The Aguiar Family
Your surname is Aguiar. It is a Portuguese name, which tells you something straight away about where it comes from. The family is Portuguese by origin, not Indian with a Portuguese name adopted later.
Portugal
The Aguiars are originally Portuguese. Somewhere in the centuries when Portugal held Goa (1510 to 1961), an Aguiar ancestor crossed the sea from the Portuguese mainland to the Indian coast and stayed. The Catholic faith, the surname, and the language came with the family rather than being picked up later.
Your grandmother on your father’s side, my mother, also carries Portuguese ancestry through her own line. Both sides of the Aguiar family in you trace back to Portugal before Goa.
Goa
Goa is a tiny state on the western coast of India - a thin strip of land where the Western Ghats meet the Arabian Sea. It was a Portuguese colony for 450 years, from 1510 to 1961, which is why families like ours ended up with Portuguese names, spoke Portuguese in Catholic churches, and carried in our DNA a particular blend of Indian and European.
The Aguiars became part of Goa. A Portuguese line that took root in Goan soil, ate Goan food, spoke Goan languages alongside Portuguese, and raised its children into the Goan Catholic community. The culture that followed is neither fully Indian nor fully European but something of its own, and that is what the family is now.
Tanzania
Like many Goan families, ours didn’t stay in Goa. The British Empire needed administrators, clerks, railway workers, and teachers across its territories in Africa and Asia, and Goans - educated, English-speaking, Catholic - were well-placed to fill those roles.
Your grandfather Felix Edmund Aguiar grew up in Tanzania, East Africa. His family was part of the wave of Goans who settled across East Africa - in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda - from the late 19th century onwards.
Felix grew up in this community: Catholic mass, Konkani spoken at home, a Goan social club, cricket on weekends. An entirely African childhood with an entirely Goan framework around it.
Australia
Felix came to Australia in the 1970s. He built a life here, raised a family, and became Australian in the way that immigrants do - by staying, by working, by putting children into Australian schools and watching them become something new.
Your father - me - grew up in Australia. I am Australian. But I carry Goa and Tanzania in my blood, in my name, and now in you.
What this means for you
Your surname is not just a name. It is a record of 500 years of history: colonisation, migration, adaptation, survival, and love. You come from people who crossed oceans and continents and made lives in places that were not theirs by birth.
You have inherited that. It is one of the most valuable things you own.
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