A Tale of Two Suburbs: Lakemba

Sydney becomes more faded the further west you travel. The paint on the houses is flakier, the cars have more rust spots, even the sunlight seems to lose some of its dazzle. This is where most of the city’s 4.5 million residents live, half a world away from the gleaming skyscrapers and glinting ocean that draw the tourists and the bankers seeking a better life.

Heading southwest from the city centre, you pass through places whose names still evoke the homesickness of the English settlers arriving in this harsh, alien land two centuries ago: Sydenham, Lewisham, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury. The western suburbs blend into one another, and you could easily drive straight through Lakemba without noticing anything unusual about it. Indeed you could spend all day walking around Lakemba without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Yet Lakemba has come to symbolise worrying divisions in modern Australian society: between the Europeans who have been here some time and more recent arrivals from the Middle East and Asia, between Muslims and non-Muslims, between good citizens and those who are dangerously “un-Australian”.

On the face of it this seems unfair. Lakemba is a predominantly Muslim suburb and home to Australia’s most important mosque, but it is hardly a fortress of segregation. Lakemba is not a no-go area but most Australians never go there. Too far west to draw middle class restaurant-goers with its Middle Eastern cuisine, it has largely been left alone. Walking down the wide streets, neatly lined with spacious houses and fragrant eucalyptus trees, you see typical Sydney scenes: children playing cricket, young men bent under the bonnets of souped-up cars, Australian flags hanging limply outside homes. The Islamic presence is also obvious, but not overwhelming. A sign in the window of one shop near the train station makes a declaration of war in English and Arabic, but this is only a “WAR OF PRICE”. A woman wearing a veil that completely covers her face uses English to scold her four small children. The notice board outside the local Anglican church pointedly boasts of “serving a culturally diverse community”.

The flags offer a clue to Lakemba’s anxieties. Many of Australia’s 350,000 Muslims feel their commitment to the nation is in question, that they will never be Australian enough for people like the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his centre-right Liberal Party. For some this gives them something to prove: at a bravery awards ceremony in Sydney I met a young Turkish-Australian Muslim who explained his courageous actions in terms of how immigrants should behave to show their pride for their new home. But others are left feeling isolated and angry.

Lakemba has come to be one of the main battlegrounds for these skirmishes over 21st-century Australia’s identity, and Lakemba Mosque at times resembles a citadel under siege. Despite its huge symbolic importance for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the Lebanese-run mosque itself is rather underwhelming: invisible from the busy main road, its immediate neighbours include a petrol station and a window fitter. But visit on a Friday or an important Islamic festival and the street outside the mosque will be jammed with cars and worshippers – an estimated 20,000 people joined the Eid celebrations at Lakemba in October.

This is why Australian politicians nervous about racial conflict and home-grown terrorists keep a careful eye on Lakemba Mosque. In recent weeks there has been plenty to worry about. In September the nation’s most senior Muslim cleric, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilaly, the ageing but sprightly Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, delivered a lesson at the mosque in which he apparently suggested that women who did not wear the veil were inviting rape. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [veil], no problem would have occurred,” he said in the Arabic address, which was obtained and translated by The Australian newspaper.

Sheikh al-Hilaly admitted making the comments, but said their meaning had been distorted and insisted he was a strong supporter of women’s rights. The damage had been done, however. The remarks confirmed prejudices about dangerously out-of-touch Islamic clerics and made headlines around the world. More worryingly, they continued to make headlines in Australia for several weeks as politicians lined up to attack the Mufti and Muslim leaders fretted about whether they should distance themselves from him or show a unified front. Sheikh al-Hilaly did not help matters, repeatedly promising to keep quiet but delivering further provocative comments with a mischievous glee that could be described as very Australian.

Most politicians, including Mr Howard, said Sheikh al-Hilaly should be removed from his post, claiming he did not represent the majority of Australia’s law-abiding, well-integrated Muslims. Ordinary Australians were bemused, and in some cases amused: one playful entrepreneur has started selling “Uncovered meat” t-shirts and g-strings featuring a cartoon cat; among the hate mail sent to the mosque was a suspicious package that turned out to contain a can of cat food. Promising to maintain a low profile, at least for now, the Mufti has left Australia on a pilgrimage to Mecca. But he has also insisted he is not going to resign.

A calm has now returned to Lakemba. The bored TV camera crews, photographers and reporters camped outside the mosque have moved on, as have the tough-looking young Middle Eastern men keeping a suspicious watch on them. Despite the hate mail, which came from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, there has been no widespread backlash against Australia’s Islamic communities since Sheikh al-Hilaly’s comments were reported. The president of the mosque’s governing body, the Lebanese Muslim Association, an eloquent lawyer and councillor for Mr Howard’s Liberal Party called Tom Zreika, has steered a careful course between rebuking the Mufti for his remarks and recognising his popularity as a spiritual leader. The only person I met who was outright offensive about Sheikh al-Hilaly – describing him as “that facking fag with his dirty religion” – turned out to be a Lebanese Christian immigrant with more than a few grudges.

But the deceptively still surface does not mean there are no longer any dangerous undercurrents. The authorities realise this: police cars regularly patrol past Lakemba Mosque, on the look out for white thugs rather than Muslim extremists. And journalists realise this: Lakemba continues to feature regularly in front page stories, usually as the home of terrorism suspects or their families.

Sheikh al-Hilaly could be a metaphor for what is wrong with relations between Australia’s Muslims and its Anglo-Saxon majority. Despite living in the country for over 20 years, the Mufti speaks only broken English, albeit punctuated frequently with the word “mate”, and delivers his serious thoughts in Arabic to an audience of Middle Eastern origin. Most Australians feel no need to understand him, and he makes few efforts to explain himself until things come to a head. Lakemba is no ghetto, but it will become one if this failure of talking and listening continues.

Escape from Canberra

Today started rather earlier than I’d planned – at 3am, to be precise. I wasn’t due to start work until 9am, but then I woke up in Canberra, a good 290km from the office.

This wasn’t exactly the plan. After spending all weekend listening to senior Australian Labor MPs insisting that the party leadership wasn’t under threat – all strangely familiar stuff – I had Tuesday and Wednesday off. Given that there was no cricket to watch, I decided to pay a visit to Canberra, Australia’s capital and home to most of its national museums and art collections. Canberra looks pretty close to Sydney on the map and initially I thought I might be able to get there and back in a day. But this would have given me something like six minutes to see all the sights, so I decided to stay overnight and make an early start on Wednesday.

Unfortunately my body wasn’t quite up with the timetable at 6.30am on Wednesday morning. While my still-dreaming mind pictured a graceful gazelle-like leap from the (rather high) top bunk in the youth hostel where I was staying, my sleep-addled carcass performed what can only be described as a splat onto the floor. I escaped lightly: grazes on my left knee, a rather sinister-looking scar on my neck where it made contact with a carelessly-placed table, and painful bruising in my right thumb. I was a bit worried about my thumb, which I need for writing shorthand and giving people the thumbs up, but otherwise felt relieved that the only person who’d seen my gymnastic display was an early-rising Belgian.

I hired a bike and had a great day in Canberra. (An aside: I’d forgotten how difficult it often is to find somewhere to leave your bike. Fortunately Australian Federal Police officers are pretty laid-back about these things, and told me I could leave it anywhere as long as they couldn’t see it.) Canberra’s a funny city. It barely existed 100 years ago, and you could argue that it barely exists now. While Sydney, Perth and Melbourne developed in the places where the European settlers wanted to live – i.e. by the sea – Canberra’s location on a hillside in the middle of wild bushland was chosen as a compromise, based on its being neither Sydney nor Melbourne. But the main problem is that there just don’t seem to be enough people in Canberra. The whole city feels like a museum, or perhaps a giant film set filled with confused bit-part actors. The heavily planned street layout gives Canberra a spacious, airy feel, but it also means the city has no real heart and the attractions are a long way from each other. Still, although I wanted to dislike Canberra, I found myself enjoying its tranquillity and openness.

Conscious that I had to get back to Sydney on Wednesday night, I made sure I was at the bus station in plenty of time. Or at least I would have been if I hadn’t made a mistake about the time of my bus. Greyhound Australia said I should be able to get on the later 7.30pm bus back to Sydney, forgetting to mention that this bus didn’t exist. A helpful woman informed me that there were no more trains or flights that night: I was trapped in Canberra. So after waiting for an hour – I found it strangely reassuring that the attention to detail that went into creating Canberra extends to having drug addicts in its bus station – I made the depressing trudge back to the youth hostel.

After a pretty good night’s sleep I caught the 4.15am bus to Sydney. The service was diverted off the main highway because of bushfires in southern New South Wales, and was about half an hour late getting into Sydney. First stop was the international airport. I decided to get off here and catch a taxi back to Erskineville so I could get changed out of my sweaty t-shirt and shorts. The taxi driver swore when I told him where I wanted to go – Erskineville is only a $20 fare, and he’d been waiting at the airport for 50 minutes – but he was OK about it after I apologised (and tipped him). After a speedy clothes change – worthy I would say of my journalistic hero, Clark Kent – I jumped on a train and managed to get into work just 15 minutes late.

Work was good. I was covering an inquest, but the Coroner put a publication banning order on the whole day’s proceedings so I couldn’t write anything about it. And the family of the poor young woman whose murder was the subject of the inquest offered to buy me a beer at lunchtime. I turned them down: I’d been up since 3am.

Up my street

This is the outside of the apartment in Erskineville, in Sydney's inner west, where I'm staying. I'm about an hour's walk from the city centre and a bit further than that from Coogee beach. Just up the road is Newtown, which is a studenty area full of people with green hair and multiple piercings who tend to wear black. There are also lots of great cheap restaurants, pubs, second hand bookshops and (allegedly) the best coffee shop in the world, although I have yet to find it. Newtown's a lot of fun.



The station is just a few minutes up the road. Along the way you pass these houses, which are pretty typical of Sydney's inner suburbs: cast iron railings, balconies, blinds and flaky paint. They don't look wholly British to me - a lot of them still have almost a frontier town feel.



Trains from Erkskineville Station go to the city in about 15 minutes. The woman who works in the station office in the mornings is amazingly friendly - she told me I wasn't wrapped up warm enough when I bought a ticket to the Blue Mountains - and takes a real interest in the thousands of strangers who pass her window every day. This kind of attitude isn't at all unusual in Australia, but it's very rare in Britain these days.



This house is just up the road from the station, on the way to Newtown. Sydney's local councils have just "declared war" on graffiti artists, but nobody seems to be very bothered about all the graffiti in Newtown - Sydney's respectable mainstream and more colourful subculture generally exist side by side very happily.

Ashes to Ashes

At times it can be a bit intimidating being British in Australia. Mostly when there’s an important sports match between the two nations coming up.

The Ashes definitely falls into this category. The Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s tabloid newspaper, started a “pommie sledging” blog on its website for its readers to submit their favourite terms of abuse for Brits. The current TV adverts for Weet-bix, the Australian equivalent of Weetabix, are accompanied by a song whose lyrics are all about “smashing the poms”. At least two of the papers used the headline ‘FIRST BLOOD’ when Australia’s cricketers beat England in India in the ICC Champions Trophy last week. And the sports pages here probably have more about England’s injury woes than the British ones do. I didn’t have to think twice when I was asked if I wanted to join the work cricket team – as well as being congenitally incapable of batting, bowling or catching the ball (in itself something of a disadvantage), I figured that the second the opposing team heard my accent, the bowling would turn nasty.

It’s nothing personal, mind. The Aussies just like getting behind their team, and they’re rarely sore losers (although admittedly this doesn’t get tested very often).

So I was surprised that there were relatively few people at the Museum of Sydney to see the Ashes urn when I visited on Monday. The urn has been loaned to Australia by the Marylebone Cricket Club in the run-up to the Ashes. Starting in Sydney, it will tour the country in the coming weeks before being returned to the MCC for safe keeping. The accompanying exhibition went through all the well-known legends about the origins of the Ashes series. It reproduced the tongue-in-cheek notice published in the Sporting Times after Australia won at the Oval in 1882 announcing the death of English cricket and saying the body would be cremated and taken to Australia.

But there was also a lot that was new to me. I didn’t know the Sporting Times obituary reflected a contemporary debate in England about the merits of cremation over burial. Or that the tiny, battered terracotta Ashes urn started life as a joke by a group of upper-class Australian women. When England came to Australia in 1882-3 for a return series, the women presented captain Ivo Bligh with the urn, in which they placed some ashes, probably from the burning of one of the wickets used in a just finished game. The story doesn’t end there: Bligh fell in love with one of the women, a music teacher called Florence Morphy, and brought her – and the urn – back to England with him. The urn became a treasured family possession as a reminder of their courtship. When Florence bequeathed the urn to the MCC after Bligh’s death in 1927, almost nobody in English cricket knew about its existence.

Most interesting, though, was a display on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, in 1868. Astonishingly, they were Aborigines. The players’ story is in some ways very sad: just decades before the team was formed, their homelands in modern-day Victoria were ravaged by the coming of European settlers, and they were given pretty racist-sounding English names like Jim Crow, Dick-a-Dick and Tarpot. But it sounds like the tour of England was a big success, financially, culturally and sportingly. They played 47 matches, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19. The three star players took a total of 607 wickets and scored more than 1,000 runs each. Another of the players, Twopenny, achieved the impressive average of 9-9 off ten overs in East Hampshire. Perhaps inevitably, the team did not attract crowds for their sporting prowess alone – they performed tribal dances and spear and boomerang throwing displays during breaks in play, and in the official pictures more of them are holding boomerangs than cricket bats.