sentences:  It appears that the first Sikhs arrived in the country somewhere in the late 1830s, when the penal transport of convicts to New South Wales (which at the time also consisted of Queensland and Victoria) was slowing, before being abolished altogether in 1840.The lack of manual labourers from the convict assignment system led to an increase demand for foreign labour, which was partly filled by the arrival of Sikhs.The Sikhs came from an agrarian background in India, and thus fulfilled their tasks as farm labourers on cane fields and shepherds on sheep stations well.