About eLanka

eLanka

Overview

eLanka is an online news and community portal for Sri Lankans in Australia, published at elanka.com.au. It describes its vision as bringing together the global Sri Lankan community and its mission as sharing and celebrating positive stories about Sri Lankans worldwide. In practice it works as a daily community newspaper and noticeboard combined: news from Sri Lanka and from the Sri Lankan community across Australia, event listings for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities, photo galleries of community functions, a business directory and classifieds, and a free newsletter emailed to members.

The portal states on its own pages that it has been operating since 2005, which makes it one of the longer-running Sri Lankan community websites in Australia. Its editorial team includes a Melbourne-based sports editor, and its long-time editor-in-chief is Desmond Kelly, a Sri Lankan-born, Melbourne-based writer and musician whose columns are a fixture of the site. eLanka is a private organisation registered in Australia. It is a separate publication from OzLanka, the Sydney community site run by the Sinhalese Cultural Centre; the two share a community and a subject matter but have different owners, editors and histories.

History

eLanka dates its inception to 2005. Retrospective material on the site explains the thinking behind it: before the portal existed, information about Sri Lankan community gatherings and cultural milestones in Australia was fragmented and circulated through disparate, localised channels, and eLanka was created to centralise community news and events on one platform. Over the following two decades it grew from that listings-and-news core into a broader portal, adding a business directory, photo galleries, classified advertising and property listings, and spinning off dedicated sister services for weddings, online shopping and Sri Lankan real estate.

For much of that period the public face of eLanka has been its editor-in-chief, Desmond Kelly ("Des Kelly"), a Sri Lankan-born writer and musician who settled in Melbourne and became a prolific community columnist. A biographical profile published on the site records that Kelly served in the Royal Ceylon Navy, performed and recorded as a singer-songwriter — including an album of Ceylon folk songs — ran his own security company in Australia, and turned to journalism in later life. The profile describes him as editor-in-chief of eLanka and of a companion newspaper, the Lanka Times, and his signed editorials — part memoir, part community commentary — have appeared on the portal for years. Readers' testimonials published on the site through 2021 and 2022 are addressed to him in that role. The site's About page directs advertising enquiries to Neil Kelly, and testimonials also thank "Neil and Team eLanka", indicating a small family-run team behind the portal.

Content and Coverage

eLanka publishes daily. Its front page at the time of writing carried multiple articles dated the same day in October 2026: Sri Lanka news, including cricket and rugby results and Sri Lankan business stories; Australian community news, such as the Australia Sri Lanka Business Council's twenty-fifth anniversary awards in Melbourne and local council news from Liverpool in Sydney; and contributed features, from health columns by Dr Harold Gunatillake to arts writing and community history.

Sport is a particular strength. The site's sports editor, Trevine Rodrigo, reports from Melbourne on Sri Lankan and Australian sport — cricket series, rugby and athletics — while long-standing contributors such as Sunil Thenabadu file profiles and match reports. Regular columns include "Good News From Jayam", a roundup compiled by Jayam Rutnam, and a "Community Engagement Newsletter". A Sinhala movies section streams and promotes Sri Lankan films, and a photo gallery records dinner dances and community celebrations in Australia and overseas.

The events service is the portal's other pillar. eLanka lists Sri Lankan events across Australia — concerts, dinner dances, film screenings, religious observances and business functions — organised by city, and promotes them through its newsletter and email marketing services. Its classifieds and business directory carry everything from Sri Lankan restaurants and jewellers in Sydney to property for sale in Sri Lanka, a significant strand of the site aimed at migrants maintaining ties with the island.

Regular features give the site a magazine character alongside the news flow. Savithri Rodrigo's "Kaleidoscope" column packages community and lifestyle topics into a numbered digest; "Maxie's Corner" carries cartoons by Max Gerreyn; and long-running health and wellbeing columns by Dr Harold Gunatillake address topics from diabetes to the benefits of daily walking. The site maintains a calendar of Sri Lankan and Australian holidays, runs a photo gallery of members' events, and its newsletter editions — numbered and dated, and archived on the site back over many years — repurpose the week's news, events and advertising for the email audience. Testimonials published by the organisation from readers in Australia and overseas, including members of the Burgher community in the United States, suggest the newsletter's reach extends well beyond Australia's Sri Lankan population.

Audience and Reach

eLanka is aimed at the Sri Lankan community in Australia and, secondarily, at the wider global diaspora. Its own About page states that it has over 25,000 members, that more than 1,000 people a day visit the website, and that it sends a free newsletter to members weekly; the site's homepage invites readers to receive the newsletter twice a week. These are the organisation's own figures, presented by it without independent audit, and they are recorded here as its claims rather than as verified measurements. Its own earlier statements chart growth on the same basis: a newsletter appeal in May 2019 boasted "more than 20,000 members", against the 25,000 members stated on the current About page. Membership is free, and article publishing, event listings, the photo gallery and the newsletter are all free services to the community; the operation is funded by advertising, email marketing for businesses, and donations.

Digital Presence

eLanka is a web-only publication. Its main site, elanka.com.au, is updated daily with articles, events and classifieds, and is supported by three sister services: eLanka Weddings (elankaweddings.com.au), eLanka Shop (elankashop.com) and eLanka Property (elankaproperty.com). The newsletter is the main distribution channel alongside the site itself, delivered free to the member mailing list, which the organisation describes as a large database of Sri Lankans in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The site also promotes events and stories through its email campaign services for advertisers.

Ownership and Organisation

eLanka describes itself as a private organisation registered in Australia. Unusually for an Australian community publication, its technical operation is offshore: the About page explains that its IT support and digital marketing are done by a small dedicated team in Sri Lanka, and that donations and advertising money received go directly to pay that team's salaries — in the site's words, to better the lives of the small IT team and their families in Sri Lanka. Editorial direction sits in Australia, under editor-in-chief Desmond Kelly, with named section contributors such as sports editor Trevine Rodrigo in Melbourne and a network of community columnists. The organisation publishes its values as authenticity, service excellence, innovation, outstanding value and social consciousness toward its members and clients.

Contact and Availability

eLanka is published online at elanka.com.au and is updated daily; readers can register free as members to receive the newsletter. The site invites corrections and enquiries by email at info@elanka.com.au, and its About page directs advertising enquiries to neil@eLanka.com.au. Events, articles, photographs and business listings can be submitted through the site, with paid promotion available through its email marketing and business directory services.