Visiting Australia’s Oldest Mosque in an Isolated Outback Town
I don’t typically read VICE, but this came in via my Google Alerts and I found it interesting. Perhaps you will too—if nothing else, it’s a good diversion from the political circus performances that have been going on.
No one admits it much, but Islam helped build Marree. Locals say the town has never had a church, but it did once have two active mosques, with the first built as early as 1861 making it the first mosque ever built in Australia.
Marree is an outback crossroads town about eight hours north of Adelaide connecting the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks. The men who built the mosques came from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. They come out to make money from their camels and whatever differences there were between then back home, they all became “Afghans.” At one point there were so many of them gathered in Marree, the place was known as “Little Asia.”
At that time, over a century ago, the town was segregated along racial lines, with the Afghans and the local Aboriginal people living in the north side of the town while the Europeans lived in the south. For the Aboriginal people, the situation was a direct product of classic, old-world racism. There was an element of this for the Afghans as well, but it was also born out of necessity, as their camels were restricted to the outskirts of the settlement. This is how Marree developed two sides, each with very different cultures. Even the town cemetery is divided, with most Afghan graves marked only with a wooden pole.
Kuranda Seyit spent seven years researching a documentary on the Afghan cameleers and says that while there was racism, South Australia was “softer” than New South Wales and Western Australia. When racism did strike, it came from outside in the form of the White Australia Policy and fears among white Europeans that brown-skinned cameleers were stealing white jobs. […]
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Here’s the documentary mentioned in the article: