When the owner of Saltwater Café on Terralong Street, Gülçin Töpel stepped onto the stage to accept the Australian Women’s Small Business Champion Award in the café category, she carried with her the story of an immigrant who has spent more than a decade turning hard work into hospitality, community and local jobs.

The Australian Women’s Small Business Champion Awards are designed to celebrate not just profitability but contribution - how businesses employ locals, support suppliers and show up for their communities.

In the café category, judges look for more than good coffee and a great seafood platter; they look for leadership, resilience and the creation of a identity, all qualities that Saltwater has demonstrated through COVID-19 lockdowns, labour shortages and rising costs.

For Töpel, receiving this and other accolades (Saltwater won the Most Outstanding Restaurant at the 2023 Illawarra & South Coast Local Business Awards) has been deeply personal; she has spoken about her pride in achieving this as an immigrant and her belief that others can do the same, framing the award less as a finish line and more as an invitation for others to back themselves.

On social media, the Saltwater team has cast the win as a victory for “family, friends, staff and community,” a reminder that small business success is rarely an individual act.

After spending her childhood in Adana, a city in southern Turkey, Töpel relocated to Sydney in 2020 where she felt that experience and city had a distinct lack of alignment with her values.

Thankfully, for us, she decided to purchase Saltwater Café in 2021 and the rest as they say is (award winning) history.

“They were a bit hungry for money” she says of the Sydney hospitality industry.

“Money may help a business grow, but money is not everything.

"If you don’t have a great heart, you can’t do anything.”

For Topel, these words are an important reflection of who she is, why she’s here, and what she wants to contribute. They are certainly not “just talk”.

Immediately after the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake, Töpel donated 100% of Saltwater’s earnings to Turkish charities and was well supported by Kiama locals and visitors.

In the national conversation, immigrants are often reduced to numbers in a population growth spreadsheet, blamed by some for soaring rents and tight vacancy rates and unaffordable house prices.

Concerningly, this narrative is well entrenched across our community’s social media pages.

Yet this story is one of many, detailing how migrants expand economic prosperity rather than simply consume it - creating jobs, taking entrepreneurial risks and drawing visitors who spend money in regional towns.

A busy café like Saltwater supports local landlords, food producers and wholesalers, and helps keep Kiama’s high street vibrant, which in turn sustains broader investment and a positive outlook in the town.

As Canberra and Macquarie Street wrestle with migration caps, zoning reforms and housing targets, Kiama’s newest national champion stands as a reminder that people are more than inputs into the housing crisis equation.

The Bugle’s View is that instead of striving to keep immigrants out to “protect” housing affordability, the better approach is to celebrate our community and those that have had the wherewithal to leave Turkey and make a new home in Terralong.