The Space of Citizenship: Drifting and Dwelling in “Imperial” Australia

Abstract

Though rarely acknowledged, cheap labour sourced through inter-colonial networks originating in British India was instrumental to the “European” exploration and development of colonial Australia in the decades that followed the initial convict-transportation era. Among others, so-called “Afghan” cameleers left their most permanent legacy in Australia’s networks of transcontinental communication and transport, which they first charted and then instrumentally assisted in building between the 1860s and 1920s. Arguably, it was these same networks that ultimately enabled the Australian nation-state to be formed. Beyond those indelible infrastructural traces, however, this paper focuses in particular on the more enigmatic built evidence of these Muslim pioneers and their attempt to establish a foothold in Australia’s burgeoning towns and cities in the early twentieth century. We consider how this humble architectural fabric – built and projected – supported their comparatively vast commercial and communal networks, and how it also asserted the cameleer’s presumed right to citizenship within the emerging Australian Commonwealth. To build was both a practical and a political statement of the intention to dwell, we argue, in a space of opportunity and potential citizenship that was – from the cameleers’ purview as subjects of the greater British world-system – truly “imperial” in scale as well as scope for cultural diversity.

Notes

1. For previous studies of the Adelaide Mosque by the authors, see: Katharine Bartsch, “Building Identity in the Colonial City: The Case of the Adelaide Mosque,” Journal of Contemporary Islam 9, no. 3 (2015): 247–270; Mizanur Rashid and Katharine Bartsch, “Architecture of the Adelaide Mosque: Hybridity, Resilience and Assimilation,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 25, no. 2 (2014): 65–75; Mizanur Rashid and Katharine Bartsch, “Historical Fabulation; A Framework to Rethink Islamic Architecture Outside the Islamic World,” International Journal of Architectural Research 8, no. 1 (2014): 120–132. Katharine Bartsch and Selen Morkoç, “Contested Terrain or Contact Zone? The Case of the Adelaide Mosque, 1888–1889,” in Contested Terrains: Proceedings of the 23rd International SAHANZ Conference, Western Australia, Australia, 29 September–2 October 2006, eds. Terrance McMinn, John Stephens and Steve Basson (Perth: SAHANZ, 2006), 25–31; Peter Scriver, “Mosques, Ghantowns and Cameleers in the Settlement History of Colonial Australia,” Fabrications 13, no. 2 (2004): 19–41.

2. David Day, Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (Sydney: Harper-Collins, 2001), 91–104, 145–158.

3. The “Afghans” were an ethnically diverse group – primarily Afridi, Durrani, Ghilzai and Baluchi tribesmen – originating from Afghanistan and the northwest frontier province of British India. For a detailed discussion, see: Nahid Kabir, Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2010), 41–94; Regina Ganter, “Muslim Australians: The Deep Histories of Contact,” Journal of Australian Studies 32, no. 4 (2008): 481–492; Abdullah Saeed, Islam in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003), 3–7.

4. H. G. Woffenden, “Blacket, Edmund Thomas (1817–1883),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed March 3, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/blacket-edmund-thomas-3005/text4395, published first in hardcopy 1969.

5. Northwood House and Cottage, Heritage Office, Database number: 5045382, File number: S90/03860 & HC 33129, accessed January 20, 2016, http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5045382.

6. Christine Stevens, “Wade, Abdul (1866–1928),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed March 3, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wade-abdul-13230/text7395, published first in hardcopy 2005. Stevens expresses some doubt about the veracity of Wade’s own claim that he first arrived in 1879, when he would only have been 13 years old. It is more probable that he arrived in the mid-1880s, still just a young adult, when gold was discovered in the Kimberley region.

7. Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, “Abdul Wade,” in Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: pioneers of the inland, 1860s-1930s (Kent Town, S.A.: Wakefield Press, 2007), 168.

8. Stevens, “Wade, Abdul (1866–1928).” The Sydney Stock and Station Journal, September 25, 1903, 4.

9. Stevens, “Wade, Abdul (1866–1928).”

10. Barrier Miner, April 29, 1905, 7; Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail, April 26, 1905, 3; The Cobargo Chronicle, April 28, 1905, 4.

11. Northwood House and Cottage.

12. These are repeated, as quoted, without evidence, in the NSW Heritage register. Northwood House and Cottage.

13. Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 168.

14. Stephens, “Wade, Abdul (1866–1928).”

15. Review of The Shire of Carnarvon Local Government Heritage Inventory for Community Consultation File No: 4T0405, 16th December 2014, Timothy Roberts, Planning Officer, accessed March 6, 2016, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ob20N0VVy0EJ:www.carnarvon.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Agenda-Part-3.pdf+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au.

16. Review of The Shire of Carnarvon Local Government Heritage Inventory for Community Consultation File No: 4T0405.

17. “An Alien Invasion,” The Northern Times, January 24, 1914, cited in Ian Murray et al., The ‘Afghan Problem’ and their Camels (Perth: Hesperian Press, 2008), 136–137.

18. “Alien Invasion. Water service refused. Afghan quarter fixed,” The Northern Times, February 7, 1914, cited in Ian Murray et al., The ‘Afghan Problem’ and their Camels, 137–138. Indeed, this was hardly unusual. “Afghans” had been buying properties in Perth and other outback towns including Broken Hill, Bourke, and Marree for decades. For those with sufficient funds who intended to stay, the evidence suggests that there had previously been no limit on their capacity to purchase and build properties. We are grateful to Philip Jones for this observation.

19. “Alien Invasion. Water service refused. Afghan quarter fixed,” 137.

20. Juma Khan had been living in Australia for almost two decades, and continued to reside in Carnarvon unril 1924. He had arrived via Fremantle in 1895, evidently already fluent in English having served as an interpreter in a court case the same year regarding labour importation. West Australian, August 3, 1895, 3, as cited in Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, “Juma Khan,” in Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 180.

21. “Alien Invasion. Water service refused. Afghan quarter fixed,”137.

22. “The Afghan Quarter,” The Northern Times, February 21, 1914; “Afghan Camp. Ladies return to the attack. Ratepayers strike advised,” The Northern Times, May 9, 1914; cited in Murray et al., The ‘Afghan Problem’ and their Camels, 138.

23. “Alien Invasion. Water service refused. Afghan quarter fixed,” 137. The emphasis is ours.

24. “Alien Invasion. Water service refused. Afghan quarter fixed,” 138. Not all cameleers suffered such injustice silently, nor the pernicious retrenchment of their status that it condoned. As “Slimco” – another long-term resident of the Carnarvon camel camp who was evidently known to locals – argued in a wily retort to the recent newspaper campaign against the camel-men, their detractors were as foolish as they were mean-spirited. Over the previous 19 years that he had “resided in the district”, Slimco explained, he and his Afghan brethren had been responsible collectively for at least 60 pounds per week of the town’s income for their basic living needs and rations alone, quite apart from the taxes they paid through their business activities: “Afghans protest against the cold shoulder. An appeal for fair play,” The Northern Times, May 9, 1914, in Murray et al., The ‘Afghan Problem’ and their Camels, 138.

25. Disheartened by the accelerating collapse of the camel business by the early 1920s, Wade sold off his country property, evidently leaving his wife and children in Sydney, and returned to Afghanistan in 1923, where he also reputedly surrendered his Australian passport in disgust. Stevens, “Wade, Abdul (1866–1928).”

26. The role of camels in exploration and expansion has been examined by a number of historians including, T.L. McKnight, The Camel in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964); H.M. Barker, Camels and the Outback (Melbourne: Pitman, 1964). The lives of the cameleers have been studied in the following texts: G. Farwell, Vanishing Australians (Adelaide: Rigby, 1961); P. Rajkowski, In the Tracks of the Camelmen: Outback Australia’s Most Exotic Pioneers (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1987); Christine Stevens, Tin mosques and Ghantowns: A history of Afghan Camel drivers in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002. Original work published 1989); Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland, 1860s–1930s (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2010. Original work published 2007).

27. Day, Claiming a Continent, 92.

28. See, for example, Christine Andrew and Penny Cook, eds., An Oral History of Descendents of the South Sea Islanders (Kanakas) (Brisbane: Maurice Caudrey Productions, 2000), or the earlier important work by E.W. Docker. The Blackbirders. The Recruiting of South Seas Labour for Queensland, 1863–1907 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1970).

29. E.W. Streeter, Pearls and Pearling Life (London: Bell and Sons, 1886); M. McCarthy, “Naked Diving for Mother-of-pearl,” in Early Days, Journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society 13, no. 2 (2009): 243–262.

30. P.J. Marshall, “The Diaspora of the Africans and the Asians,” in Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. P.J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 284–285.

31. In the years between the formal establishment of British colonial administration, in 1874, and the early twentieth century, over 60,000 indentured labourers were imported from India to serve on British-owned cotton plantations in the Fiji islands – which had an estimated indigenous population of just 150,000 in 1874. By the time the colonial era had come to a close less than a century later, the Indian community that was now permanently settled on these islands outnumbered the native Fijians. By the early twentieth century, the size and relative cultural impact of the migrant Indian populations in Trinidad (135,000), and Mauritius (465,000) were even greater – as two further examples of key tropical island colonies in the British colonial world system where indentured workers had been massively recruited from India to supplement the labour formerly provided by imported African slaves. Marshall, “The Diaspora of the Africans and the Asians,” 288–289.

32. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 183.

33. Darwin, The Empire Project, 281–282. See also Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

34. Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyde, eds., Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections Between India and Australia (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2010), 38.

35. Westrip and Holroyde, eds., Colonial Cousins, 169. After federation, such “Socialist” leanings and economic nationalism manifest in Australia’s whites-only immigration and labour policies tended to complicate the political relationship of the new Australian Commonwealth with imperial Britain and its investors. However, it remained fundamentally aligned with the conservative banking practices and fiscal policy centred in the City of London. See Darwin, The Empire Project, 281–282.

36. May Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” Occasional Paper #22, (October 1980), Afghanistan Council, The Asia Society, New York, 1980. Philip Jones has compiled a substantial number of biographies of individual cameleers which can be viewed at www.cameleers.net.

37. Vivienne Loois, “Afghans and Indians in Western Australia,” in Asian Immigrants to Western Australia, 1820–1901, compiled by Anne Atkinson, The Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australia, vol. 5 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1988), 396–399.

38. Westrip and Holroyde, Colonial Cousins, 84–87.

39. Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 50–65.

40. Philip Jones, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, South Australian Museum, 2011, accessed March 6, 2016, http://www.cameleers.net; Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 52–54.

41. Louis Green, “Giles, Ernest (1835–1897),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed March 10, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au, published first in hardcopy 1972.

42. Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed, 1964. A map of this expedition entitled Map showing the routes travelled and discoveries made by the exploring expeditions equipped by Thomas Elder and under the command of Ernest Giles [cartographic material]: between the years 1872–1876 can be viewed online at the National Library of Australia at http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm2902-1.

43. Suzanne Edgar, “Lindsay, David (1856–1922),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed March 10, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au, published first in hardcopy 1986.

44. Jones, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 2011

45. Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 55.

46. Christopher Steele, “Wells, Lawrence Allen (1860–1938),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed March 10, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au, published first in hardcopy 1990.

47. Valmai A. Hankel, “Bejah, Dervish (1862–1957),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed March 10, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au, published first in hardcopy 1979.

48. L.W. Parkin, “Madigan, Cecil Thomas (1889–1947),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed March 10, 2016, http://adb.anu.edu.au, published first in hardcopy 1986.

49. Jones, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 2011.

50. Jones and Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, 58–65.

51. The Mohammedan Mosque of Perth, Western Australia, Annual Report, no. 2, 1905–1906 (Perth: Hasan Musakhan, 1906).

52. Faiz and Tagh Mahomet (sic.)*, ‘The out-back Afghan’, The Sun, Kalgoorlie, February 4, 1900. Reproduced in Murray et al., The ‘Afghan Problem’ and their Camels, 87. (*Note: Tagh Mahomet had been dead since 1896).

53. Darwin, The Empire Project, 281–282. Faiz himself had served previously in the British Artillery transport service. “Faiz Muhammad,” Australia’s Muslim Cameleers, Cameleer Biographies, accessed June 15, 2016, http://www.cameleers.net/?page_id=239&cambiomode=2&cambioid=293

54. Gregory Fremont-Barnes, The Anglo-Afghan Wars 1839–1919 (Oxford: Osprey, 2009); May Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” Occasional Paper #22, (October 1980), Afghanistan Council, The Asia Society, New York, 1980.

55. Letter to Rear Admiral, H.R.H. George Frederick Ernest Albert, Prince of Great Britain and Ireland, from the Afghan residents in Western Australia, Perth, W.A., 20/7/1901, appendix to M.H. Musakhan, ed., Islam in Australia: 1863–1932 (Adelaide: Mahomet Allum, 1932).

56. Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” 12–13; See also May Schinasi, Afghanistan at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Nationalism and Journalism in Afghanistan, a study of Seraj ul-akhbar (1911–1918), (Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale, 1979).

57. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, Hobson-Jobson. A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-India Words and Phrases (London: John Murray, 1903), s.v. “pucka”.

58. Seraj ul-akhbar, IV, 21, 9–10, as cited in Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” 11.

59. Seraj ul-akhbar, IV, 21, 9–10, as cited in Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” 12.

60. Brisbane was the third capital city that had acquired a mosque by this time. See Jessica Harris, “Tradition, Identity and Adaptation: Mosque Architecture in South-East Queensland,” in Open: Proceedings of the 30th International SAHANZ Conference, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 2 July–5 July 2013, eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast: SAHANZ, 2013), 341–353.

61. Seraj ul-akhbar , IV, 24, pp. 7–8, as cited in Schinasi, “The Afghans in Australia,” 13.

62. The original Queenslander which housed the Brisbane Mosque, purpose built in 1909, was replaced in the 1970s.