The new owners of the Swan Reach Service Station – Raf and Sadaf Memon – are delighted to now call East Gippsland home.
The couple, originally from Karachi in Pakistan, moved to Swan Reach in July after purchasing the business.
The couple has four children who are attending local schools – Umais, 13, Rafay, 11, Ryan, 8, and Jenna, 5.
“We love it here and so do the children,” Mrs Memon said.
“And everyone has been so welcoming, people have been bringing us flowers and cards, it’s really so lovely.
“We really like being close to the water, the lakes and beach.
“And the children, they play cricket every week on the oval behind us.”
The Memon’s live behind the fuel station and have been in Australia for almost 10 years.
They left Pakistan because they believed it faced an uncertain future.
Mr Memon was granted a skilled migration visa to enter Australia and the Memon’s stayed with family friends in Sydney for a week before finding accommodation in Punchbowl.
However, when they first arrived in the country, in February 2009, life initially wasn’t easy.
The family didn’t have a car or a pram and with two young children, Mrs Memon battled to do the shopping, as their rented house was located quite a distance from any of the stores.
“It was really hard, and to walk to the train station without a car or a pram was difficult,” Mrs Memon said.
When her husband returned home one day with a pram, Mrs Memon berated him for spending their savings.
“Until he told me he didn’t buy it, but it had been put out in the hard rubbish on the street,” Mrs Memon laughed.
Mr Memon, who had previously worked in bulk wholesale, purchasing medicines for pharmacies in Pakistan, struggled to find work in Australia.
He trained as a security guard, completing his course work from home after four months.
Mr Memon’s first job in security was at a large nightclub in Penrith where more than 40 security guards were employed.
“It was really funny, because he’d never even been in a nightclub before,” Mrs Memon laughs.
A fight broke out on the first night Mr Memon was there.
“He was really skinny at the time and there were these big solidly built men fighting,” Mrs Memon remembers.
“I just told them to stop fighting,” Mr Memon said.
A job in security on a construction site was a better fit, but in 2012 the family made the move to Albury and purchased a fuel station, which they still own.
In 2016, they moved to Rutherglen to take possession of another petrol station, but when the opportunity to purchase in Swan Reach came up, they sold the Rutherglen business.
“We thought this was the best,” Mr Memon said.
“We saw Metung and loved it.”
“So we decided on that day, the Saturday, after driving over from Rutherglen, that we would move here,” Mrs Memon said.
Mrs Memon returned to Pakistan earlier this year after her father died.
She was there for six weeks and returned to Australia in March.
Not long after, she received news her 39-yearold brother, Karar Shah, had been killed in a motorbike accident in Karachi.
“My brother was like my best friend, a really gentle man,” she said flicking through the photographs on her phone.
“To think that no one gave him first aid, he was left bleeding on the road.”
Mrs Memon’s other brother was also injured in the accident.
“It’s just very sad,” she said quietly.
The Memons are now Australian citizens.
PICTURED: Sadaf and Raf Memon, at their fuel station in Swan Reach, say most people have welcomed them to East Gippsland.
