The Crow Eaters Read online

  Ron and I drive to Beit Shalom on Hackney Road. It is framed with beautiful stained-glass windows and seems more like a doctor’s surgery as I enter, rather than the stuffy religious sanctuary I might expect. I glimpse the standard iconography of lions, doves and loaves of bread stencilled on the windows. There are lists of members, presidents and remembrances for the deceased. I notice the names Helfgott, Gee, Glonek, Kaiser and Argy on the walls, all names I recognise from everyday life in Adelaide, though I never realised the Jewish connection between them.

  It is much more relaxed in Beit Shalom and Ron says part of that is their diversity. ‘We’re not an ethnicity, we Jews come from all over,’ he reminds me. There is an artwork of the tree of life on the wall – it was an interfaith project done by people around Adelaide, including input from two Indigenous Kaurna locals. Ron unrolls a Torah the size of my arm – he shows me the intricate handwriting within. ‘I think this is probably three or four hundred years old,’ he says. Ron places it back with the other Torahs, some of which came from synagogues destroyed by the Nazis. ‘It’s a way of keeping that part of the past alive,’ he says. It’s a nice thought, that even if the Jewish community here in this ‘City of Churches’ isn’t what it used to be, there is an immense sense that the history still preserved within it will endure.

  The other prominent religious community I am keen to visit in Adelaide is the Muslim one. While I have heard some of the Islamic story of the state on my visit to Marree in the north, I wonder how the Muslim community has fared in Adelaide compared to the Jewish demise.

  During the 19th century when the need for the Afghan cameleers diminished and after the railway was operational and routes to the pastoral country were established, many of the Afghan cameleers were left unemployed. With no means to pay for a return passage home, some moved to Broken Hill in New South Wales and across to Western Australia; others came south to Adelaide as herbalists and hawkers, swapping their camels for vans and horses.

  Construction of their mosque in Little Gilbert Street near West Terrace began in 1889 and the four white-painted minarets were completed in 1903. Back when there was no Centrelink, the mosque was a place of charity and community for Afghans, and those like them, in need. The initial cost was £450 and it took two years to pay off the mortgage. In August 1893, Abdul Wahid, a wealthy camel importer paid off the remaining £332 owed.

  In 1893 the Hadji Mullah Merbain found work for the Afghans at the mosque and later in 1894 a fund for the sick and poor was established for those left destitute by the completion of the railway.

  In the early 1890s there was also a sense of community brought about by the mosque for those left destitute after the cameleer era. An article in the Adelaide Observer from August 1890 cites the 80 Afghans and one Hindu who would worship in Little Gilbert Street and the many locals who would watch on, mesmerised, as these men would smoke their nargile pipes and pray in a way they had never seen before:

  During the past few days the Mohammedans in Adelaide have been engaged upon one of their annual festivals incidental to the observances of their religion, and the pretty mosque in Little Gilbert Street has been the scene of much devotion on the part of the followers of the Prophet.

  Between 1890 and 1925, Merbain and Faiz Mohamet of Marree funded the Afghan section in West Terrace Cemetery, which still exists today, with the grave sites facing Mecca, perpendicular to the Christian graves, in adjacent rows.

  Not far from the mosque, the herbalists, who would sell their wares along Rundle Street, needed fresh ingredients to combine for their medicines. None of the local cottages had backyards for growing herbs and the sort of produce they needed, so the Afghan herbalists would go to the central markets, just down the street. Even now, Chinatown is right next door to the markets and traders from both Afghanistan and China, who share a common border in their home countries as well, would interact as they had common experiences with the herbs and vegetables they needed.

  Mahomet Allum ran a successful healing business on Sturt Street. His descendants first told me about him while I was in Marree. Allum died in 1964 and the procession from the mosque to Centennial Park Cemetery where he is buried was said to be ‘more than a mile long’, full of admiring locals for this man who came from Kandahar and found success in the city long after the need for camels had passed.

  In the west end of the city, I walk past the Buddhist Relief Tai Chi Centre, across the park and past the Moroccan cafe on Sturt Street before I turn down Little Gilbert Street. It isn’t until you’re nearly directly below them that you notice the four white spires of Adelaide’s mosque behind a red brick wall.

  It is the end of the mid-afternoon prayer on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. I wander inside the grounds of the mosque, initially feeling as though I’m trespassing. Men walk in and out of the bathroom to wash before they enter the prayer room; every single one of them stops to greet me, to say hello and to shake my hand to make me feel welcome. Many have the shirts and lanyards of office workers and others the shorts and boots of construction workers – all here to pray on their way to a meeting or during their lunchbreaks.

  Once the prayers finish, a man with a long, salt-and-pepper beard and a white turban comes out to greet me. Sheikh Haitham is the Imam of the Adelaide City Mosque and he’s keen to show me that the ‘City of Churches’ isn’t so much incorrect, but that the reality of Adelaide is much more inclusive than the cliché. We walk around the courtyard as he tells me of the old days here, when the grounds surrounding the mosque were grass and the fence line was full of fruit trees. The ground is now concrete, and the area has a modern glass-covered pergola to deal with the city’s weather. ‘I grew up here,’ Haitham says of his Adelaide upbringing.

  He has recently returned to his home city after 15 years abroad studying Islam, and he became the Imam here in 2016.

  ‘You should see a Friday sermon, it’s a full house,’ he says. In South Australia there are currently 28 547 Muslims according to the 2016 Census.

  There are mosques around Adelaide, to the north and south, though Haitham tells me that this one is the most multicultural, partly due to its central city location. ‘Because I’m well spoken in English and fluent in Arabic, we get people from India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia; even Bosnians. We get all sorts of people here,’ he says as I watch people greet him when they arrive. He is quick to smile, and he switches between Arabic and English as people flow through the space. One elderly man wearing a white taqiyah head covering is happy to have an outside guest here and he tells me of the ‘old days’ when they’d pick grapes off the vines along the fence and of a Malaysian lady who used to cook them up a feast after Friday prayers.

  Haitham’s role as Imam now involves engaging with the community, supporting education, going to religious events, dispute resolution and marriage consultation. While he embraces his role as the leader of his mosque and he shoulders great responsibility, his youthful eyes reveal that he’s not that much older than I am. ‘I studied computer systems engineering and commerce at UniSA, then I left to do Islamic studies. I went to Damascus and Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.’

  When I ask what led him along this path, he tells me, ‘I felt a sense of isolation. I’d always been asked questions about Islam and I didn’t have the answers. I realised I needed to learn more.’

  For Haitham this need was highlighted further after 9/11. ‘There were a lot of misconceptions and negative focus on our community, so this gave me motivation to learn more. I took with me my understanding of Australian culture as I travelled. I managed to combine that and relate to what Australian Muslims were going through,’ he says, as I notice construction workers in high-vis vests outside the gates paying no attention whatsoever to the mosque in their midst.

  ‘Young Muslims used to ask me: are we Muslim or Australian? They didn’t realise that there’s no clash; they can be both. What I do is about engaging the community like this in a productive manner.’

  Haitham an
d I walk inside the mosque; it is still lined with the original green tiles from the 1890s and the orange glass windows give the room a warm glow. A light breeze blows through and, even though I’m a visitor, it’s easy to appreciate the quiet and peacefulness within the space. I ask if they have a call to prayer here, as I am so used to the sound from my travels through Islamic countries around the world. Haitham says that they just keep it in-house here, so as to not disturb the neighbourhood. I always loved the sound of the warbling call at sunset as I walked the laneways in Istanbul or through markets in Tunis. While I understand why it’s done like this here in Adelaide, I do think it’s a pity.

  A steady stream of visitors comes up to Haitham to offer their blessings and to give him their news. It feels more like a small town than a capital city, though that’s part of the appeal. ‘Adelaide is a good environment, there’s less tension here than many other Australian cities,’ he says, while also telling me he’s part of the interfaith dialogues in the city that Ron mentioned. ‘They don’t have a mentality of isolation here. That’s why I returned to my hometown,’ he says. And he’s right; while it might seem only like a ‘City of Churches’ from the outside or from the inside of a taxi as you whiz past, the reality is much larger than that.

  The next layer of Adelaide I explore takes me to the north of the city and to the industrial zone of Port Adelaide. Just like Elizabeth, Port Adelaide was a place that endured a reputation in the past as a rough place best avoided. As with the gentrification of many suburbs around Australia, though, Port Adelaide now looks different. I arrive on a Sunday morning and, while there is still the unmistakable smell of stale beer on the street, it is the aroma of pancakes and coffee that dominates now. The cafes are full, the museums, taverns and businesses wear their stone, brick and metal pasts as badges of honour in this refurbished centre, and the extremities are lashed with big, colourful murals on the sides of buildings. I’m not here for the architecture though. I park in the shadows of the City of Adelaide clipper ship – the looming, rust-coloured hull of the remains of the ship built in 1864 to transport passengers from England to South Australia. An estimated 250 000 Australians can trace their ancestry back to those who took their initial voyages to Australia on the City of Adelaide and it is now being slowly restored.

  Despite the history of the clipper, it is another ship that has brought me here to the port. I watch out towards the outer harbour, among the hulking cargo ships, the smoke stacks, silos, cranes and the masses of power lines strung out across the port like a Vietnamese laneway. There is no trace of it now, though back in 1893, only metres from where I stand today, the Royal Tar, one of the most ambitious ships in Australia’s history, departed from Port Adelaide on its second voyage. In the 1890s Australia was struggling with poverty and a wideranging shearers’ strike. It was before Federation and many of those who’d come to Australia – to Sydney Harbour and Port Adelaide on ships not that long removed from the 1890s – were unhappy with the prospects in their adopted country. Then entered an idealistic journalist named William Lane. He inspired hundreds of followers to begin a ‘New Australia’ that would be socialist, teetotal and white-skinned. They secured 460 000 acres (186 155 hectares) in Paraguay in South America for their utopia and with their subscription fees they enlisted ship builders on the Nambucca River in New South Wales to build them the Royal Tar. Among the builders was foreman William Peat, who happens to be my great-great-great grandfather. The second boatload of utopians bound for Paraguay left from Port Adelaide, with many South Australian families on board including the Sibbalds, Kings, Weidenhofers and Caseys.

  Unfortunately, the utopia those leaving from Port Adelaide had hoped to build didn’t eventuate as planned. William Lane’s New Australia Colony fractured into two in 1894 and, as the stresses of life in the jungle in South America bore down on the settlers, many left the colony, to integrate into Paraguayan life, to try their luck on the estancias of Patagonia, or to find a return voyage back to Australia. The colonies of New Australia and Cosme still exist in Paraguay today, with the echoes of their past voyages from Sydney Harbour and Port Adelaide. Today, there are more than 2000 descendants of those original ‘New Australians’ still living in Paraguay, with surnames like Birks, Smith, Murray, Wood and McCreen.

  While all that remains of the Royal Tar here is the information and old photos taken at the port, now sitting on the Maritime Museum’s database, I can visit the eerie quarantine island in Port Adelaide which held many of the arrivals to this new frontier, after ship voyages of their own into the unknown.

  Torrens Island was once the quarantine station for new arrivals to South Australia when there was disease or pestilence on board. The island looks like a teardrop sitting just north of Port Adelaide, though still within the shelter of the harbour. There is now a bridge connecting the island to the mainland, though when it was operational everything was ferried across by barge to those with smallpox and later Spanish influenza. The entrance to Torrens Island is now fenced by the enormous smokestacks of the island’s power station – it is the largest natural gas–fired power station in Australia. We bounce along in a bus under wires that warn of 275 000 volts and past families fishing on the inlet just outside the gates of the station, near the rusted hulks of forgotten tankers. The path onto the island narrows to a single-lane track. I notice two warships at the dock out to my left and a fringe of mangroves still intact around the island.

  The quarantine station began here in 1855, when it was only a ramshackle collection of canvas huts on the beach. We’re led around the former infection zone by Jacqui Ladner, who tells us that when there was an infected ship here a black flag would fly over the island. It now looks like an abandoned village after a nuclear reactor meltdown or a zombie apocalypse. The laneways are paved with broken bitumen, the corrugated shacks are rusted and, down the end, the ‘chalets’ are all cinder blocks and broken glass among fields of yellow flowering soursob weeds.

  Our first stop is inside the fumigation room, beside a device which looks like a giant toaster. New arrivals would have had their luggage blasted with steam inside the contraption, though for extreme cases, a cocktail of chemicals, including cyanide, would be used.

  Next is to the old shower room, where visitors would be divided up into first- and second-class arrivals. Those with first class tickets would de-robe and wash in warm baths before dressing in clean clothes and being sent out the far door. Those with second-class tickets would be lined up in the shower cubicles and blasted with water and carbolic acid as a disinfectant. Now the baths have been removed and all that remains are the plumbing lines and the old showers which once would have scoured the lice, sores, pox and pestilence off the arrivals as their first experience of South Australia.

  Despite the rude introduction, the conditions here were reasonably comfortable: there was ample food, families would be together, and many fished from the mangroves or played tennis or footy in their spare time. While those who were infected would be put inside the doublewing hospital to recover, the notion of being a prisoner on the island is something I can still feel as I walk towards the administration building, ‘Refshauge House’, and the old cottages.

  The quarantine island operated until 1980; however, one section of the island was used as a POW camp during the First World War. In August 1914 around 300 ‘Germans’ from the South Australian community were taken to a compound on Torrens Island where they lived in simple canvas tents. They were kept under armed guard and the Concentration Camp, as it was officially known, was said to be one of the worst facilities in Australia. The prisoners were eventually removed to other locations on 17 August 1915 after complaints by the German Government that there would be international reprisals if conditions on the South Australian island were not improved – where guards used bayonets and shot at the feet of the internees – despite the fact that they were civilian prisoners. Central to the complaint was the stewardship of Captain Hawkes, who oversaw the regular bayonet attacks. Brisbane�
�s The Worker newspaper claimed that at least 25 prisoners had significant puncture wounds. A barbed-wire enclosure was constructed for forced marches – with up to 36 men inside at once. Hawkes was finally removed from Torrens Island after the escape and re-capture of two inmates. Once they were caught in the Adelaide Hills, Hawkes insisted on ‘English justice’ and marched the men (one of whom was Swedish) over to some nearby sandhills. According to The Worker:

  Both the prisoners and the other internees thought they were going to be shot. However, they were stripped naked, their hands were tied to a tree, and one of the strongest sergeants in the camp, acting under orders, gave them a flogging with the cat o’ nine tails.

  Both men were left raw and bleeding heavily, with one report saying that they could do little more than writhe on top of their blankets (unable to walk) for four days. While the remains of the camp cannot be seen now, Jacqui says many believe it is on the site where the power station now operates.

  Inside the chalets of the quarantine era, there is room for a double bed, and strips of old orange curtains, built-in robes and the remains of showers and toilets still standing inside the cinder-block walls. These rooms were used up until 1966, and, while they are grim, I’ve stayed in many hostels that look to have borrowed from the same decorator set.

  The most interesting structure is the American Working Men’s Cottage. This old wooden structure, still standing today, was built in the 1870s and imported from the US. It has the peaked roof of a frontier church and the inside shelves are still full of original bottles brought by the inhabitants, the beds are spread with dishevelled pillows and blankets and the paint is peeling off the original cedar walls. There were 30 of these big airy buildings once upon a time, though due to decay and vandalism, this is the last one that remains. After the quarantine operation closed in 1980 it wasn’t until the 1990s that it was heritage listed, so many of the fittings, buildings and structures were either removed and sold off, or burned or smashed by vandals.