CHAPTER 14
Mahsheed Ansari
The recent withdrawal of American and coalition forces from Afghanistan marked the end of the longest war in Australian history (2001–21).1 To the roughly 600 000 Muslims in Australia, the war in Afghanistan was a poor foreign policy choice borne of the misconceived ‘War on Terror’.2 Indeed, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Australians have endured a domestic ‘era of terror’.3 While the opportunities provided by a multicultural and liberal Australia have generally seen Muslim Australians thrive, since 9/11 they have become one of the country’s most targeted and vilified groups.4 Muslim communities have endured repeated mosque attacks and verbal and physical abuse in public spaces such as buses, trains, streets and suburban shopping centres. They are frequent targets of right-wing extremism.5
Politicians have much to answer for. Scholars have demonstrated a strong correlation between anti-Muslim rhetoric in political discourse and Islamophobic attacks.6 In the run-up to several elections since 9/11, politicians have, not coincidentally, drawn attention to the ‘imminent threat’ of terrorism, with waves of new laws and domestic security measures. Australia has passed over 60 pieces of anti-terrorism legislation since 9/11. According to the sociologist Scott Poynting, the ‘Howard Government alone between September 2001 and its departure from office in 2007, enacted 48 new anti-terror laws: one new law on average every 6.7 weeks’.7
Many of us will remember when One Nation leader Pauline Hanson walked into the Senate chamber wearing a black burqa in August 2017. The stunt was designed to ridicule Muslims and underline her call for the traditional garment to be banned. The sensationalising of the ‘Muslim problem’ by bigoted and self-serving politicians has given legitimacy to pockets of ultra-nationalists and White supremacists, and led to organised violent crimes against Muslims.8
When an Australian man resident in New Zealand, Brenton Tarrant, slaughtered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, Muslim Australians and New Zealanders felt trauma, fear and concern for their safety.9 To add to the scale of the atrocity, the terrorist broadcast the murders in the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch live on social media. Yet in the aftermath of the attacks, Australian Senator Fraser Anning blamed New Zealand’s immigration policy for allowing Muslims into the country.10 Anning also raised Muslim immigration to Australia as a key issue, calling for its ban in his first speech on 14 August 2018, wherein he evoked and praised the ‘White Australia’ policy in the hope of prompting its return. His comments were widely condemned by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, opposition leader Bill Shorten and most MPs. However, in November the same year, several politicians, including Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, blamed the Muslim community for the Islamic State–inspired terrorist attack in Bourke Street, Melbourne, in which one man was killed and two injured. They criticised Muslim communities in Australia for not doing enough to stop extremism, ‘making excuses’ and ignoring potential risks.11
Peter Dutton linked the attack to the government’s re-evaluation of Australian citizenship. He said it is ‘much harder’ to deal with Australian citizens radicalised in Australia than a visa holder, who can be deported, signalling he would make an announcement in ‘due course’.12 Two years earlier, Dutton suggested that it had been a mistake to settle so many Muslim Lebanese in Australia in the 1970s. Despite objections from the United Nations, he gave preference to Christian Syrians and Iraqis for refugee status in 2015 by classifying them as ‘persecuted minorities’.13 After the Bourke Street attack, terrorism experts dismissed the notion that Muslim leaders needed to do more to counter terrorism, as the man was known to intelligence agencies and had been classified as low risk. Despite appeals from Muslim community leaders about the destructive political debates that conflate Islam and terrorism, this political discourse routinely appears, usually in the lead-up to elections, with lasting repercussions for the Muslim community.
The roots of the anti-Islamic attitudes that are so prevalent today can be traced back to colonial Australia, with the introduction of policies that dehumanised non-White and non-European minorities. The experiences of Muslims, from the Afghan cameleers and Malay pearl divers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the more recent post–Second World War migration, reveal a pattern of religious and racial discrimination. It is also possible, however, to discern exceptions to this discriminatory attitude to immigration and cultural difference in Australian history. Immigration reform after the Second World War was driven by changing geo-political circumstances and shifting community attitudes, but crucially, it was also championed by progressive politicians. History shows that strong leadership at the political level is vital to counter the appeals to division and bigotry that are sadly not uncommon today.
The ‘Muslim problem’ in Australian history
The so-called ‘Muslim problem’ in present-day Australia has many precedents in our history. During the nineteenth century, non-Europeans were free to arrive and settle, but they were not always permitted to own land or given equal status in social, commercial and official dealings. Muslim migrants, such as South Asian cameleers, began arriving after the mid-century gold rushes. They lived on the outskirts of settlements, building their tin houses and mosques in outback fringe locations. The explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills employed cameleers on their trek from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860, before perishing on the return leg.14 The ‘Afghans’, ‘Ghans’, ‘Hindoos’ or ‘Syrians’, as migrants from places including Kashmir, Punjab, pre-Partition Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey were collectively categorised, were frequent targets of racism and discrimination.15 Also known as ‘Mohammadans’ or ‘Mohomets’, (though some were of Hindu and Sikh faiths), they were eyed with suspicion for their lack of Christian belief.16 The writer Hanifa Deen has argued that the ‘Afghan problem’ in the late nineteenth century generated the kind of anxious discussion and consternation that is evoked in relation to asylum seekers and refugees in contemporary Australia.17
The beliefs that underpinned the desire for a White Australia came from the ugly mix of certitudes and anxieties that permeated the newly ‘settled’ Australian colonies, and were later present in the Commonwealth of Australia.18 Colonisation and exploitation were justified by the assertion of racial, religious, cultural and civilisational superiority of the coloniser over the colonised.19 These assertions of racial superiority were boosted by the distorting quasi-science of social Darwinism, which premised a hierarchy of races, in which the Anglo-Saxon races sat at the apex. The self-serving beliefs that literary critic Edward Said later described as ‘Orientalism’ also allowed the coloniser/occident to represent himself (and this was a male-dominated system of power) as culturally and biologically superior to the colonised/oriental.20
Anxieties about immigration and race increased during the 1890s, as economic depression gripped the south-eastern parts of the continent. Sentiments such as ‘Australia for the white man’ were increasingly heard, and reflected in colonial government policies that targeted non-Anglo communities. This racial ideology culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was the first piece of legislation passed by the new Commonwealth parliament. The act delineated Australia as a ‘White nation’, not explicitly, but through its invidious stipulation that potential migrants could be asked to take a ‘dictation test’ in any European language. Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, had successfully lobbied the Commonwealth government to introduce the dictation test instead of the explicit policy of exclusion preferred by the Labor party, as a means of appeasing non-White members of the empire.21 If applicants failed the test, they could be refused entry to Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act became a principal pillar of the tenuous Australian ‘national identity’, which was British, Christian and openly hostile towards non-White peoples.
With the introduction of the White Australia policy came a further hardening of attitudes towards non-Anglo populations. The first settled Muslim community – the cameleers – was subjected to punitive conditions. Camel drivers were required to apply for special certificates to cross state boundaries, and pay licence and registration fees to continue the work they had always done.22 In 1907, the Macassar Trepang fishermen were banned by South Australian authorities from entering the country. So-called Malay pearl divers (a group that actually included Singaporeans and Indonesians) were granted an exemption from the Immigration Restriction Act, but deported decades later when they sought to unionise in an effort to improve working conditions.23 Among these divers was Samsudin bin Katib, who was deported to Sumatra in 1948, despite having served with distinction in the Navy during the Second World War. In her book Ali Abdul v. the King, Hanifa Deen describes the plight of Ali Abdul, a greengrocer from Sydney who was unlawfully convicted of being an illegal immigrant after failing the dictation test in 1931.24
Resistance to White Australia
Australia is a diverse migrant nation, despite the dominance of Europeans in the continent’s very recent history. Research is increasingly revealing the close contact, trade and cultural exchange between the First Australians and their neighbours.25 Indigenous people engaged in trade since at least the 1700s with Macassar Muslim traders for trepang sea slugs. One wonders how things might have been if Australia had not embarked on a racially restrictive path in 1901, which limited the free flow of people and trade; how it would have affected Australia’s regional leadership in South-East Asian markets as well as our political culture.
The experiences of non-White people, whether they were Indigenous, Muslim or from some other discriminated-against minority, drop in and out of the Australian historical record. A smattering of accounts have survived of daily interactions, cultural exchanges and marriages between Asian Muslim cameleers, hawkers and pearl divers and their European and Aboriginal counterparts.26
A handful of Anglo-Australians, including the philanthropist and humanitarian Caroline Chisholm (1808–77), sought to protect the civic rights of migrants. They acted with goodwill, generally aiming to improve the inadequate conditions and welfare of the poor and needy. Although most philanthropical works and services were focused on the early colonial settlers and convicts, there is evidence of provision for other races as well. The construction of shelter sheds in goldmines, which had been proposed by Chisholm, proceeded from 1855, and protected ‘Chinese and possibly Aboriginal or other dark-skinned Asians’.27 There is little evidence of other assistance, apart from mutual exchange of benefits from those who worked with cameleers or were in the sea slug business. Most efforts at advocacy were overridden by the racism of European Australians, who barely tolerated non-White people as lowly workers and little else.
The British government put increasing pressure on Australia about its racially discriminatory immigration policy over the course of the twentieth century. Australian voices who spoke for disaffected minorities, including Afghans, Indians and Malays, became louder too. For example, a group of white eyewitnesses provided court testimony to support the Sydney greengrocer Ali Abdul, who was threatened with deportation. He later won his appeal, since he had migrated legally to Australia before 1901, and was able to call on the testimony of friends and acquaintances from over the decades, and the help of goodwilled lawyers.28 Similarly, the political activist Elizabeth Marshall (1879–1964) and her husband lobbied the Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell and other members of parliament to support the Malay pearl diver and Second World War special forces commando, Samsudin bin Katib, in an appeal after his application for naturalisation was rejected. Katib, a highly skilled pearl diver, had been deported after the war. He was targeted as a trouble-maker, having organised divers against the ‘Master Pearlers’ who had been accustomed to dealing with cheap, tractable indentured labour.29 The advocacy of the Marshalls was successful, and Katib was allowed to return to Australia in 1949.30
Some Muslim immigrants succeeded in circumventing the White Australia policy, among them the Punjabi Fatteh Mohammed Dean and the Kashmiri Fatteh Gulab Deen. The Punjabi Dean was successful in bringing his young bride to Australia after Federation. She would later return to India with her baby sons, all bearing ‘Exemption from Dictation Test’ certificates, which would later allow them to re-enter Australia legally. Dean was a ‘city Muslim’, in contrast to most of his contemporaries who were in the camel trade. He succeeded in his integration strategy as a ‘suit-and-tie’ Muslim – a successful businessman who was able to prosper despite the obstacles to coloured people in this era.31
The end of White Australia
In 1945, Australia became a founding member of the United Nations. The Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, was elected president of the UN General Assembly in 1948, the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.32 From the late 1950s, with Britain’s turn away from its former empire towards Europe, Australian geo-political strategy began a slow reorientation to Asia. These developments compelled Australian policymakers to adjust to an increasingly globalised world that was less tolerant of nations with racially discriminatory practices. Australia could no longer afford to overtly discriminate against nations with whom it sought economic and strategic cooperation.
In 1958, the notorious ‘dictation test’ was abolished.33 Further, in 1966, Australian Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman ‘secured legislation … that allowed for increased migration of skilled non-European migrants’, and gave them the right to citizenship after living in Australia for five years.34 As chairman of the Immigration Advisory Council, Sir Keith Wilson pointed out in the House of Representatives on 24 March 1966, ‘from now on there will not be in any of our laws or in any of our regulations anything that discriminates against migrants on the grounds of colour or race’.35 Thus, even prior to the Whitlam government’s official renouncement in 1973, substantial steps had been taken towards dismantling the White Australia policy. Moreover, large migrant communities from eastern, southern and central Europe and parts of Asia became an increasing presence in Australian society between 1945 and 1972.
A significant step in Australian engagement with its Asian neighbours occurred with the introduction of an innovative educational scheme nested within a bigger cooperative development venture, the Colombo Plan, in 1951.36 Australia’s scholarships provided under the Colombo Plan were aimed at strengthening relationships with Asia and soon became a useful form of advertising for Australia as an education destination.37 It led to Australia’s successful international engagement in the region.38 In this era new opportunities opened for Muslim tertiary students who arrived in Australia as early as the 1950s and 1960s from Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan and India.39 Australia attracted foreign students from Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt as well.40 The vast proportion of these were private international students, whose presence ensured the establishment of societies and associations, which had a lasting impact on social and political relations between Australia and its regional neighbours.41
After the White Australia policy was officially abandoned in 1973, bipartisan support emerged for a policy of multiculturalism to replace the old policies of assimilation and integration into a white majority culture.42 The political changes in Australian public policy since the 1950s and seismic shift to multicultural policy since the 1970s altered the nature of migration to Australia.43 With greater cultural acceptance of non-Europeans, the increased migration of Asian and other non-Anglo and white Muslims was now possible. Young Muslims from various parts of the world came to study in Australian universities, and the new era also encouraged general migration of non-Europeans with some assisted programs to Muslim migrants.44 By the 1970s and 1980s, Turkish and Lebanese Muslim migrants were joined by Albanians, Yugoslavians and Cypriots.45
Muslim Australians thrived in multicultural Australia. There were greater opportunities for education and employment for the children of the settled Muslim migrant workers. Other positive examples of a working multicultural policy included the establishment of Islamic associations and the development of city mosques in Melbourne and Sydney. The personal attendance of the Labor opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, at the inauguration of Preston mosque in 1976 underlined the sense of a new era for migrants and Muslims.46 It also demonstrated that minority communities could thrive socially and politically if their social and political rights, and freedom to practise their faith were ensured.
Lessons from history: The need for political leadership
Australia is no longer the institutionally racist society of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. But there is no doubt that the War on Terror has undone many of the gains made during the era of multiculturalism. Once again, Muslim Australians have become targets of fear, hatred and politically motivated scapegoating. As the historian Regina Ganter suggests, the War on Terror had the effect of compressing various non-European ethnic communities into one body of ‘Muslims’.47 The populist conservatism that thrives in sections of contemporary Australia seeks to drive wedges of fear and suspicion between Muslims and other Australians for political gain. It risks further inciting those on the far right who are fuelled by racial and religious hatred and motivated towards terror.
Australia’s geo-political and economic interests are best suited to multiculturalism and a multifaith philosophy. Mutual respect between Muslim and other Australians, rooted in genuine appreciation for the identity and individuality of all humans irrespective of their race and creed, is not just morally right, but also conducive to the success and growth of a progressive liberal nation-state. As writer Hanifa Deen describes:
History teaches us many lessons: what to be proud of and what to shun. Some people worry that the old gravitational pull from the days of White Australia will reassert itself again – but I am more optimistic, for Australia is not a racist society today. I also know, however, that escaping a racist past doesn’t happen overnight; there are lessons to be learnt from looking at the way we once were.48
Leaders who seek to leave a ‘positive mark’ on Australia, with bold, game-changing policies like ‘multiculturalism’, and increased political and cultural integration with Asia must reject the xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse that loiters around parliament and the wider community. The history of the ‘Muslim experience’ in Australia shows that politicians must not be seduced by populist waves of racist bigotry, as tempting as these may be when seeking to harness electoral support. Eventually such populist temptations wither away in the face of policies based on reason and geo-political reality. Bold leaders can be the champions of true multiculturalism and find a new definition of ‘we are one but we are many’.