I never knew my grandfathers – on both sides of my family, they passed away before I had a chance to meet them. But when I think of the word ‘grandad’, my first thought is of the gentle and kindly old man who lived next door to my family when I was three years old, in the country town of Albury, NSW.
He lived alone, and he adored us – we could ride our bikes on his driveway, and he’d bring cold drinks out and chat to our parents. He loved being called Grandad, and he inhabited the role for us completely. It is a memory that strikes me now as particularly unique – in the rhetoric we hear today about migrants moving to regional Australia, it’s hard to imagine a white man of the older generation being so welcoming to the new immigrant family next door. But in many ways, our early experiences of Australia were proof that multiculturalism can work.
My family and I migrated to Australia in 1992, in the years before Pauline Hanson had her original stint in Parliament. At that time, the first wave of the kind of anti-immigration rhetoric was beginning to appear on television screens, in newspapers and on airwaves – but they didn’t prevent my father from being hired as the first non-white engineer at his new company. This vision of a divided Australia was somewhat at odds with our actual experiences.
Zoya Patel, aged 6, with her father. Source: Supplied
We moved to Albury, a regional centre in New South Wales, where my dad’s job was based. Things weren’t always easy going as a migrant family in a very white town, and my siblings and I suffered some racism at school, as did my parents at work.
But overall, our lives in Albury were in many ways an example of how multiculturalism can work – when people of diverse ethnicities come together to form functional communities. As Fijian-Indian Muslims, we soon found a vibrant network of fellow Muslim immigrants from all over the world – Indonesia, Malaysia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Pakistan, India, and more. We would meet, celebrate religious holidays and share our knowledge regularly.
The women would gather at each other's homes to teach how to prepare special sweets from their cultures. I can still remember our Bosnian friends at our home, stretching out pastry until it was paper thin and covered our entire dining table, showing us how to make the delicious treat of burek. Our shared experiences as migrants brought us close together, but these connections were further enhanced through the support of the broader Albury community.
A local church allowed us to use their hall for our Friday prayers, and for Sunday school lessons for the kids on Islamic history and traditions.
The closest halal butchers were either in Sydney or Melbourne – both a long trek by car – but that didn’t stop us. My father brokered connections with farmers in the region who were very happy to sell him chooks and have them slaughtered on their land.
Dad would travel down random driveways and knock on doors, introducing himself and explaining our situation. He would perform the slaughter himself, but often with the help of the men on each property. These farmers became family friends, and some of my favourite memories are of meeting weathered Aussies who would take us around their property, let us pat lambs and calves and invite us into their homes.
A local church allowed us to use their hall for our Friday prayers, and for Sunday school lessons for the kids on Islamic history and traditions.
I will always remember one couple in particular who owned a hilly property outside of Albury. We once visited them to help clear their fields of mossy stones, which we later used to build a retaining wall in our backyard. They had a cat called Dog and a dog called Cat, and I spent hours playing with these animals under the watchful gaze of the kind woman who seemed to relish our company on her isolated land.
We had amazing neighbours, and us kids would be in and out of each other’s houses every afternoon, with no mention ever of my siblings and I being the only non-white kids in the gang. When our neighbours visited our house, they would be fed snacks of samosas and bhajia, and we visited theirs we would happily eat Pringles and vegemite sandwiches. On Halloween we would travel the neighbourhood as one pack, with a parent chaperone who happily volunteered to steward our sugar-fuelled journey through the streets.
We made wonderful friends through school and through my parents’ jobs who would come to our house and eat Indian food with their hands, eager to learn about a different culture, and equally willing to show us more about our new home. Sometimes we would giggle at our new ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who didn’t know how to tear roti into strips and scoop up curry, but it was the joking of family members, an ease that confirmed how strong our friendships had become.
When our neighbours visited our house, they would be fed snacks of samosas and bhajia, and we visited theirs we would happy eat Pringles and vegemite sandwiches.
Yes, I was bullied at school for being brown by children who had never interacted with a person of colour before, and there were occasional nasty incidents of racism in public – but when contrasted with our warm experiences in general, they just reminded us that the racists were in the minority, and that Australia truly aspired to be an inclusive community.
We moved to Canberra a few years after arriving in Australia, and that sense of community became diluted. We engaged less with people from other cultures, and stuck more to our own smaller networks. With a larger population came a more transient shared identity.
In Albury, people were more likely to see our shared experiences rather than our differences. People were willing to help based on these connections, and we built a community around them.
A few weeks into 2019, racial tensions ran high. A rally of far-right anti-immigrant groups on Melbourne’s St Kilda beach highlighted that for many Australians, multiculturalism no longer has the positive connotations it once did.
Instead of suggesting a vibrant and diverse community, bringing together the best of many cultures, the term is associated with racial unrest, scarcity of resources, and an irrevocable disagreement on what an Australian national identity should look like.
Reflecting on our arrival in Australia reminds me of our optimism about our new home, and our excitement at becoming Australian citizens. In today’s climate of culture wars, racial profiling, and hate speech, it’s hard to see how immigrants arriving now could have as positive an experience. It’s a timely reminder of our supposed shared values as Australians: to be welcoming, friendly, and to always offer to help. These were values that I saw inhabited by the people we met in Albury, but which have become clouded by the ‘us vs them’ rhetoric of our politicians and those who use immigrants as scapegoats for any number of issues that affect all Australians.
Perhaps my family were fortunate to experience a brief moment in Australia’s history when we truly exhibited the ‘mateship’ we claim to prize as a culture. The ideal of multiculturalism is a worthy one to pursue – but if we continue to focus on division over inclusion, and blame cultures rather than systems for the challenges that affect our lives, we’re at risk of losing more than just a buzzword.
Zoya Patel is the author of the memoir No Country Woman, published by Hachette Australia
