Paki-Bashing from Bradford to Bankstown

Near Broome in 1975, I met a very tall, dark man who looked after the town’s electricity generator. He described his heritage to me both his grandmothers were Indigenous Western Desert women; one of his grandfathers was an Irish policeman (hence the barely discernible freckles); and the other was from the North West Frontier, in what is now Pakistan, a Jat Pathan he thought. From his Pathan grandfather he had a scimitar, engraved in Pushtun script, which he intended to take with him (as a clue) when he headed off to Pakistan to ‘find his roots.’

What we now call Pakistan has a long historical connection with Australia. Pathans, Baluchis, and Punjabis played a crucial role in the opening up of Australia as traders, transport camel drivers and labourers. The remnants of their mosques exist in the heart of the country, and the Ghan train gets its name from their misinterpreted presence. As in the case of my Broome acquaintance, they inter-married with both Indigenous and settler Australians.

Then, for 70 years, no more of these people were allowed in.

But as White Australia faltered and then disintegrated, the Pakistani professional classes saw in Australia a place of opportunity and fraternal lifestyles, not least because of the shared passion for cricket. Middle-class Pakistanis came to Australia as doctors, engineers, and other professionals and established themselves as part of the new diversity of multicultural Australia.

A camel train ca. 1911. Photo courtesy of the State Library of South Australia. SLSA: B 14808

In 1976, I was living in Bradford in West Yorkshire, the epicentre for Pakistani immigration to Britain from the disputed territory of Mirpur in Kashmir. Mirpur had been used as a labour quarry for the archaic textile mills of Britain’s north country, its population pushed there by violence and economic devastation in their homeland, and pulled there by recruiters promising steady incomes and opportunity.

By 2005 Bradford had been the scene of race riots between Asians and Whites and had become a centre for the racist National Front and part of the milieu which produced Britain’s first ‘home-grown’ terrorists the neighbouring city of Leeds being the home of the bombers of the London Underground on 7 July 2005.

This situation owed much to the fact that young British Muslims had grown up in economically decaying inner cities spaces marred by White flight to the suburbs and dormitory towns.

Some of these young British Muslims had been drawn to the fringes of crime. Studies of the Bradford rioters of 2001, when over 100 men of Pakistani descent were jailed following pitched battles with police, indicated that some had been involved in drug and petty street crime but the vast majority had no prior convictions. Their parents were unskilled and often unemployed, their communities had been badly affected by the virtual collapse of the textile industry, and opportunities promised to previous generations had not reappeared.

The Bradford rioters lived in segregated and impoverished neighbourhoods, with poor services and under-resourced education and social provision. Britain had failed them and their anger and frustration showed. And yet British Institute of Race Relations research demonstrates that the sentences they received were significantly greater than those for White men arrested after similar disturbances elsewhere in the north of England and in Northern Ireland.

In Australia, the Pakistani community has a very different profile it has no religious leaders in a political role and the community organisation is headed by a woman lawyer. Even so, Pakistanis and other sub-continental Muslims have been the victims here of attacks by White thugs (also the trigger for the Bradford riots). Why the antipathy, when the Pakistani community is in general peaceful, well-off, quite secular and integrated?

Three problems bear down on the Australian Pakistani community, yet it has little if any control over how they are perceived. Firstly, the publicity given to terrorist training camps in Pakistan fuels media speculation that the Pakistani Government accepts and even encourages these camps, thereby being closet terrorists. That speculation occurs despite the many attempts by al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups to kill President Pervez Musharraf and the regularly voiced opposition to terrorism by local Pakistani leaders.

Secondly, the notorious case of the four K brothers, sons of a Pakistani-born doctor, convicted of a string of gang rapes in 2002 and again in 2005, has had a very negative effect on public understanding of Pakistani society. Notwithstanding the widespread condemnation of their acts by Australian Pakistanis, the men’s egregious claims that they were victims of an anti-Muslim conspiracy secured even more media headlines.

And thirdly, there is the fear in the general community caused by the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric, and its channelling against darker-skinned Muslims in particular.

One of the challenges for governments and the community in Australia is to increase our broader confidence and competence in understanding our national diversity, and engaging with each other as Australians free of stereotypical simplifications.

It is also important that all Australians (including those from a Pakistani background) feel that their governments are concerned with their well-being, that the police wish to protect them against aggravation and provocation, and that the whole of society sees them as being part of writing the national future.

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