Journal of Australian Studies

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Muslim Australians: the deep histories of contact

Regina Ganter

To cite this article: Regina Ganter (2008) Muslim Australians: the deep histories of contact,
Journal of Australian Studies, 32:4, 481-492, DOI: 10.1080/14443050802471384

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Journal of Australian Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 4, December 2008, 481
492

Muslim Australians: the deep histories of contact

Regina Ganter

Griffith University

Muslims are now arguably the most widely debated and feared segment of the Australian
community but they are also its most long-standing non-indigenous segment. In
Australia we are able to draw on a long and primarily positive contact history between
Muslim and non-Muslim Australians that makes nonsense of the paranoid nationalism
with which the Howard government wanted to protect a way of life from ‘recent
invaders’. There are deep histories underlying some of the highly debated ‘border
control’ phenomena such the Tampa refugees and ‘Timorese poachers’. The way we
understand our histories also shapes the way in which we can imagine our futures and
the fantasy of a white Australian history does not stand up to historical investigation.
Keywords: Muslims in Australia; Aboriginal history; Asian-Aboriginal history; border
control

Introduction1
Since the political bankruptcy of the idea of race after the end of World War II, public
discourse of significant differences between peoples has been twice revamped. As natural
science proclaimed ‘there is no race’, the discourse of systematic difference was rescued
through the idea of ethnicity and nationality, until more recently religion has come to be
the new great divide between peoples presumably acting out an age-old ‘clash of
civilisations’.2 All of these terms have been put to effective use in defining distinctions
for which blood may be shed, without actually erasing older conceptual distinctions such
as ‘white’ and ‘black’.
The reconfiguration towards religious difference in public discourse presents an
interesting challenge to Australian historians (who have tended to ignore the admonitions
of older historians of white Australia, that religion is of fundamental importance for
understanding the past) because having anchored our history on ideas of race, ethnicity
and nation, it is all the more difficult to effectively decipher the history of religious groups.
Thus the historical phenomena of Malays, Afghans, and Macassans in Australia are rarely
read together as the history of Muslims here. Once we assemble the diverse histories of
these marginal groups into a single narrative, however, a long, strong, and still relevant
history of the presence in Australia of a religious group emerges which derives its salience
from the way in which Australian Muslims are now externally identified primarily through
the prism of religion, and indeed appear to self-identify on that basis.
Within the first few years of the new millennium Muslims have become the most widely
debated and feared segment of the Australian community. The trajectory of this view picked
up with the First Gulf War (Iraqi invasion of Kuwait 1990
91) and became quickly firmed
in the Howard government’s stance against (mostly Muslim) asylum seekers. This erupted in
international news when the Tampa was refused entry to the Australian immigration zone in
August 2001. In the following month the September 11 attacks brought about a hardening

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DOI: 10.1080/14443050802471384
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482 R. Ganter

of attitudes and Australia aligned itself more closely with the aggressive foreign policy of the
Bush administration, for which the Bali bombing in October 2002 was widely understood to
be a revenge. By December 2005 white supremacist youths in Cronulla were ready to attack
Lebanese Australians at the site of a memorial for six local victims of the Bali bombing,
sparking a prolonged race riot. Anti-Muslim sentiment had gradually gelled over a series of
gang-rapes by young Middle Eastern men, and Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali ensured his demise
as Australian mufti with ill-considered remarks about Australian women in October 2006.
The deception and malpractice of a single individual, Dr Jayant Patel, who became famous
as ‘Dr Death’ in May 2005, severely dented the image of foreign-trained doctors in
Australia, so that when British investigators of the London and Glasgow bombings in July
2007 expressed interest in interviewing Dr Mohamed Haneef, the Australian media and
government recast him within a few hours into a ‘major terror suspect’.
The currently dominant narrative of Australian Muslims is highly pejorative,
constructing an imagined religious community as backward, violent, latently dangerous,
and intrinsically more disposed to terrorism than anyone else.3 The Howard government
actively fostered this attitude (‘we wouldn’t want such people here’). In 2002 it
implemented the Pacific Solution for turning asylum seekers away, in July 2005 it excised
important points of entry for refugees from the Australian migration zone,4 and since
October 2007 Australian visa applicants now have to sign an ‘Australian values’ declaration
(unless they are from New Zealand in which case they need not bother).5 A citizenship test
was also implemented, so that aspirants now need to know whether Australians refer to
their swimsuits as bummies, budgie smugglers, toggie batties, swimmy budgers, or sossies,
exceeding in banality any of the questions in the citizenship test introduced in the UK in
November 2005 or in the US in November 2006.6
The ‘paranoid nationalism’ with which the Howard government fed negative images of
Muslims, thrives on the idea of the need to protect a way of life or ‘social space’ from
recent invaders, as Ghassan Hage points out.7 But once we reconfigure a complex tapestry
of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and other middle eastern people as a single social
phenomenon bounded by religion, then it must also be observed with neat historical irony
that Muslims are not only a long-standing part of the Australian social landscape (rather
than ‘recent invaders’), they are in fact its most long-standing non-indigenous segment,
because they entered northern Australia well before any Christians.

The long history of Muslims in Australia

The earliest documented contact between Aborigines and others is with the Muslim
Macassans who seasonally visited Marege (literally ‘wild country’) on the northern shores
of Arnhem Land, and Kayu Java, the beaches on the Kimberley coast and the off-shore
islands of the Arafura Sea to gather trepang (also referred to as bêche-de-mer), a highly
prized sea cucumber (holothurian) that is ascribed with aphrodisiacal qualities. This
contact, much predating European interest in the Australian continent, was not just
incidental and occasional, but left profound imprints on the cultures and languages of the
far north shores. Annie Clarke observed from archaeological field work on Groote Eylandt
in the Gulf of Carpentaria that under the impact of this regular contact, the indigenous
people of Groote Eylandt became more strongly orientated towards the coast and marine
resources.8 Anthropologist Ian McIntosh also speaks of the profound impact of this
contact as a result of which Aborigines creatively adapted aspects of Islam.9
The fleets came predominantly out of Makassar (formerly Ujung Pandang), the capital
of Sulawesi, either via Timor or via the Aru Islands. It is preferable to continue to refer to
 Journal of Australian Studies 483

‘Macassans’ in the Anglicised spelling, because this term refers to a historical phenomenon
rather than an ethnic group. The visiting fleets comprised Sama Bajo (sea gypsies),
Timorese, Aru Islanders, the captains and crew from Makassar itself, as well as people
from other kingdoms in Sulawesi, and even the occasional Chinese trader. The crews and
captains were predominantly Muslim, and Muslim prayer references still survive in some
secret/sacred incantations on the northern Australian shores, alluding to ‘Allah’. The
Macassan trade kriol became a lingua franca for indigenous peoples in habitual contact
with these fleets, and several early European reports refer to indigenous people in the Top
End addressing strangers in ‘Malay’.
That Macassan contact predates the arrival of the British on the Australian continent is
not disputed, but there are various understandings of the commencement of contact.
Indigenous people tend to understand this contact history as quite ancient, so that Ernie
Dingo, at the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games referred to ‘thousands
of years’ of contact with Macassans. John Darling’s 1994 ABC documentary Below the
Wind refers to 400 years of contact, counting in the undocumented visits from ‘sea gypsies’
or Sama Bajo who seem to appear in Yolngu mythology as Bajini. This 400-year account
of contact history is mirrored on the Indonesian side by a Sulawesi historian suggesting
that the Australian Top End had been part of the (Macassan) Kingdom of Gowa since
1640.10 Unfortunately he does not produce the evidence on which this dating claim is
made.
The academic debate about when this contact might have actually commenced, hinges
partly on questions of methodology
to what extent one is prepared to rely on
ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for events that are outside the
timeframe of documented history. A number of archaeologists have argued for the ‘long
history’ view
that in order to have brought about the substantial cultural changes that it
did, it must predate the British arrival by at least 200 years, and a 400-year history is often
cited as a ‘more or less’ reliable estimate.
The other question revolves around the presumption that the contact itself was initiated
by the trepang industry powered by demand from southern China. This is clearly not how
traditional indigenous economic activity is normally organised: it is not usually the
orchestrated long-distance expedition in search of a single export commodity. Such
intensive trades generally craft onto already established traditional routes that may be very
localised but serve a range of economic and cultural purposes. The current of the trade
winds support an easy sea route from Timor to the Tiwi Islands.
Staying on the safe grounds of historical method, C. C. Macknight dates the beginning
of the trepang industry in Australia to between the 1720s and 1750s, although this does not
preclude earlier, less organised contact. The earliest recorded trepang voyage to Australia
was undertaken from Timor in 1751, so that a 250-year contact history is established
through the historical record. The British became aware of this trade some ten years later,
in 1762, when Alexander Dalrymple, then hydrographer for the British East India
Company, speculated that the indigenous people these trepangers were interacting with on
the southern continent were apparently ‘Mohammedans’, presumably because they were
circumcised.

Indigenous perspectives
Today Aboriginal ceremony, language, song and oral history of the Top End shores reflect
the memory of the annual visits of the Macassans. The Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land
have been particularly well studied by anthropologists, and a number of their elders have
484 R. Ganter

been especially forthcoming with what had traditionally been considered secret knowledge,
so that we have a much clearer picture of the cultural impact of Macassan contact on
Yolngu people compared to other language groups in the Top End and the Kimberley. In
Yolngu culture Makasan and its surrounding languages and dialects enjoy a status much
like Latin in the Western world, representing the most initiated and learned form of speech,
but also percolating profusely into the vernacular. Even the characteristic and omnipresent
expression ‘Yo!’ used in Yolngumatha, has its equivalent in Makasan.11
Some of the most characteristic cultural icons from the north also reflect this contact
history, but in order to understand its embedded allusions demands the requisite cultural
capital. For example, the Lunggurrma, or northern wind, is a central icon used in body
decoration and traditional and commercial art. A typical description of such artwork
would be that lunggurrma is the monsoon wind, and that the pattern refers to the cirrus
clouds that are typical for the wet season.12 Occasionally there is also mention that this
season is associated with the arrival of the Macassans. Typical for indigenous art and
storytelling, we see here layers of meaning piled upon each other. The Macassan
connection is revealed by those who have the traditional authority to do so, generally
very highly regarded members of the yirrtja moiety.13
Conversely, the end of the trepang season, when the fleets returned home to Sulawesi,
has also imprinted itself on ritual culture in the form of the characteristic ceremonial poles
from Elcho Island that are used for mourning or funerary ceremonies. Again there are
various levels of revelation in the descriptions of the artwork.14 According to Warramiri
elders, the Morning Star poles represent the masts of a boat, with strings for the riggings,
as an allusion to the farewell, when the Macassan boats would depart at the end of the
trepang season. They now represent a long, and final, farewell, alluding to the time when
the trepang boats came for the very last time, when an embargo was placed on their entry
into Australian waters in 1906.15 This incisive moment in Yolngu history is still so
historically close that the stories surrounding it are both history at the brink of mythology,
and myth at the brink of history as their deeper meanings are getting rediscovered and re-
embedded with historical detail.
Artist John Bulunbulun makes extensive connection between his art and the Macassan
contact history. He explains the role of the Marayarr (Morning Star) pole in the Marayarr
Murrukunddjeh ritual, a song cycle of cultural exchange and diplomacy in which Dhuwa
and Yirrtja have complementary roles, celebrating the creation and cycles of nature, birth,
death and regeneration. The Marayarr pole represents the mast and rigging of a Macassan
boat, and by giving away the pole at the end of the ceremony the sadness of parting is
expressed. This ceremony was performed in a three-day ritual in Makassar in 1993:
The visit, to re-establish relations with descendants of the Makassans, was a moving time for
the Ganalbingu . . . On the last night of the ceremony, the dancers slowly appeared out of the
shadows to reveal their final gift. People mourned the loss of the pole as it was presented, a
traditional ritual which reflected the Ganalbingu’s sadness at parting with their Makassan
friends and family.16

The effect of all this cultural affinity is that Yolngu people feel deeply bonded to
Macassans, spiritually related as well as connected by family. And indeed, several
traditional stories allude to family connections between them.
One such story recording this final farewell is the Djawawungu (the story told by
Djawa, and belonging to Djawa). It is called, ‘The final visit of the Mangatharra’ (of the
Macassans) and its storyline makes some deeply meaningful connections between
Macassan and Yolngu people. It is about an encounter between young Djawa and the
 Journal of Australian Studies 485

Macassan captain ‘Gatjing’ who came to take his final leave, saying they would never come
back to Marege, because the ‘balanda’ (white people) were ‘making trouble’. As part of his
farewell, captain Gatjing bestowed on Djawa the Macassan name of Mangalay, and
instructed him to let his father and mother and uncles and everyone know that he now
carried this Macassan name. We can assume that with the acceptance of the name he
carried the responsibility of keeping alive the memory and connection with these
Macassans, and indeed he is depicted in this story wearing a Muslim fashion headscarf.
Expert advice on Aboriginal mythology cautions that it must not be mined for
historical references.17 But the striking feature of this story is that Gatjing can actually be
traced through the records of the Australian customs officials stationed at the Top End to
police the trepang trade. His full name is Suleiman Daeng Gassing, sometimes referred to
just as Gassing. He belonged to the family of Husein Daeng Ranka, a captain whose
customs records trail through the entire period that these records were kept, from 1881 to
1907. In other Aboriginal stories Husein appears as Yocing, and his father Samaila Daeng
Bacan appears as Jamaila. His son, Mangellai Daeng Maru also participated in the
trepang voyages so that this family represents at least three generations of Pa-Marege
(captains travelling to Marege).18
The bestowal of the name of Mangellai on Djawa in the story is therefore deeply
symbolical. It is an acknowledgement of a family connection between the family of Husein
Daeng Ranka on the Sulawesi side and the family of Djawa on the Australian side. That
Husein had family in Australia is well documented.19 He was based in the Kampung
Maluku (Moluccan township) of Makassar, working in association with the merchant
Abdulrazak Puddu Daeng Tompo. This Abdulrazak also appears in an account supplied
to the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt by the Yolngu elder Djaladjari who
stayed in Kampung Maluku for several years. According to his account there was a
sizeable Aboriginal population in Makassar who also formed families there.20 His son
Bawurr at Yirrkala said that Djaladjari himself also had children in Kampung Maluku.21
Husein Daeng Ranka remained a regular visitor in the final years of the trepang
industry to Marege, and was actually the last captain to visit. Another link to his family is
provided through the genealogy of Elcho Island elder Mattjuwi Burruwanga who is said to
be related to Jamaila.
Many place names in Yolngumatha also make reference to specific Macassans (like
Garra Mangalai) or their activities (such Lembana Panrea meaning tradesmen’s bay,
Melville Bay), and some Makassan place names have also been adopted, such as Lembana
Mani Mani (abrus seed bay, for Maningrida). Yolngu people today tell the story of long
and peaceful contact with the Macassans as a counterpoint to the violent colonisation by
balanda (whites). This is evident in a number of song lyrics. The Wirrnga Band from
Milingimbi produced ‘My Sweet Takirrina’ in 1990 celebrating that they were ‘trading
goods and making better friendship . . . Macassan men
how brave they were’. In 1993 the
Sunrize Band from Maningrida produced the bilingual Lembana Mani Mani singing ‘we
commemorate and celebrate for those visitors from Macassar’ and Yirrkala’s Yothu Yindi
also has a bilingual ‘Macassan Crew’ in its repertoire where the English text gives a general
gloss on the history of Macassan visits (‘they came in peace through the Ashmore Reef . . .
navigate the morning star, brave Macassan crew’), while the Yolngumatha passages make
specific reference to Gatjing (Dayngatjing), again displaying the characteristic layers of
meaning of Aboriginal cultural production.
When faced with the suggestion that beneath this harmonious veneer the Macassans
came well-armed with guns and carrying cannons on their fleets, Mattjuwi asserted:
486 R. Ganter

No. These here Makasar people, very good start. Real good friend. All the Makasar bringit
here friend, brother and sister, uncle, nephew, not they bringing trouble, not anything, because
they looking for dharippa job [trepang], he working on the dharippa, ma. This is the story from
the beginning. True story. Different from there Captain Cook. Makasan people come here,
they are friends. One group.22

From the historical record it is clear that this contact history was not without friction, even
violence, including the hostile reception of shipwrecked Macassans on the Tiwi Islands. Ian
McIntosh suspects that the Wurramu ceremony, which refers to the law of Walitha’walitha
(Allah) is grounded in an unequal relationship between Macassans and indigenous people.
It was reportedly first performed by Macassans at Cape Wilberforce as a tribute to their
historical partnership when ‘hundreds of Aborigines had lost their lives’23 (possibly due to
a smallpox outbreak). However, these days in an ‘almost contradictory way this ritual is
being put forward as a public show of inter-cultural unity’.24

White perspectives
Whereas indigenous people tend to remember harmonious relations with Macassans the
documented historical record suggests quite a different contact history, punctuated by
violent encounters that had to be settled through the intervention of white officialdom.
The idea to tax and police the Macassan trepang trade emanated from white
entrepreneurs who were in direct competition for Aboriginal labour and natural resources
with them. The white manager of the Cobourg Cattle Company, stationed at one of the
prime trading points of the trepang industry before customs officers were appointed in the
region, reported in 1877 that Macassans were abusing Aborigines and that a tax ought to
be placed on their activities, and in the following year observed again that Macassan crews
were raiding the timber and trepang resources of the coastline and were ‘debauching’
Aborigines. In the same year Captain Cadell, who was attempting to enter into commercial
competition with the Macassan trepangers, reported that the competition from the
Macassan trepangers was unfair and presented a tax on the environment. He offered to
protect local Aborigines in return for a monopolistic lease of the sea shores for ‘quitrent’.
E.O. Robinson was appointed as collector of customs at Port Essington in 1881. He had
attempted to establish a trepang station at Croker Island in 1878, and became manager of
the Cobourg cattle station in 1879. He was hardly a disinterested party. In 1888 he
complained that ‘The Malays lure my trepang workers away with alcohol’. He imposed a
hefty licence fee which would ‘hopefully mean that the Malays would go to New Guinea,
Papua and other places in preference to paying the licence’.25 The trade did indeed drop off
under the imposition of fines, taxes, import duty on provisions carried, and the
requirement to report to inconveniently situated customs stations, as well as high-handed
attitudes and capricious regulations.
The arguments leading to the patrolling of the trepang trade in 1881 and its prohibition
in 1906 ranged across concerns over resource depletion, lack of returns to the domestic
economy, detrimental impact on Aborigines, using alcohol as payment for services,
introduction of disease, and unfair competition: much the same range of objections that
was used against Chinese on the goldfields, Japanese in pearling, and other ethnic groups
that were successful in establishing a foothold in a particular commercial activity. The
historical record of this trade is clearly over-determined by the views of men who had a
direct investment in this industry, so that it is all the more necessary to look to alternative
methods of discovering the past, such as oral history.
 Journal of Australian Studies 487

The ‘Afghan’ cameleers were faced with similar resistance. They started to arrive in
Australia in 1865 and their migration peaked in the 1880s.26 Again we are dealing with a
historical phenomenon which requires the label ‘Afghan’ to be placed in parentheses. The
cameleers came from a wide range of Muslim origins, but mostly from Beluchistan, the
Punjab, Kashmir and the Sindh province, areas that now straddle north India, Pakistan
and Afghanistan. In other words, they were just as likely to have come from British India,
and were British subjects, originating from east of the Durant line that separated British
India from Afghanistan. Their common designation as ‘Afghans’ served the purpose of
classifying them as Alien or ‘Asiatics’ under various restrictive laws curtailing their rights
to own property, land, or engage in independent business. A group of cameleers in
Wyndham, most of them Indian and therefore British subjects, battled for sixteen years to
obtain a lease which was denied them on the basis of being ‘alien Asiatics’.
‘Afghans’ came to dominate long-distance cartage, particularly through the dry interior
and in the northern goldfields. As in the case of Chinese on the goldfields, and Japanese in
the pearling industry, it was their commercial success in Australia that engendered racist
opposition, because leading members of their community quickly outgrew the patronage of
large companies like Elders and started to import camels and cameleers under their own
name. By the 1890s ‘the ownership of camels in Australia was well and truly in the hands of
Afghan merchants’ like Faiz and Tagh Mahomet from Kandahar.27
Resistance against Afghan cameleers peaked in the 1890s, during a period of general
agitation against Asians, Africans, and Pacific Islanders, the fomentation of the White
Australia sentiment. An Anti-Afghan league was formed on the eastern goldfields in 1896,
and in NSW and Queensland cameleers were harassed by bullock teamsters, with the result
that the Imported Labour Registry Act of 1897 prohibited ‘coloured aliens’ from
importing other workers. The dynamics of racial exclusion are familiar, we see economic
competition, lobbying based on racial vilification, and quick legislative action supporting
the economic interests of whites.
Not only bullock teams competed with the cameleers. In 1892 white shop-owners in
Western Australia complained about the competition from hawkers who were servicing the
remote stations. The Western Australian parliament up took this debate on behalf of
‘legitimate traders’, discursively rendering the non-white hawkers, who had obtained and
paid for their licences, ‘illegitimate’. The debate referred to hawkers from ‘India or other
Asiatic countries’ that made themselves ‘a nuisance and terror to law-abiding settlers’. It
was alleged that they usually visited remote farms when the ‘husbands were away and only
the women and children were at home’, and being ‘strong hulking-looking fellows’, ‘often
put the womenfolk in great fear being aliens and coloured men’. The appearance of some
of them, it was claimed, ‘was enough to intimidate any lonely female, and make her
purchase against her will’.28 The attorney general thought that their licences could be
withdrawn on the basis of being alien Asiatics, but found that most of them were in fact
British subjects. The dilemma was resolved by abolishing the Hawkers Act 1882, and
hawking licences, altogether.
Despite such xenophobic legislative responses, ‘Afghans’ settled successfully into
Australian lives, very many of them forming families with Aboriginal women.

Living trails of Muslim history in Australia

Whereas Muslims today are under pressure to assimilate into a largely undefined
‘mainstream’ society, the history of contact contains a different model of cultural blending.
Next to the historical case lesson of the Yolngu/Macassan family and cultural connections,
488 R. Ganter

Afghans and Malays also successfully formed families with Christian women, mostly
indigenous women who had been raised on Christian missions. As a result many
indigenous people today remember poly-religious families based on mutual respect for
each others’ cultural practices and avoidance rules.
The immigrants were not on the whole evangelical about their faith and permitted their
children to be raised in Christian schools, and their wives and children, while not
abstaining from pork, would generally use separate dishes to avoid contamination. Muslim
‘Malays’ entered the pearling industry in large numbers so that many families in Torres
Strait, the Kimberely and the Top End today bear Arabic names (Anglicised to varying
degrees): Doolah, bin Doraho, Hassan, Hoosen and other versions of Husein, Ahwang,
Ahmat, Boota, Sahanna (for Sianna), Dewis, Loban, bin Awel, Barba, bin Bakar, bin Sali,
Khan, Mahomet, and many others. Chee Krimon (from Singapore) and Igari Bamaui
(from Badu Island) gave an equal share of Muslim and Christian names to their eight
children: Marsat, Samat, Aaron, Leah, Alia, Ruth, Jane and Nauma. Among the
descendants of such men there has been revival of Islam in an effort to embrace their
patrilineal heritage, and Islam must be counted as the second most important religion in
Torres Strait next to Christianity.
When we think today of indigenous cultural heartlands our thoughts are drawn to
the Red Centre, to Arnhem Land, the Kimberley, and the Torres Strait. These are precisely
the areas where indigenous contact with Muslims was at its most intensive. This is no mere
historical coincidence. William McNeill argues strongly that poly-ethnicity is the normal
state for a civilised society, while mono-culturalism is the historically rare, aberrant form.29
According to this argument a developing, buoyant and vibrant culture is always poly-
ethnic, able to accept, adapt and syncretise external influences.
By recasting ethnic ‘problem populations’ as religious ones, historical continuities are
erased, and something that has a long history can emerge as an entirely new phenomenon.
When the Tampa was refused entry to Australia in 2001, it carried 433 refugees, mainly
from Afghanistan, who had been rescued at sea. The SAS (Special Air Service) was
deployed to guard the vessel and prevented any Australians including lawyers, reporters
and residents of nearby islands, from contacting the vessel, so that no images of the people
on board, or any personal stories could percolate to the public. Julian Burnside believes
that this was carefully orchestrated in order not to allow a feeling of compassion to arise
among the Australian public. Had the Australian public known about the stories of the
Afghans on board (practically all of them have since been confirmed as legitimate refugees)
a wave of compassion might have arisen.30
This is precisely what happened in another border control phenomenon of the 1990s,
that of the ‘Timorese poachers’ on the Arafura Sea. Noticing that the same men kept
turning up in their jails from the same villages, prison officers in Broome joined with
members of the community who had Indonesian and Timorese family connections in the
Kimberley/Indonesia Friendship Association. This is the kind of story that makes us proud
to be Australian. They found out that these fishermen continued the age-old tradition of
the Macassan trepang fleets, except that they were now fishing for trochus and shark fin,
and that what they had considered part of their home reefs
Pulau Pasir (Ashmore Reef),
Pulau Datu (Scott Reef), Pulau Baru (Cartier Reef) etc.
had become Australian waters, as
the customary 3 mile limit had been extended to 12 miles in 1968 and to 200 miles in 1979.
They also found that most came from Roti Island, which is just 80 kilometres from
Ashmore Reef and were permitted traditional fishing rights in a boxed area around
Ashmore Reef. Traditional fishing meant no motors, no radar, no sonar, no radio, no two-
way and therefore no weather warning, no quick get away, no SOS, and no search and
 Journal of Australian Studies 489

rescue in case of cyclones (willie-willies) for which that part of the open sea is famous.
When members of the Association visited Papela on Roti Island, the villagers said that
about 140 of their men had drowned in this area within the last ten years. There were many
widows and fatherless children. The delegation started to understand that it is wellnigh
impossible to determine an unmarked (and uneven) sea boundary without modern
equipment, and that marine resources had come under extreme pressure (from a
combination of population pressure, boosted by the Indonesian policy of transmigrasi,
and permissive trade policy with Taiwan and Japan, permitting their fleets intensive fishing
in Indonesian waters).
Another delegation of Australian citizens reached much the same conclusions. They
were Bardi Aborigines from One Arm Point who went to Roti Island to protest against the
frequent incursions into their traditional fishing area, over which they had recently gained
rights after a prolonged battle for recognition. Irene Davies, a member of that delegation,
told me when they saw how these villagers lived, their anger melted into compassion. Both
of these citizen groups started to lobby and raise funds for aid to be channelled to these
islands. Since small community projects for sustainable resource management were
established at Kadatua, no poachers from that island have been apprehended. At
Masaloka a cooperative trading venture had the same effect. The Broome group organised
a similar scheme for Maginti, and the Bardi initiated trochus hatcheries at One Arm Point
and in Sulawesi.31

Conclusion
Informed Australians should be able to draw on a long and primarily positive contact
history between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians. Muslim organisations have been
arguing this for some time, but it reads to most like a novel assertion because, for one,
northern histories have generally been marginalised in the Australian historical conscious-
ness, and secondly, migrant groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were referred
to by ethnicity and nationality rather than as religious communities. The result is that some
current phenomena appear entirely unrelated to their historical antecedents: any
connection between Afghan cameleers and Tampa refugees is as submerged as that
between Macassan trepangers and Timorese poachers on the Arafura Sea.
Beneath this difference in constructing ‘problem populations’ there are also some
significant continuities. These are the essentially economic root causes of xenophobia, and
the steps along which ‘problem populations’ are first constructed as monolithic entities,
then identified as a threat to the social fabric, and thirdly legislated against. This historical
cycle is as easily identified with regard to Aboriginal Australians, Chinese Australians, and
any other group that has come under target in the richly chequered Australian history of
xenophobia.
To describe a generalised ‘Australian’ sense of thinking about anything is necessarily
hazardous. More importantly, it is essentially a question of method: who will be allowed to
speak for the ‘Australian sentiment’? Media reportage seeks out the troublesome,
extraordinary and controversial, and neither are parliamentary debates likely to be
sparked by community harmony. The documented historical record is always more
predisposed to lead us into trouble: Hansard, the press, magistrates’ courts, police journals,
inquests. But for all the trouble, research focussed on a particular ethnic group has
generally found that migrant groups
though they may be overrepresented in gaols, and in
media reportage of organised violence
are more law-abiding, less troublesome, and also
less likely to seek recompense through legal means, than non-migrants in Australia.32
490 R. Ganter

Paradoxically, migrants have generally been understood as a ‘problem’ in white

Australia. This view rests largely on the assumption that they are a somehow ‘recent’
phenomenon, punctuating a white Australian history. As I have argued elsewhere, white
settlement did not make any substantial inroads into northern Australia until the 1860s,
and remained numerically tenuous next to the preponderance of Aboriginal and Asian
people there. Until the mass evacuations during World War II, Asian, Aboriginal and
coloured populations far outstripped a thin layer of white residents so that the social
history of the north is characterised by poly-ethnicity rather than monoculture, until
precisely the moment when large scale post-war immigration in the south put a practical
end to white Australia there.33 The idea that Muslim migrants in Australia pose a problem
has to do with what Hage calls ‘the fantasy of white supremacy’, but it also rests on the
fantasy of an imagined history of an essentially predominantly white Australia.

Notes
1. This paper emerged from a joint conference presentation with Emad Soliman whose PhD work
examines the construction of Australian Muslim Identity since the War on Terror.
2. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 1996.
3. Edward W. Said and Gauri Viswanathan, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W.
Said, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001; Nahid Afrose Kabir, Muslims in Australia: Immigration,
Race Relations and Cultural History, Kegan Paul, London, 2005; Scott Poynting, Greg Noble,
Paul Tabar and Jock Collins, Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, Sydney
Institute of Criminology Monograph Series, No. 18, Institute of Criminology, Sydney, 2004; Liz
Jacka and Lelia Green, ‘The New ‘‘Others’’: Media and Society Post-September 11’, Media
International Australia, no. 109, 2003; Peter Manning, Us and Them, Random House Australia,
Milsons Point, NSW, 2006.
4. In particular, Christmas Island, Cocos-Keeling, and Ashmore and Cartier Reefs were excised
from the Australian immigration zone.
5. From the Department of Immigration website:

The statement requires applicants to confirm that they will respect Australian values and
obey the laws of Australia before being granted a visa.
Australian values include:

respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual

equality of men and women

freedom of religion

commitment to the rule of law

parliamentary democracy

a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces mutual respect, tolerance, fair play and
compassion for those in need and pursuit of the public good

equality of opportunity for individuals, regardless of their race, religion or ethnic
background.
6. A sample question from the citizenship test implemented in October 2007:

Give three Australian colloquialisms for swimming suit

__ budgie smugglers, cossies, swimmers
__ budgies cossers, toggie batties, swimmy budgers
__ togs, bummies, sossies
__ swommies, cossies, mugglers

7. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto
Press, Annandale NSW, 2003.
 Journal of Australian Studies 491

8. Anne Clarke, ‘‘‘The Moormans Trowers’’: Macassan and Aboriginal interactions and the
changing fabric of indigenous social life’, Modern Quaternary Research in South East Asia, vol.
16, 2000, pp. 315
35.
9. Ian McIntosh, ‘Islam and Australia’s Aborigines? A perspective from North-East Arnhem
Land’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 20, no. 1, June 1996, p. 55.
10. This nearly 370 year history is only about 10 per cent short of 400 years. Abdulrazak Daeng
Patunru, Sedjarah Goa, Jajasan Kebudajan di Makassar, 1967. Special thanks to C. C.
Macknight for a copy of this rare publication.
11. David Paul Zorc, ‘Yolngu-Matha dictionary
Macassan loanwords project’, 29
30 May 1986
(MS) and Alan Walker and R. David Zorc ‘Austronesian loanwords in Yolngu-Matha of
Northeast Arnhem Land’, Aboriginal History, vol. 5, no. 2, 1981, pp. 107
34.
12. For example, Shirley Banalanydju from Ramingining describes her Lunggurrma painting as
follows:

This wind heralds the season when the seas are calm and new growth starts. The months for
this type of wind are October to December. This season is known to Yolngu as Gunmul.
There are big clouds without thunder, then rain.

The triangles in the paintings of Lunggurrma represent clouds. This triangular patterning
represents monsoons ‘‘standing up’’ on the northern horizon. The clouds seem to stand
higher and higher on the horizon. They become black, heavy with rain (black triangles).
Soon it starts to rain, with lightning flashing (cross-hatched triangles). When a storm
passes, the setting sun glows brilliant red or yellow against the clouds (red or yellow
triangles).

The Lunggurrma design belongs to the Yirritja moiety and clans linked with this design are
known as the ‘line of clouds’ bapurru (group of clans). Clans in this group include the
Wulaki, Djardewitjibi, Balmbi, Dabi and Mildjingi peoples. www.bulabula-arts.com/gallery/
artwork.php?id 245
13. John Bulunbulun at Maningrida describes his lunggurrma as follows (in a Maningrida Arts and
Culture website no longer accessible):

Johnny Bulunbulun is a senior member of the Ganalbingu group and is one the most
important singers and ceremonial men in north-central Arnhem Land, NT. In this
lithograph he depicts his personal clan totem design which is used in public ceremonies
of diplomacy and by boys during their circumcision ceremonies. Lunggurrma is the
northern wind which brought the Macassan trepangers to the shores of Arnhem Land. The
memory of the annual visits of the Macassans has been enshrined in Aboriginal ceremony,
language, song and oral history. The wet season is stongly associated with the arrival of the
Macassans. Lunggurrma is also the name of the high cirrus clouds which run in a straight
line across the sky.

14. At Elcho Island Art and Craft the Morning Star Pole by Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwiwi is
described as follows:

This Morning Star (Banumbirr) Pole comes from the artist’s father’s traditional homeland
of Ngaypinya. The Banumbirr Star is sacred to the Dhuwa clans of the Yolngu people. The
Banumbirr Star is very bright and rises just before the dawn. At this time the light is
changing rapidly. There’s is the darkness of the night, punctuated with the reflections of the
Morning Star on leaves of the trees, together with the distant glow of the dawn and the
fading of the other stars in the sky. This Banumbirr Pole represents a ground yam known as
riny’tjangu. The feathers at the top of the pole represent the Banumbirr Star. Further down
the pole the dark feathers depicts that the leaf of the plant is dead and dried up. The white,
green and orange feathers represent the new life given to the plant, which is also
representative of new life for the people. The different colours of ochre represent the
492 R. Ganter

changing light of the early morning, with the black being the night, the yellow and the red
being the coming dawn and the white being the rays of sun light and it’s reflection on the
trees.
15. Interview with Terri Yumbulul, George Wulanybuma, and Willie Danjati Gunderra at
Galiwin’ku, Elcho Island, June 1995.
16. Rosalinda Corazon, Garuda In-flight Magazine, September 1997, p. 45.
17. This view of Aboriginal mythology follows anthropologists Hiatt, McConnell, Morphy and
Malinowski. Ian McIntosh, ‘The bricoleur at work: Warang Dingo mythology in the Yirritja
moiety of north-east Arnhem Land’, MS (NLA), 1992.
18. C. C. Macknight, A Voyage to Marege
Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1976; Peter Spillett, ‘Gotong Royong: Hubungan Makassar-
Marege’ Paper presented to the 2nd International Convention of the Indonesian Educational and
Cultural Institute, Ujung Pandang, July 1987, MS.
19. Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, University of
Western Australia Press, 2006, pp. 34ff; see also Spillet, Gotong Royong and Macknight, A
Voyage to Marege.
20. Ronald and Catherine Bernd, Arnhem Land
Its History and its People, Cheshire, Melbourne,
1954, pp. 53ff.
21. Ganter, Mixed Relations, p. 38.
22. Interview by Regina Ganter with Mattjuwi Burruwanga at Galinwin’ku, 1995.
23. The connection between Walitha-walitha and Allah is not equally shared by Yolngu people.
McIntosh observed it to be only known to some older informants, and particularly yirrtja moiety
members, and is cautious to assert that most of his information pertains only to the Warramiri at
Elcho Island. Ian McIntosh ‘Islam and Australia’s Aborigines?’, pp. 53
77. Part of the Wurramu
song cycle recorded by W. L. Warner at Milingimbi and Elcho Island in the 1920s, runs: ‘Oh-a-
ha-la! (during a funeral ceremony where a dead body is moved up down as if lifting a mast), ‘A-
ha-la!! A-ha-la!! Si-li-la-mo-ha-mo, ha-mo-sil-li-li’ and later ‘Ser-ri ma-kas-si’ (resembling the
Indonesian terima kasih for thank you). W. L. Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an
Australian Tribe, P. Smith, Gloucester Massachusetts, 1969, p. 420.
24. McIntosh, ‘Islam and Aborigines’, p. 57
25. Robinson to Little 12/2/1882, cited in Macknight, A Voyage to Marege, p. 106.
26. Christine Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, A History of Afghan Cameldrivers in Australia
Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989; Michael Cigler, Afghans in Australia, AE Press,
Melbourne, 1986.
27. Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns; Cigler, Afghans in Australia.
28. Legislative Assembly Hansard, 1892
93:401ff and 11/3/1892 p. 847 WAPP.
29. William H. McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, 1985.
30. Julian Burnside has made this point in a number of speeches. It is also published in smh.com.au/
articles/2003, from a speech at Parliament House, Victoria, on World Refugee Day 2003 as
‘Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers: the view from outside’, 8 July 2003.
31. Jill Elliott, ‘Fishing in Australian waters’, Inside Indonesia, no. 46, 1996, and ‘Indonesian
fishermen: a Western Australian perspective’, MS, ca. 1994.
32. This finding has been made by historical researchers of Chinese, Japanese and Malay histories in
Australia, but continues to be confirmed by social science empirical research. Holly Johnson,
‘Experiences of crime in two selected migrant communities’, Trends & Issues in Criminal Justice,
Australian Institute of Criminology, no. 302, 2005, pp. 1
6. This is not only the case in Australia,
but has also been observed in the USA and Europe. Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and
Stephen Raudenbush, ‘Social anatomy of racial and ethnic disparities in violence’, American
Journal of Public Health, vol. 95, 2005, pp. 224
32; Stephen Castles et al., ‘Assessment of research
reports carried out under the European Commission targeted Socio-economic Research
Programme’, European Commission Directorate General, December 2001.
33. Ganter, Mixed Relations, pp. 69, 235, 254.