In the Footsteps of the Ancestors – Muslims Down Under: a mostly positive view of Australian Muslims and their history and cultures

Nada Roude, “In the Footsteps of the Ancestors – Muslims Down Under” (2009)

A little known timeline of Australian history extends further back than 1788 when the first European settlement of the country began and this is the history of Muslim interaction with the continent. It may have begun as far back as the 14oos when the Chinese explorer Zheng He, himself a Muslim from Yunnan in southern China, sailed his fleet through Southeast Asia and might have made landfall on Australian shores; some intriguing Y-chromosome DNA studies of Aboriginal men in northwestern Australia which found that a tiny percentage of these men had a Y-chromosome lineage typical of Chinese men but not of Indonesian or other Southeast Asian men suggest Chinese-Australian contact in pre-colonial times. However the history of Muslim contact with and settlement in Australia really begins with the visits of Macassan fishermen from Sulawesi island in central Indonesia to northern Australia to trade with the local people there for beche-de-mer. Following a chronological structure, the documentary later switches to the arrival of camel drivers from Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in central Australia, exploring why they came, what they did and how they coped with maintaining their beliefs in an alien culture and environment, and what happened to their descendants.

Using a mix of archival materials and interviews, the documentary presents a mostly positive view of Muslim immigration and settlement in the country. It is at its strongest and most interesting in delineating the early history of Muslims here, where they came from, some the reasons why they came, what they did and what their contributions to the country’s life are. We learn that Muslim camel drivers and hawkers helped open up transport routes and enabled families living in isolated rural areas to keep in contact with others, run their households and farms, and bring up children. Albanians arriving in the 1920s and 1930s worked as unskilled and semi-skilled labour at first and later established orchards in northern Victoria. Immigrants from Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon began arriving in the 1950s and 1960s to assist in the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme and later to work in factories in Australia’s burgeoning manufacturing sectors.

The second half of the documentary concentrates on Muslim efforts to build up community life and institutions leading to the establishment of State councils and a national structure to co-ordinate Muslim communal activities and represent Muslims to a wider Australian community. Although the country’s first mosque was established in Broken Hill early in the 20th century to cater for the Afghan and Indian camel drivers and hawkers, further mosque construction began in earnest only during the 1960s and 1970s. Later, Islamic schools offering an all-round education from kindergarten to matriculation with instruction in the Muslim religion were established. The documentary also examines some cultural barriers, such as differences in burial practices from Christian practice, Muslims have had to overcome in order to practise their faith in accordance with their beliefs.

In the wake of increased hostility to Islam and Muslims worldwide since the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in New York City in September 2001, this documentary seeks to present a positive picture of Muslims  and their contributions to Australian society and culture. It does skip over divisions within the community itself and some of the cultural issues it grapples with, such as the alienation of second and third-generation youth within the community who are caught between traditions and histories they might not feel any connection to and the seductions of a global Western-dominated youth culture, focussed on easy fame, wealth and instant sensual gratification, aimed at harvesting their money from their pockets. The emphasis on the success of Muslims, especially Muslim women, in education, community life and other mainstream areas of Australian society and culture ignores the problems of Muslim men, especially young men from working-class families in which book learning and reading are rare if not unknown, in an economy whose manufacturing sector has shrunk to minuscule levels and which increasingly requires its workers to have above-average levels of literacy and written skills. The attention given to Muslim burial practice seems fussy in a documentary that strives to educate and inform in a general way. Divisions within the Australian Muslim community over how to deal with religious and racist prejudices against its members, and prejudices among themselves, are also not dealt with. The danger in portraying the Australian Muslim community as a “happy family” monolith, masking very real differences among them, is that Muslims might be seen as smug and complacent about their place in Australia, out of touch with issues confronting all Australians, and an easy target for vilification.

As an introduction to Australian Muslim history and culture, this film does a good job but as it continues it veers dangerously close to sugary propaganda when it should be frank about the ongoing challenges Muslims face in living as a large and diverse minority in Australia. I don’t mean just the obvious in terms of racial and religious vilification against them and various forms of discrimination practised against them but also fighting ingrained expectations that “they” must adapt to Western ways: this implicitly assumes that Muslim ways are always inferior to those of the West. Cannot the West also acknowledge that certain of its customs and traditions might need reforming and that Muslims and other groups can offer advice, experience and possible solutions to reform?

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