sends money home, flies back for weddings and funerals, and watches Sri Lanka’s economy from a distance. Many of the families who held on through the 2022 crisis did so with help from a relative abroad. We’ll be telling those stories from both ends.

Source: ABS 2021 Census, Greater Melbourne and Australia, people born in Sri Lanka. The share is our calculation from those figures. The 2026 Census results are due in 2027.