Finding My Place Read online

  Multicultural Interests is one of those smaller portfolios that is usually given to junior ministers or to ministers with funny-sounding names as an add-on to a number of other more significant portfolios. But Geoff Gallop, then Premier of Western Australia, was an intellectual who took a keen interest in the portfolio and decided to keep it as one of his. It meant that the office, though small, could focus on some of the meatier issues instead of just cultural celebrations and harmony. It’s not that I don’t like a bit of soy sauce with my sausage roll or that I don’t fancy a bit of Bollywood with my media consumption, but this pesky view of multiculturalism being about strange food and fancy dress is just so tiresome. I’d had my fill of watching older women dressed in purple get in touch with their inner vaginas by joining a belly-dancing class and letting it all hang out, or blokes telling me that they were so multicultural because they were married to women from the subcontinent. I wanted to make multiculturalism mean something more than gritted-teeth tolerance of exotic others who are given permission to celebrate their ‘otherness’ as long as it’s colourful and tastes just like chicken.

  I’d been working at the office for around six months and had in that short time developed a morning ritual where I would stop for coffee at a local cafe and then head up to enjoy the smooth velvet of my extra-hot skinny double-shot cappuccino in the quiet of my office while I checked my emails. I walked into the cafe one morning with my pencil skirt, tailored shirt and high heels and greeted Sebastian the barista with my usual morning cheer. ‘Morning, Sebastian, how are you this fine morning? How was your weekend?’ Sebastian and I enjoyed our little morning small talk and today was no exception. We shared stories of our weekend and our plans for the week, as well as the usual complaint about Mondayitis. I’d learned a lot about him from those morning chitchats. I learned that his family were originally from France, that he had a sister and that he wanted to be a musician.

  The cafe was full that morning. It was a small hole in the wall that seated only around ten people to capacity, but accommodated a few more tables on the footpath. The line was particularly long as the word was getting around that the coffee was hot, the food was good and the staff were friendly. Sebastian prepared my coffee and I moved slightly to the left, ready to pick up my order. I knew the drill – place order, move to left, pick up cutlery, await name to be called, take coffee, leave.

  ‘I love your necklace,’ said the girl behind the counter. She was only new and I couldn’t remember her name.

  ‘Oh, thanks so much,’ I said, clutching at the gold chain around my neck that I had worn every day since my mother had given it to me three years earlier when she returned from a trip to Egypt.

  ‘What does it say? Is it your name?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, thinking nothing of this charming young woman’s curiosity. ‘It’s Arabic. It says, “Mohammed is the prophet of Allah”.’

  Suddenly, the whoosh-whoosh of the giant machine that churned out my morning elixir stopped, and from behind the steam Sebastian emerged with a deep frown. He looked like steam was coming out of his head. ‘Are you Muslim?’ he questioned.

  ‘Yep,’ I said and grabbed a plastic spoon, my mouth watering with eager anticipation of that milky chocolaty frothiness followed by hot bitterness. That’s the thing about cappuccinos – they’re a milk chocolate dessert AND an invigorating drink in one. No other hot drink can claim that kind of accolade. I am prepared to debate anyone who wants to contest this truism.

  Sebastian came face to face with me. ‘So, what do you think of innocent people being murdered by terrorists?’ His question jolted me out of my morning stupor – you know the kind of Monday-morning stupor that you need an extra-hot skinny double-shot cappuccino to break you out of.

  ‘Well, are you asking me that because you really want to know, or are you asking me that because you just found out I’m Muslim? Either way, I’m completely against murder of any innocent people by anyone. Period.’

  ‘Just as well,’ scoffed Sebastian as he pushed my coffee over to me with a condescending huff. As I turned on my high heels to walk out of the cafe as I had done every working day for the past six months, Sebastian yelled after me, ‘Look out, everyone. She’s a Muslim. She’s probably got a bomb.’

  The click-clack of my heels on the wooden floorboards broke the silence, and as I stepped out of the doorway the coffee machine let out a final whoosh.

  I should’ve known what to do, right? I should’ve turned around and said something back to Sebastian and to all the people in that cafe. Something like, ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists, you know’ or ‘The only reason I come here is for the halal milk’. But instead, I went to the bathroom and cried into my coffee cup. Partly because I was angry at myself for crying and partly because I knew I could never go to that cafe again and would have to find somewhere else to buy my morning coffee.

  At around 11.05 on the evening of 12 October 2002, a man known only as Iqbal walked into Paddy’s Bar in the dizzy Kuta district of Bali. Australians had known Bali as their backyard playground for close to three decades. Kuta is the epitome of kitschy tourism in Bali. The sights and smells of its main strip, Jalan Legian, are a sensory overload. Those who have been to Bali offer the worldly advice of seasoned travellers – as if sharing some kind of savvy tourist secret that only those in the know could possibly know: ‘Stay away from Kuta if you don’t want to be hounded by shopkeepers and street vendors.’ At night, the overbearing doof doof of music spills out of the nightclubs and onto the streets, the neon signs and the skimpily dressed girls beckon passers-by to enter the dark chambers offering local beer, cheap cocktails and even cheaper entertainment. It’s hard not to let Kuta consume you rather than you consume it. Once Kuta comes alive, it is an unstoppable force – much like the persistently cheery shopkeepers and street vendors we are warned to avoid. It’s hard to shake Kuta off once you enter Jalan Legian.

  Aussies, young and old, flocked to Kuta clad in Bintang singlets, thongs (the kind you wear on your feet) and shorts. Inebriated Aussies hopped their way from one bar to another – young men with bare chests and shorts pulled down low to reveal the tops of their Bonds undies (when did that become a thing?); old men with their singlets clinging like Glad Wrap to oversized beer bellies; women with newly braided hair and frangipani nails – all telltale signs that you’re an Aussie in Bali. Paddy’s, a favourite haunt for Aussies and fellow travellers, was as full as it was on any other Friday night. As the night revellers nodded along to the beat of the DJ’s music, Iqbal walked to the centre of the bar, stood somewhere near the DJ and flicked a deadly switch.

  In the pandemonium that followed, patrons fled to the streets, dazed and confused. Some headed towards the shelter of the nearby Sari Club just across from Paddy’s. Nobody noticed the white Mitsubishi van parked outside the Sari Club. Jalun Legian was always a sea of metal, glass and noxious fumes, with vans hauling tourists around Bali’s hot spots and taxis cruising the stretch looking for their next pick-up. In the driver’s seat of the white van, Jimmi was waiting to detonate the second vehicle-borne suicide bomb. Seconds later, the powerful bomb reverberated through the heart of Kuta, demolishing the Sari Club in a matter of minutes.

  Sitting on the second storey of the Kuta mosque a few streets away in the part of Kuta where tourists rarely venture, Jaffar heard the loud explosion. He turned to the other men who had gathered that evening to pray. The mosque sits in a typical Balinese street. There are no high walls, luxury villas and private swimming pools. Just modest homes built in the Balinese style with tiled open-air living spaces and small bedrooms shared by whole families. Across from the mosque where the local Muslims come to worship is the local church servicing the Christian population, and two doors down a Hindu temple is adorned with the kinds of offerings that are part of the Bali landscape. If you stand at just the right angle, the three symbols of Bali’s diverse religious cultures line up – Hindu, Muslim and Christian. There is a reason the Balinese refer to this island
as the most harmonious place on earth.

  Looking out over the packed roofs of Kuta’s skyline, the men could see the fire and smoke billowing from the Sari Club location. They assumed a gas bottle had exploded or a wayward match had sparked a fire that got out of hand. A terrorist attack was not in the scope of their imagination. From his home a few suburbs away, Haji Bambang, a community leader who coordinated the local Muslim charitable group known as Fardul Kifaya, got off the phone to Jaffar and waved goodbye to his family as he made his way to the site of the explosion. The men rode their bicycles barefoot, wearing only their day clothes. Arriving shortly after the blast, they immediately went to work pulling the injured from the rubble, holding the hands of the dying and picking body parts out of the ruins. They worked through the night until the sun rose on a new day and they stood there in the stark light surveying the devastation and being thankful that the cloak of darkness had hitherto hidden the magnitude of all this ugliness. As they lifted a large corrugated tin slab that was once part of the roof of the club, the reality of the devastation struck hard. The heap of charred bodies and burnt body parts brought them to their knees. Tragedy can do that. These were the first responders of the Bali bombings. Their story has never been told.

  On the tenth anniversary of the bombings, the men gathered to commemorate the dead and to celebrate the release of Haji Bambang’s new book. Many had not spoken to each other of that night. Sitting in a circle in a meeting room at the White Rose Hotel in Kuta, they broke down as they shared, for the first time, their memories of that night.

  Two hundred and two innocent people perished in those attacks. Among them eighty-eight Australians. They were young football players celebrating their club’s finals win, sisters and cousins celebrating a wedding, mums and daughters, fathers and sons marking some kind of milestone. It’s the kind of thing we take for granted: going to a restaurant or a club to celebrate something. The kind of thing we are lucky to not have to think twice about.

  The Indonesian arm of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a transnational militant Islamist group with links to al-Qaeda, had organised the attack. At midnight on 9 November 2008, three JI members convicted of planning and carrying out the 2002 Bali bombings – Imam Samudra, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim and Ali Ghufron – were executed by firing squad.

  The Bali bombings brought terrorism home. This was not an attack that happened to people somewhere far away – a story told in stylised images and high definition. Everyone was touched by the Bali bombings in some way or another. For most Australians, Bali shattered the relative peace we found ourselves in after the September 11 attacks. Despite the best efforts of our politicians and our media to make the US attacks about all of us, Australians still couldn’t relate to terrorism until it visited our own backyard.

  In 2003, the Howard Government developed the framework for Australia’s counterterrorism approach. Nestled among the hard military and law enforcement responses was a commitment to prevention of terrorism. Our office had carriage for administering the prevention part of the policy framework by engaging with communities – mainly Muslim communities – and promoting something called social harmony. I doubted that football games between the police and young Muslim men was any kind of panacea for terrorism – as if somehow we could make ‘them’ love ‘us’ and then they wouldn’t you know, bomb us because they hated us. I cringed at the sorts of programs that were being delivered as part of this approach to the problem of terrorism – the numerous Muslim leadership programs and the ‘understanding Islam 101’ programs. The worst would have to be the ‘dress as a Muslim for a day’ program – that’s right, step right up folks, put on a niqab and dress like a Muslim for a day to see the world through Muslim eyes. We guarantee you won’t become a terrorist or your money back!

  I sat around the table with a group of senior public servants and a couple of local Muslims, and watched exasperatedly as the bureaucrats puffed out their chests and patted themselves on the back for sitting next to a woman in hijab – like they were doing their duty for keeping Australia safe or something. ‘It’s because I don’t understand Islam,’ one director whispered to me during one of these tedious meetings. ‘Neither do I,’ I whispered back. ‘I don’t understand Christianity, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or Buddhism in much depth either. But I don’t need to understand them to respect Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists.’

  I don’t think he understood me.

  I was enjoying the work at the office of Multicultural Interests. I learned about policy development and ministerial briefings and Dorothy Dixer questions, which is where the government asks a question of itself in parliament so that it can show off what it’s doing on a particular issue. I loved going into the office each day and not knowing what I would be doing – whether there would be an urgent question to answer or a snap meeting with a community group or advice sought from another office. I loved working out how to answer questions that I didn’t already know the answer to. The Office of Crime Prevention had just taken up the newly refurbished offices next to ours on the twenty-sixth floor of the state government building in Perth’s CBD. I asked the receptionist if she could recommend anyone I could talk to for advice in putting together a response to a person who had written to the premier about a policing issue. She thought for a minute. ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘go into that office there on the right. Ask to see Dave Allen. He’s a former police officer. He can help you.’

  Dave Allen was sitting at his desk, which faced the wall. As I walked into the office he shared with another public servant, he pulled up a chair and turned it slightly to the right so that he could face me. I could tell he was tall, though he didn’t stand up to greet me. His hair was white at the temples and he sported a silver goatee and white whiskers. He was handsome in a kind of classic handsome way – a Richard Gere kind of handsomeness. He spoke with a North American accent – Canadian, actually – not that I could tell the difference. On his desk was a photo of his family. They reminded me of my family – if only because his wife was brown-skinned. I wondered if Dave Allen thought himself multicultural because he married a brownie. He answered my questions with patience and offered to send me more information. We talked some more about our families and our work and the kinds of things you talk about when you first meet someone.

  Dave Allen and I became work buddies. We occasionally bumped into each other in the lifts or the corridors and went out for coffee or a smoke break together. We joined our other work colleagues for lunches and shared updates about our kids and our lives. I learned a lot about him in the short time that we worked on the same floor in the same building. I learned that he was once one of Canada’s most promising young ice hockey players and that when he was twelve he had a French girlfriend who would write him love letters that he would take to his French teacher to translate. That he was once captain of the Australian ice hockey team. That he used to run up Jacob’s ladder (the steep staircase that cuts through Kings Park) on one foot to keep fit (whatever floats your boat). I learned that he was a police officer and that he had a passion for working in law enforcement. And I learned that he was kind and had a good sense of humour. But I never thought that one day in a future I couldn’t yet contemplate, I would love him. Eventually, he moved on and we lost touch altogether.

  20

  Question Time

  Over the years I’d resisted going back to further study. I’d lasted a good ten years out of university – not a bad run for someone who craves those A pluses. But by 2005 I needed a change. More than that, I needed to understand. I needed to understand what was driving this insanity called terrorism. I had heard the conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks, which were often packaged with self-deprecating comments about how it couldn’t possibly have been organised by a rag-tag bunch of men with beards fresh off the boat: ‘Us Muslims can’t find enough common ground to organise our way out of a paper bag, do you really think we could organise such a large-scale attack?’ I had heard the analysis that put
the blame squarely in the court of recent Western interventions in the Middle East – as if somehow terrorism had never existed anywhere, anytime in the history of humankind ever before. I had read the analysis by pundits, academics, politicians and conservative commentators, all proffering different and often conflicting points of view, but none of them made complete sense. None of them was enough.

  I didn’t want to believe that the terrorism that had invaded my every day had anything to do with my religion. I didn’t want to believe that young men were blowing themselves up and taking innocent lives with them in the name of my religion. It’s a tough pill to swallow. I had grown up with a version of Islam that spoke of love and peace and empathy. But I was now facing another version – a version that justified murder and the taking of innocent lives. And though this was not my first brush with terrorism having lived in Egypt when the violence of Egyptian Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood had reached its peak after I left school, this was different. Back then there was a kind of common understanding that terrorism and violence were anomalies – something carried out by men (because they were almost always men) who didn’t represent anyone but themselves – not Egypt, not Egyptians and certainly not Muslims.

  That’s the thing about being part of the majority though. You get the luxury, the privilege even, of being judged as an individual. Your actions – bad and good – are nearly always attributed to you, the person you, not the group you or the identity of you. If you’re a bloody idiot, you’re a bloody idiot all on your own – not because your entire country is the world’s largest producer of bloody idiots per capita. If you’re a drug addict, it’s because of your circumstances or your choices, or the circumstances that caused you to make those choices, not because the colour of your skin or some other predetermined condition makes you predisposed to drug addiction. When and if you are ever in the unfortunate position of being the ‘other’, all the bad stuff that other ‘others’ do stains you. Their bad deeds stick to you like that gooey residue that stays behind when you rip stale Blu-Tack off a wall. They become the yardstick by which you’re measured and it’s not because of their circumstances or their choices or even their bloody-minded idiocy – it’s because you’re all like that. It’s because there’s something inherent in them and by association inherent in you too. You are consistently judged as a part of that group – as one of them. It’s the same wherever you are. Whether you’re a Christian minority in a Muslim-majority country or a racial minority or a Muslim in Australia.