The Auburn Gallipoli Mosque is on North Parade, just a couple of hundred metres from the shops. As we got closer it became obvious we had arrived at a significant time. It was midday Friday, and lots of people were coming to the mosque. The streets were full of parked and parking cars.
The mosque was just as impressive and imposing up close. Surrounding the huge dome were the Islamic equivalent of verandahs, fountains and grassy bits. There were dozens of places outside to sit or stand and talk, which is what many were doing. And just 10 metres away were the weatherboard houses.
At the fountain, people gathered and removed shoes. We could see several hundred people outside, more through the doors inside, ranging from teenagers to 80-year-olds. Unlike almost all Christian churches, the congregation included a lot of 18-year-olds, 25-year-olds and 33-year-olds. Islam did not seem to have misplaced a generation in the same way Christianity had.
‘What a mix,’ I said.
It took Lucy to point out the obvious. ‘Except women.’
She was right. Midday on Friday at the mosque was mantime. She also noticed something I had never seen poking out from a suburban church—security cameras.
I wondered about the time. Christians and Jews have times for worship that don’t interfere with the working week. It couldn’t be easy, especially in Sydney, to ensure work commitments didn’t interfere with worship time on a Friday. Perhaps it is an indication of differing priorities. Rather than give matters spiritual a low priority and fit religion in around other things, perhaps more Muslims are committed to giving the spiritual side of life a higher priority and fitting work and other things in around it.
Though all we did was walk past the mosque as the crowd gathered, I had a sense of intruding, perving, of being somewhere I didn’t belong, looking at things that were none of my business. Yet I can’t say where I got it from. No one looked at us with hostility. No one looked at us at all. It was more an indication of my own uneasiness at being there than of anything else. Perhaps in the past year I’d read too many stories about gangs of ‘men of Middle Eastern appearance’. I think I half-expected them to be prowling around. But this wasn’t a gang, it was a group coming together to worship.
We made our way back to the car, still passing men heading towards the mosque, and then to Lakemba. Lakemba is 15 minutes’ drive south-east of Auburn. We turned off Punchbowl Road and parked in Wangee Road, a semi-main road flanked by drab grey apartment blocks.
It’s funny how big the difference between theory and practice can be. As we started to walk in the general direction of the shops a woman wearing the all-covering burka walked past, and for all my talk and thought over the years about accepting others my first thought was not of similarity, but of difference. Whereas in my own street I might have felt secure enough to smile and say ‘hello’, here, in unfamiliar territory, I stared, thought don’t stare, looked away, stared again and looked away again. Just because I’d never seen a pair of eyes behind a veil walking down my street.
There wasn’t much happening on Wangee Road. Washing flapped from apartment balconies and there was a lot more concrete than grass. It’s not rundown, but it’s not pretty either, and trees are rare. As we got closer to the shops we passed a dental clinic and a Lady Doctor. Then a dentist. Then a dental clinic. And another one. Eight separate dentists within 200 metres. Just as Auburn does smokes and meat, Lakemba does teeth. Eleven dentists in the suburb. Bondi has cafés, Crows Nest restaurants, Lakemba dentists. Has the idea that people of the same ethnicity live in the same area spread to jobs? Doctors in Pymble, stockbrokers in Vaucluse, dentists in Lakemba.
Between the dentists were Lebanese cafés, second-hand electrical stores and agents, both travel and real estate. Most faces in the street were Arabic, as were most of the shops, but the buzz that brought Auburn alive was missing. There were fewer people about, and they were doing less more slowly, as if everyone who had any energy had nicked off to Auburn or somewhere else. There’s no excess money in Lakemba, in the people or the shops. No one was flashing it about, dressing up rich or driving a fast car.
The closest Lakemba got to having a gang were groups of middle-aged to elderly Arab men sitting outside cafés sipping dark coffee. No women with them. In fact there were very few couples in the street. Men yes, women yes, but not together and never holding hands. A couple of the men looked at us as we passed, and I felt conspicuous. I could imagine them being there every day, just like the men at Bronte. A government program should be set up to get them to swap for a day, although the Bronterians might look a tad underdressed in the middle of Lakemba wearing Speedos.
I think I’d been expecting to see lots of young, tough-looking men hanging around or cruising laps in cars that were more stereo than engine. In fact there weren’t many young men about at all—maybe they were all at work—and we only heard one car playing doof-doof music, and it just drove right on through. In Bondi they do laps.
Most shop signs were in both Arabic and English. Orient Travel offered trips to Beirut twice a week, and boasted that ‘We Speak Australian’. A real estate agent was selling ‘A Bit of East in the West!’ The unintended irony of the slogan was that it described the entire suburb; a bit of the Middle East in the west of Sydney. It also, in a very different way, described me. A bit of Sydney’s east visiting the west. Out of place.
In the middle of the shops was that part of any suburb where you can always find Anglos—the pub. It, too, looked out of place. I stood outside it and looked down the street. About 40 people, five of them Anglo. Then inside. Sixteen people, all Anglo. Vive la différence.
‘Don’t take notes so obviously,’ Lucy whispered. As usual I was jotting things down as we walked.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you look nosy.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘You do. It’s intrusive. People might not like it.’ We were arguing in whispers.
‘You never said that in Manly,’ I said, ‘or Haberfield.’
She looked at me, and the unspoken comment was, well, this isn’t Manly or Haberfield. This is Lakemba, and she felt uncomfortable.
I wanted to scoff, but I felt uncomfortable too.
But was it us or was it them? How much anxiety had we brought with us? How much of it was our own baggage, our own fears, our own reaction to the media blitz associating Muslims and ‘things to be feared’? It was all very well to talk about being open-minded, but harder to actually be so.
Atmosphere is not just about the place and the people who are there. It’s also about the relationship between those two things and the observer. If you go to Paris and fall in love, you’ll probably like the city a whole lot more than if you go there and break up with your partner, lose your watch and have computer trouble. But it’s the same Paris.
We veered onto the back streets. Once we got a block or two away from the shops, apartment blocks gave way to comfy middle-class houses. We hadn’t got to the mosque yet but we did see other indicators of community that undermined the idea of a nearly exclusively Muslim suburb: an Anglican church, a Uniting church, a Seventh-Day Adventist church and a Masonic centre. Even a Boy Scout hall. I bet there was a gang in there every Thursday night shouting out strange slogans and tying weird knots.
We wound our way back past the car to the mosque. The Lakemba mosque, the Imam Ali Mosque, is also huge and can hold thousands. It is flat-roofed with one minaret rising above it. We saw two men walk in the front, then a woman in full burka with only her eyes showing disappeared into the carpark underneath.
Thirty metres down the road was a man sitting out the front of his flat on a little brick fence watching the world go by. I said hello, he smiled back and we talked about the weather and Bibi for a while. He was the only person we talked to in Lakemba and he was English. Then I realised he was also the only person I’d smiled at and said g’day to.
For every image of difference in Auburn there seemed to be a corresponding one of acceptance. In Lakemba I felt like
a nosy tourist coming to spy, which is what I was. And like a nosy tourist, I didn’t stay long enough to really get to know the place. I stayed just long enough to get nervous about the difference.
But if I felt out of place and conspicuous in Lakemba, how then do those who live there feel outside of Lakemba? What sort of vibes would the veiled Muslim woman I had gawked at feel if she walked down the streets of Parramatta, Manly or Burwood? How did she feel when people like me stared at her? At least when I felt like an outsider I had the security of knowing I was part of the cultural, religious and ethnic majority.
I resolved then not to stare anymore. Not even accidentally. Not at Muslims, not at Africans, not at the disabled, not at people who had a bit of parsley stuck between their teeth. But I knew I still would. So I made a second, more realistic resolution. That when I did stare I’d smile as well.
seven
obsession
That night when I got home the trolley was still out the front of our house. I pushed it back in front of number eighteen. If it had even a rudimentary consciousness it would have been confused. The next morning it was back in front of our place again, with a loaf of mouldy bread in it. Were the builders upping the ante by sending back a loaded trolley?
Our response would be vital.
I went inside and, over the banging from both sides, shouted to Lucy. ‘Let’s vomit in it.’
Lucy raised half an eyebrow. It’s something very few people can do and it has a particular meaning that approximates to, ‘What a novel idea. It is entirely without merit.’
‘Then they’ll think we ate the bread and we got sick. They’ll feel guilty.’
This time the eyebrow went right up. Then she went back to her magazine.
‘I’ll do it,’ I shouted over the drilling, knowing I wouldn’t.
She didn’t even look up.
I fussed about for a bit, then went out the front again to see exactly how mouldy the bread was and what sort of loaf it had been. I don’t know why. I carried Bibi in my arms to elicit as much sympathy for myself from myself as I could. I opened the front door and saw they had struck again.
This time it was number twenty-two. Some time in the last ten minutes one of them had nailed a metre-long Masonite plank to the top of our adjoining fence. It wasn’t in my way, but I was outraged. How dare they do it without asking. Just to show them I wasn’t someone they could simply walk all over and expect no retribution from, I grabbed it, broke off a tiny corner and threw it at their stupid house. The wind caught it and it blew away. I looked at the plank. No visible difference, really. I looked at Bibi. I think we both knew I’d made my point.
I slammed the door loud enough to almost hear it over the drilling. As I stomped down the hall it occurred to me that it was all very well to pat myself on the back for having been able to enjoy myself on a four-hour holiday in Haberfield after turbo-charging up with coffee, but that when it came to trying to maintain peace of mind when things weren’t perfect I still had a way to go.
But I wasn’t as bad as I used to be.
In 1996 I was working as a lawyer for legal aid, and had been since 1994. I worked at various local courts around Sydney representing pretty much anyone who turned up and satisfied three criteria: they had been charged with a criminal offence; they didn’t have a private lawyer; and they didn’t have much of an income. Since I joined legal aid I had represented people charged with shoplifting, assault, armed robbery, drug possession, drug supply and even murder.
Each day I met people with fucked up lives. Of course they were all, to a large degree, responsible for that themselves. But almost invariably, when I asked a few questions of a client, a history of a disjointed and unpleasant childhood would emerge. Typically he (and it was ‘he’ about 90 per cent of the time) would have a history of receiving violence from one drunken parent and indifference from the other, drug addicted one—if they had contact with both, that is.
I had grown up having no understanding of why anyone would take heroin, but when someone explained to me that it was the ultimate pain-killer, I slowly started to get it. And I began to understand how lucky I had been to be born into comfortable middle-class circumstances to parents who were good to me.
When I say I began to understand, I mean that in a purely intellectual way. I understood how emotional pain can motivate short-term pain relief through drugs such as heroin, and how that can lead to addiction and that can lead to crime. I reasoned how all this could happen, and I tried to display empathy with my clients without being a complete wet blanket. My primary job was to give them legal advice and representation, but sometimes it was also to try and help in a more holistic way. My message to clients became, ‘Shit happens and it’s probably happened to you, but in the end it’s up to you— and only you—what you do about it.’
But I remained an outsider. It wasn’t my world. I came into it at 8.30 each morning and left it again at 5. Which was a good thing.
Occasionally something crossed over emotionally. Once I represented a young woman who was probably mildly intellectually disabled and who had a late-night job packing shelves. It was pretty lonely work, and to pass the time she had started to eat the odd chocolate bar. Then another one, and perhaps a packet of snakes as well. As the weeks went by she kept eating and eating, and eventually she had effectively stolen a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise from her employer. At court she was terrified, as was her mother. She’d never had her daughter assessed to see whether she was intellectually disabled—but she referred to her daughter as her ‘special’ one. The whole thing was very sad. The magistrate saw it that way too, and put the girl on a good behavior bond, effectively ending the case. But driving home I couldn’t get the image of her frightened face out of my head and had to pull over because I was crying.
Over the next few moths I’d think of her and wonder why. Mainly though, I did what they tell you to do, and what you make yourself do automatically—I distanced myself. And I had another focus, my comedy career.
It is obvious now that doing gigs three nights a week and trying to find more time to write, on top of working full-time, was running me down, and that creeping exhaustion played a part in what was to come. But at the time I was oblivious. Perhaps I sensed that I was so busy rushing from one thing to another I didn’t have time to actually enjoy anything. But if I did sense it, it didn’t seem important.
One day I had a coffee with a friend, Steve, another criminal lawyer. We swapped work stories as you do, and Steve told me how someone in a case he was involved in had claimed that Steve had tried to pressure him into changing what he was going to say in court. Steve wasn’t a person who would ever do something like that and, as he was acting for a client who was broke, he certainly would have had no financial motivation to do anything inappropriate. But someone had phoned Steve later and told him he was being investigated for attempting to influence a witness, a very serious offence that could lead to a jail sentence.
‘When was that?’ I asked
‘Um … ’bout six months ago.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Never heard back from them.’
‘You must have been terrified,’ I said.
‘It did scare the crap out of me at first,’ he replied, ‘but after a while I forgot about it.’
‘Forgot about it!?’ The idea of forgetting about something so potentially earth-shattering seemed bizarre to me.
‘Yeah, something new to worry about must have come up.’ He laughed.
I didn’t. I felt shaken. I had never thought about this dangerous side of being a criminal lawyer before. If something like this could happen to Steve, then surely it could happen to me.
I started asking fellow lawyers if there had been a time when they, too, had almost been sucked into a case. Many of them had a similar story. It seemed that if you were a criminal lawyer for long enough, it was almost inevitable that at some point someon
e would make a complaint about you.
And then somehow, instead of shrugging my shoulders and getting on with it, I started to become obsessed with the idea that sooner or later someone would make an allegation about me. I had always gone out of my way to be completely above board in every way, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how many one-on-one conversations I had to have as part of my job, and how easy it would be for someone to try and get me into trouble. I started to get very paranoid.
I started playing mental tapes of every work-based conversation I’d ever had and wondering which was the one that was going to get me into trouble. I started thinking about it all the time. And the more tired and run down I got, the more I thought about it. I became obsessed with the idea that something terrible was going to happen to me and spent hours imagining what it would be in ridiculous detail. Looking back on it, I somehow lost control of my mind. It started to spend all its time in places that were very unpleasant indeed.
Whenever I had free time I would spend it worrying. I ran through every possibility. What if, in that case three weeks ago, someone accused me of this? What if it was some other case? The police could be on their way to see me now. They could be. Maybe they weren’t, though. Maybe someone had made a complaint about me and it was in a pile somewhere and next Tuesday, or the following Wednesday, or the Thursday after that, someone would read it and come to see me. Or maybe not. The possibilities went around and around and around. My thoughts were an exhausting, repetitive worry-loop, trying to anticipate events I couldn’t control and which, in fact, didn’t exist. It seemed unfair. I had worked hard over the past few years to get away from being a miserable corporate lawyer, to get going in two jobs I enjoyed. I seemed to be getting somewhere and now, all of a sudden, it all seemed vulnerable. From feeling completely safe I had somehow thought myself into a position where I was imagining, with terrifying intensity, something going very wrong. And it wasn’t even because I had a guilty conscience. I hadn’t done anything wrong. What was going on?
A Month of Sundays Page 6
