Born in Singapore, educated in Brunei and India, and of Indian heritage, Suresh Rajan had a thing or two to learn when he came to Australia.
And one of the first lessons was that Aussies don't wear much during summer.
"This was quite a shock to me," he says. "When I first got to the shopping centre and saw people in various stages of undress, I thought 'Wow, this is an interesting place'."
Suresh was 15 when he arrived in Western Australia after spending five years in an Indian boarding school.
"I couldn't understand what the teachers were saying," he says.
"It took me the better part of the whole first year before I actually understood that when they went somewhere 'to die', they did not mean they literally went to die - that's just where they went 'today!'"
Although his fellow students did try to make him feel welcome, he didn't really connect with the Aussie surfing culture.
"I couldn't get my mind around that," he says. "I was a person who, to this day, has not learnt to swim, but it was not an issue."
The former economist also found 1970s Australian cuisine decidedly different until one day, at an Italian deli, he found a samosa.
"To this day, I still regard it as the worst samosa I've ever eaten, but it was the first samosa that I'd seen in Perth and it was a revelation," he says.
Suresh says since then Australian cuisine has evolved and so has multiculturalism.
Although he stresses that all levels of government need to commit to making it work.
"Otherwise we'll go down the path of most of the other places in the world that have attempted it and then discounted it because it hasn't worked because they haven't made the commitment to it," he says.
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