The Muslims in Australia A Brief History By Bilal Cleland Woomera High Security Detention Centre for immigrants in Southern Australia, the inmates of which are mainly Muslim. July 2000, courtesy & © Bilal Cleland Published July 2000 by Islamic Human Rights Commission PO Box 598, Wembley, UK, HA9 7XH, Telephone (+44) 20 8902 0888 Fax (+44) 20 8902 0889 e-mail:
[email protected] web: http://www.ihrc.org/ The Muslims in Australia - A Brief History 1 The Muslims in Australia - A Brief History Bilal Cleland July 2000 Islam in our Near North. 2 The Fleet of Prahus 3 The Impact of Macassar 5 White Christian Civilisation to the East 6 The Conquest of the Interior 9 The Camel Communications Network 11 Racism rears its head 12 Muslims and the Policy of Racial Exclusion from 1901 14 The Muslim Community before the Great War 16 Muslim Family Life 17 The Great War 18 The Indians, the Empire and White Australia 21 Pearling and White Australia 22 Between the World Wars 23 The Thinking behind Racial Classifications 25 The Second World War, Refugees and Australia 27 After the Second World War 29 White Australia sinks into oblivion 31 Building a National Body 33 Discrimination at the level of Local Government 35 The Gulf War 38 Trends 39 The Muslims in Australia - A Brief History 2 Islam in our Near North. Many Australians are accustomed to thinking of the continent as being isolated for thousands of years, cut- off from the great currents flowing throughout world civilisation. A sense of this separation from ‘out there’ is given in “The Tyranny of Distance” by Blainey who writes “In the eighteenth century the world was becoming one world but Australia was still a world of its own.