EVENT: The Lakemba Night Market

Some years back, a certain blogger for a Sydney tabloid freely available at Scottish-American restaurants in Sydney wrote a piece about the Sydney suburb of Lakemba. He wrote about his experience staying in a local pub room and walking up and down the main drag. He described it as a cultural monolith, “the last Anglo holdout in Sydney’s otherwise Middle-Eastern south-western suburb” where the only predominant race on the cultural menu speaks Arabic. Some of Blair’s descriptions of Lakemba, according to one report, mirrored that of far-Right groups such as the Australian Defence League (ADL).

The same newspaper frequently presented Lakemba as a hotbed for global jihad. These days, the only jihad you’ll find in Lakemba is the State MP for the area. And boy do the locals love their Jihad. In the 2019 NSW State Election, the former Punchbowl Boys High School principal scored a whopping 4.4% increase in his primary vote. Meanwhile the Christian Democrat candidate’s primary vote went down 5.7%. When it comes to the popularity of Jihad in Lakemba, Tim Blair might just have a point.

But in terms of Lakemba’s ethnic composition, Blair doesn’t have a clue. Far from being an Arab Islamic city, the largest non-Anglo group hail from the rather non-Arabic-speaking nation known as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, a nation whose national language is written in ancient Sanskrit script and the words of whose national anthem were penned by Nobel Prize winning Hindu author Rabindranath Tagore.

What used to be known affectionately by many locals as Lakembanon has now become Lakembadesh. In fact, the local Bangladeshi community is so strong that one of the Liberal councillors on Canterbury Bankstown Council is an Aussie woman of Bangladeshi origin who doesn’t exactly dress like something out of an old Scott Morrison tourism advert. Unless, of course, if the said advert featured Lara Bingle wearing a hijab and sporting a more authentic tan.

 

I used to run a legal clinic in Lakemba for the Salvation Army for a few months just before Aunty Gladys decided to declare a lockdown. Lakemba and other parts of South-Western Sydney bore the brunt of Delta, with police horses and choppers and drones enforcing the draconian but necessary regulations. Gladys chose not to enforce the regs on her mates in Liberal-voting wealthy parts of Sydney. Now that she’s working at Optus, maybe Lakemba locals should collectively switch to Telstra.

 

Covid meant that the Council-hosted annual month-long street party during the nights of Ramadan had to be cancelled. During this much-loved annual event, huge swathes of Haldon Street are closed off, with plenty of food on offer from across the world.

 

Of course, there is Bangladeshi food, including desserts sweet enough to give you Type II diabetes with a single bite. Then there is food from China (yep, those dreaded Chinese have extended their reach to Sydney before Peter Dutton’s AUKUS submarines are delivered). There’s also Syrian shawarma, Lebanese felafel, Hyderabadi barbecue, Pakistani chapli kabab and Afghan mantu. All this with potato fries on a stick and grilled camel burgers. You’ll even find traditional Aussie tucker – nasi lemak from the Christmas Islands.

 

A fair few Syrian and Rohingya folk can be found making quite a killing with their beautiful dishes and amazing customer service. Social distancing isn’t a huge priority when the streets get crowded, so bring your RAT’s tests! Though I found one supermarket selling single tests for $10 each.

In this, the sacred month of Ramadan, even the local pub was doing a roaring trade. Though I didn’t see as many people lining up for a VB as they were for the camel burgers outside the pub. Two Islamic religious bookshops were also open, one of them once the subject of tabloid speculation for its alleged links to al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIL, the FARC militia, the IRA and the L Ron Hubbard Liberation Front. I went inside the bookshop accompanied by a female friend who wasn’t wearing a facemask let alone a burka. The bloke behind the counter, whose beard was around one third the size of your average barista, gave us a welcoming smile. The books looked very Boko Halal to me.

 

A fair few clothes were also on sale. Australia is a haven of modest fashion, witb even DFAT hosting Australian designers at overseas embassies. This caused certain writers from The Ameri … whoops … Australian newspaper to collapse in a collective cultural cardiac arrest. The resulting pseudo-conservative monocultural mass debate about Islamic and modest fashion lasted around 48 hours, with the designers and vendors no doubt making a bigger profit out of the trumped (or given Newscorp’s love for the man, should that be Trumped?) up controversy than the said newspaper. No suicide vests were on sale, which will no doubt disappoint the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) who invented the blasted things.

 

It’s pretty easy to get to the Ramadan night market, and there is bugger-all parking so leave your guzzlers at home. The crowds will only get bigger, with people of all faiths and none enjoying the food and the atmosphere. Even the local Uniting Church had set aside part of its grounds for people to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea. And why not? After all, Christians and Muslims are both part of #TeamJesus.

 

The Ramadan Night Market is an experience not to be missed even for certain less intelligent scribes of the Daily Telegraph. 

(First published in TCNW)

OPINION: ANZAC Day reflection ...

Every year Australians celebrate a most sacred day. No, not Easter or Christmas. Not even Melbourne Cup Day. 

I’m talking about ANZAC Day. It’s a day when we commemorate our nation’s great tradition of going to the other side of the world to fight someone else’s war. We are so adept at it and have plenty of experience at it. Just ask the Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis etc.

 

ANZAC Day is about Australia. Yes, the Kiwistanis were also involved but who guvs a stuff abioot thim. This was our time to shine. We went off to defeat the Ottoman Empire, to liberate Istanbul and revert it back to its status as Constantinople, the beating heart of the Anglican and/or Catholic church. We were to climb the sandy ridges of the wrong beaches and be victoriously slaughtered at the orders of a colonial fruitcake named Winston Churchill. Our young men were to be mowed down by the machine guns and snipers of a tiny Ottoman force led by a bloke named Mustafa Kemal.

The Ottomans managed to defend their strip of the beach and so save their capital. Istanbul isn’t an Anglican or Catholic city. Their young leader became Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish republic. Winston Churchill went onto greater achievements. His bright ideas for the British armed forces directly led to the 1943 famine in the colonial possessions of Bengal in north-western India. A mere 3 million Indians died in that famine. At least in sheer numbers, Churchill managed to recreate half the Holocaust. The colonial administration tried to stop photos of the famine being published in the papers. Who needs to deny a genocide when you can just hide it?

 

And what did Australia get out of this madness? Apart from grieving wives and mums and girlfriends and families back home, we got an excuse to have a public holiday when we can glorify war and celebrate our  tradition of mateship, a uniquely Australian characteristic not found anywhere else in the multiverse.

 

We must never sully the name of ANZAC Day by comparing it to Afghanistan or Palestine or Iraq. Especially if we are a dark-skinned engineer wearing a hijab whose parents migrated from the Sudan. We cannot allow our diggers to be insulted. They fought and died for our freedom to hassle and threaten and silence minorities on the pages of newspapers owned by a true Australian who showed his patriotism by throwing away his Australian citizenship to become an American.

 

ANZAC Day is about fighting against foreigners in the service of other foreigners. Rarely have Australians ever fought to defend their own territory. Unless it involved massacring indigenous folk.

 

Even today, so many of our regions are named after genocidal maniacs. Just south of Perth is a place called Peel, named in honour of Thomas Peel, a magnificent individual who established the first British settlers in WA. His shining achievement was to carry out the Pinjarra massacre in 1834. 

 

Now here’s an interesting fact about the brave ANZACs. And yes, they were very brave. So brave that they gave their lives fighting under the flag. No, not our flag. The ANZACs fought under the Union Jack, a bastardised combination of the St George Cross and the crosses of other neighbouring people the Poms colonised and massacred.

 

So while we fly Chinese-made Aussie flags on ANZAC Day, our diggers fought under a foreign flag. Even on the first ANZAC Day celebrations, Irish-Australian  veterans managed to piss everyone off by refusing to march under the Union Jack, preferring instead to hold the Australian flag to show their disdain for an empire that sent their people into famine.

 

So there you have it, folks. A brown-skinned Muslim whose parents were born in Delhi has just written a blasphemous piece about ANZAC Day. I urge you all to write to The Australian, Daily Telegraph and any other American-owned newspaper at your disposal. Ring up Sky News Australia After Dark and tell them how disgusted you are. Have me lose my job at the ABC (not that I have one), get threatened and hopefully deported back to where I come from. Not that I can afford the house prices in East Ryde anymore.

 

Because these are the culture wars the diggers fought and died for! 

(First published in TCNW)

Welcome!

 Welcome to More Planet Irf, a continuation of the Planet Irf blog. Here you will find more commentary and opinion from Irfan Yusuf. 

Irfan's work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Geelong Advertiser, Adelaide Advertiser, Courier-Mail, AMUST, New Zealand Herald, Christchurch Press, Wellington Dominion-Post, NSW Law Society Journal, MWU!, Crikey, ABC The Drum, Eureka Street, Guardian Australia, SBS Life, 10 Daily.

Enjoy!