[Reader-list] A true telling of Australian history

[Marni Cordell]

Hi all,
This is an article I put together while travelling through central and 
northern Australia earlier this year. Thought it might be of interest to 
those on the reader list.

Cheers,
Marni


A true telling of Australian history
by Marni Cordell

Racquel Austin-Abdullah has old memories of being driven through the dry, 
saltbush landscape near Broken Hill in outback New South Wales, and feeling 
at home. She remembers her stepfather describing nearby Wilcannia as a “no 
good blacks’ town”, and wondering how it was, if the place was so wrong, 
that she could feel right there.

At 29, Racquel now lives in Alice Springs with her 17-month-old daughter 
Milosh. Inside her small flat, a photo of a full-bellied woman, standing 
pregnant and proud next to a camel, dominates a wall. The picture was taken 
just weeks before Milosh was born. In black and white, Racquel is a 
classical Middle Eastern woman, with a strong face and dark smile. In real 
life her face is much softer and lighter, but her eyes - pure light green 
and arrowed - draw a clear path to the tracks of her ancestry.

Racquel is a descendent of the Northern Frontier Province Afghan camel 
traders that came to Australia in the late 19th century. The ‘Afghans’ as 
the camel traders became known, were Afghan, Pakistani and Northern Indian 
men who transported goods to remote and otherwise unreachable areas of 
outback Australia before the advent of the motorised transport industry. 
Bourke and Wills brought the first cameleers to Australia as early as 1860, 
but many more soon followed, single or without their wives, with the hope 
of making their fortunes in the desert. Although never easily accepted in 
to white Australian society - their strictly religious and tribal culture 
commonly attracted fear and persecution - they quickly became an essential 
part of white man’s survival in the outback, as their long camel trains 
were able to travel into waterless areas of desert where bullocks and 
horses could not.

Racquel’s family history also ties her to the indigenous Barkindji people, 
a decimated Aboriginal nation from the Darling River region near Broken 
Hill. A departure point for camel trading routes to South Australia and 
beyond, Broken Hill was also home to many Ghantowns; the small villages of 
tin shanty constructions that sprung up around the edges of major towns to 
house the excluded Afghans. It is thought that Racquel’s great grandfather 
met her great grandmother, a Barkindji woman, when he and his camel train 
had been stopped there for a pastoral or mission station visit. Their son, 
her paternal grandfather, grew up in a nearby aboriginal mission.

The Barkindji people, like so many indigenous tribes to Victoria and NSW, 
were caught right in the heartland of colonial development. By the late 
1800s, their land, livelihood and culture had virtually been decimated by 
pastoral occupation. In the early 1900s, with their major food sources 
gone, the Barkindji turned to police rationing centres for survival. 
Supplies were sparse, and they were still required to supplement with 
hunting and gathering. Many Barkindji ended up in missions, some forcibly 
placed and others through being convinced, after desperation and hunger set 
in, that a better life awaited them there.

Her Irish grandmother was just a 14-year-old girl when Racquel’s father was 
born to her grandfather: a Barkindji/Afghan man from Lake Cargelligo 
Mission. Her father was adopted out at birth on advice from the local 
church, and was brought up in Adelaide by a couple who followed the 
Methodist faith, without knowledge or understanding of his cultural 
background and story.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that he was able to gain access to 
information on his biological parents, explains Racquel, and “realised that 
he was Koori.” “So my own connection with my Afghan/Barkindji roots didn’t 
really emerge until I was about 18. That’s when my dad started talking to 
me about his own personal journey”.

There are mixed stories of how Aboriginal and Afghan societies interrelated 
in outback Australia. According to Christine Stevens, who has studied the 
cameleers in her book Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, “from their earliest 
encounters, Australian Afghans considered Aborigines inferior; their simple 
very basic lifestyle, lack of material comforts and their seemingly 
undeveloped religious life indicated to the Afghans an inferiority and lack 
of status.”

But Racquel has had story “passed down through word of mouth” of close 
relationships between the two races, and believes that Afghan men may have 
even “identified with the customs and laws, society and kinship structure 
of the Aboriginal people.” According to Stevens, racism and persecution 
towards both groups from the white administration did mean that the two 
fragmented societies sometimes took solace in each other.

Towards the turn of the century, the growing belief that Australia was in a 
dangerous position as a burgeoning ‘white’ nation within a ‘coloured’ 
region, allowed racial prejudice to flourish like it never had before. For 
the cameleers, who had always resided on the very fringes of white society, 
hostility steadily built until finally, writes Stevens, “the term ‘Afghan’ 
began to embody a notion of contempt, of racial inferiority, of 
uncleanliness, brutality, strangeness and fear. The Afghans became the 
untouchables in a white Australia.”

In a letter to a local Broken Hill newspaper at the time, one European 
Australian implored: “white man can live anywhere and do anything a 
“nigger” can do
so why bring them out?”

In truth of course, many of the early European settlers found Australia’s 
arid landscapes hostile and harsh. But just as the desert was a rich and 
seasonal home for the local indigenous people; for the Afghan camel men, 
Australia proved a familiar and workable environment, and their long camel 
trains remained essential to white man’s dream of conquering the land right 
up until the motorised transport industry finally made them redundant in 1934.

There has been little research done into the history of the Australian 
camel industry and Racquel knows that so many stories have already been 
lost, “they only write about how these men came to work with the camels, 
set up the industries and then went back home. They don’t acknowledge that 
some stayed here and that there are descendents from them.”

The contribution and involvement of different cultures in the development 
of Australia has long been a bit of a taboo in this country, but the legacy 
of cultural and racial diversity that is left by immigration is often an 
even less acknowledged subject area. Descendents of immigrants are 
encouraged to loosen ties with their cultural roots and “become 
Australian”. But just as the predominantly Anglo-Celtic makeup of today’s 
Australia is a result of years of careful and race-based policies, what we 
have come to know as ‘history’ must surely have been dictated by similar 
fears and prejudice.

There is no doubt that Racquel feels a sense of belonging to her country; 
although not in a nationalistic sense. She has an affinity with the land 
here and appears to view race and cultural identity as part learnt, part 
chosen and part earned. She does not distinguish between her Afghan and 
Aboriginal roots, but feels justified in claiming a connection to this 
country because her ancestors traversed, lived from and walked the land here.

Racquel would argue that Australian ‘indigenousness’ has become a complex 
and multi-faceted concept. “It’s a hotly debated issue,” she explains, 
“because to be legally recognised as an Aboriginal, you must personally 
identify as Aboriginal, but you must also be identified by a community.” In 
many areas however, white infiltration and subsequent inter-marriage has 
meant that ‘community’ is no longer a definable entity. “It’s an issue that 
many people face
especially in NSW and Victoria, because those areas were 
the first to be settled.”

Currently studying Aboriginal Management Policy through the University of 
South Australia, Racquel hopes to one day go into film production, in order 
to “explore the many issues that make up aboriginality,” such as “family, 
culture, country, landscape, whether that be in a spiritual, practical or 
political sense;” and to normalise the idea of a complex aboriginality.

Above all, in building her own story, she hopes to explore and integrate 
the paths of her ancestors, by reuniting with her father’s father’s family, 
“one day.”

“My dad’s passed away now,” she explains, “he died early. So I think that’s 
also a driving force to constantly, and gently, find out about his history.”
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