MUSLIMS IN AUSTRALIA: A Brief History (Excerpts)

MUSLIMS IN AUSTRALIA: A Brief History (Excerpts)
by Bilal Cleland

From: ht p:/ www.icv.org.au/history4.shtml
The Islamic Council of Victoria website

ISLAM IN OUR NEAR NORTH

Many Australians are accustomed to thinking of the continent as being
isolated for thousands of years, cut-of 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. It was untouched by Europe's customs and
commerce. It was more isolated than the Himalayas or the heart of
Siberia." [1] The cast of mind which is reflected in this statement, from
one of Australia's most distinguished modern historians, understands 'the
world' and 'Europe's customs and commerce' as somehow inextricably
linked.

Manning Clark writes of isolation, the absence of civilisation, until the last
quarter of the eighteenth century, at ributing this partly to "the internal
history of those Hindu, Chinese and Muslim civilisations which colonized
and traded in the archipelago of southeast Asia." [2] While not linking
Europe with civilisation, Australia still stands separate and alone.

There is no doubt that just to our north, around southeast Asia and
through the straits between the islands of the Indonesian archipelago,
there was a great deal of coming and going by representatives of all
world civilisations. Representatives of the Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist,
Islamic and latterly, Western Christian civilisations, visited, struck root
and occasionally, evolved into something else. Some left or were cast
out.

There was substantial trade between Arabia and China from the Tang
Dynasty (608-907 CE) and that trade was plied around the seas to
Australia's near north. The history of Islam in the region commences with

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the maternal uncle of Muhammad, Abu Waqqas, who went on the
migration to Ethiopia during the persecution but did not return to Arabia
with the other refugees. He went on a trading voyage with three other
Sahaba (Companions of the Prophet), from Ethiopia to Guangzhou in
about 616 CE. He then returned to Arabia. Chinese Muslim annals
record that after 21 years he returned to Guangzhou bringing the Qur'an
with him. [3] He founded the Mosque of Remembrance, near the Kwang
Ta (the Smooth Minaret) built by the Arabs as a lighthouse. His tomb is
in the Muslim cemetery in Guangzhou.

The precise date of Islam's arrival in insular southeast Asia cannot be
readily established. Some historians argue "that by the beginning of the
ninth century Arab merchants and sailors, (and other Muslims) had
begun to dominate the Nanhai or Southeast Asian Trade."[4] There was
already a colony of foreign Muslims on the west coast of Sumatra by 674
CE and other Muslim set lements began to appear after 878 CE. [5]
Islam steadily spread, Islamisation of societies occurred and according to
even hostile commentators, Islam "was a factor in the life of the islands
by the end of the twelfth century." [6] There are indications that Arab
explorations of northern Australia did take place. The map of the Sea of
Java of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi 820 CE shows Cape Yorke
Pensinsula, a "V" shaped Gulf of Carpentaria and a curved Arnhem Land
[7]. A later map, that of Abu Isak Al-Farisi Istakhari 934 CE, also includes
an outline of the northern coast of Australia. [8]

Islam was well established by the time Ibn Bat uta visited Sumatra in
about 1350 where he found Sultan al-Malik az-Zahir "a most illustrious
and open-handed ruler, and a lover of theologians." [9] Marco Polo had
found the Kingdom of Sumatra inhabited by idolaters a few years before
in 1292 CE, but the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Perlak on the same
island had changed from idolaters to Muslims "owing to contact with
Saracen merchants who continually resort here in ships". [10]

Other famous travellers also left their accounts. Chinese Muslims,
Admiral Zheng He and his lieutenant Ma Huan (Muhammad Hasan), in
the service of Yung Lo third Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, became
famous as navigators and explorers between 1405 and 1433. The
chronicler Fei Xin accompanied many of these voyages and it is from his

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records that we know "the treasure fleet reached Timor, which is just 400
miles north of Darwin". [11] The discovery of an image of the god Shou
Lao in Darwin in 1879, wedged in the roots of a banyan tree over a metre
underground, points to a very early Chinese contact with Australia, [12]
but it is not known whether it was Zheng-He or some other Ming sailor.

The palace revolution which caused the permanent cessation of Chinese
voyages of exploration opened the way for other seekers of new worlds
in our near north. According to Clark: "In the 1430s it looked as though
this inheritor of the Chinese would be the Muslim merchants from Persia
and the Gujerati Province of India." [13] Islam steadily spread throughout
the Indonesian archipelago, extending across the whole of Java by the
eleventh century, into the Moluccas in the early sixteenth century and
into Macassar via the Royal Courts of Gowa and Tallo' in the first decade
of the seventeenth century.

As it was pushing onwards into West Papua and beyond, Islam met its
nemesis. Clark claims, "the coming of the European ended the spread of
Islam, for when Torres first sailed through the strait which still bears his
name, he met Moors in west New Guinea. That was in 1607. This
marked the limits of the Muslim expansion and knowledge of the area."
[14] Torres came from the east across the Pacific, for the Americas and
beyond had been given to Spain by the Pope, Africa and India and
beyond to the Portuguese.

The Portuguese Christians, who came via the Cape of Good Hope and
India, were clear about their objectives. They well knew of the
significance of Islam in the region. Albuquerque, in 1511 the conqueror
of Muslim Malacca, the main centre for the dissemination of Islam in
southeast Asia, had some time before devised "a scheme to divert the
Nile to the Red Sea to make the lands of the Grand Turk sterile, and then
to capture Mecca and carry away the bones of Mohammed so that, as he
put it, these being reduced publicly to ashes, the votaries of so foul a
sect might be confounded." [15] By winning a monopoly of the
Indonesian spice trade these Crusaders hoped to fatally wound Islam.

Although the aggressive Portuguese presence hindered the process of
Islamisation in the Moluccas and Timor, Islam remained dominant

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throughout the archipelago. It was Muslim Macassans and Buginese who
established links with Australia.

The Fleet of Prahus

There are suggestions of trading camps on the northern coasts dating
back several centuries. Macknight reports (and rejects) evidence that
some fireplaces date back 800 years [16] and Levathes suggests a
relationship between the light-skinned Bajunis of Kenya's of shore
islands and the "Baijini" of northern Australian legend, possibly linking
the early Chinese explorations of both areas. [17] However, as Islam did
not come to Macassar until the early 1600s and unless these Baijini were
like Zheng-He, also Muslim, they are not part of this history. Certainly
Alexander Dalrymple, an English seafarer in the 1760s related "The
Bugguese describe New Holland to yield gold, and the natives, who are
Mahometans, to be well inclined to commerce." [18] Macknight attributes
this religious designation to the fact that circumcision was practiced
amongst the northern tribes, not to their ideology. [19]

There were annual voyages of prahus from Macassar in southern
Sulawesi to the coasts of Marege, the area of coastline east of Darwin to
the coasts of the Gulf of Carpentaria and to Kai Djawa the coastline from
Darwin westwards. When they began is not yet established. [20]
Macknight argues that the southeast Asian trepang trade did not
commence before the late seventeenth century so that this annual traf ic
between Marege and Macassar could not be earlier than about 1650.
There is a Dutch reference from 1654 which mentions tortoise shell and
wax amongst other commodities, obtained from a great crowd of islands
to the south but Macknight does not accept this as a reference to
Macassan trade with Australia. The ethnographers R.M. and C.H. Berndt
also suggested in 1947, from their observation of the depth of influence,
that there had been some form of contact between the Aborigines, the
people of Marege, and Macassar from the early sixteenth century. This
too is rejected by Macknight. He insists that let ers from 1751 and 1754
provide the first reliable evidence of the trepang trade between these
Muslims and Marege. [21] Perhaps other commodities dominated
commerce until the opening of the more lucrative Chinese trepang
market, but this is still within the realms of speculation.

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Pobassoo, the Macassan master of a fleet of six prahus, was
encountered by Flinders in 1803 in the Malay Roads at the north eastern
tip of Arnhem Land. He informed the English visitor that he had made six
or seven voyages in the preceding twenty years and that he was one of
the first to come. Flinders recorded, "These people were Mahometans,
and on looking in the launch expressed great horror to see hogs there.
Nevertheless they had no objection to port wine, and even requested a
bot le to carry away with them at sunset." [22]

Each year in December, as the low pressure cell moved over Australia
and the winds blew towards the south, the prahus left Macassar for
camps along the shores of Marege. Then four months later, as the sun
moved over the northern hemisphere and the winds blew from the
continent towards the northern equatorial zone, they sailed back. By May
they had all gone. While they were here they caught, cooked and dried
the sea slug or trepang in beach camps. One of the markers of these
camps, apart from the stone fireplaces, is the presence of tamarind
trees. Tamarind pods were used to flavour their rice and the seeds
thrown away near the camps. [23]

So significant was the Macassan trade that for many years the British
tried schemes to make the northern coast into a second Singapore.
Smarter than modern Australian policy-makers, they quickly understood
that the Muslims of ered a bridge to trade with the region. While the
Dutch tried to wrest control of Singapore to the east of the Indonesian
archipelago from them, the British believed that they could, through
trading with the Maccasans and Buginese, economically infiltrate the
Dutch controlled areas of the west. A second Singapore on Australia's
northern coast of ered great wealth. William Barns put this plan to the
British government in 1823 and gained the support of a lobby of London
merchants. An expedition was sent to northern Australia in 1824 and Fort
Dundas established on the strait between Melville and Bathurst Islands.
However British control of the first Singapore was assured by the Treaty
of London March 1824 thus removing one major incentive for its
establishment. It was also soon understood that the fort was located too
far from the trepang fleet's camps to trade. It was a failure.

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In 1827 a second set lement was established 200 miles further east in
Raf les Bay. Fort Wellington was built but abandoned in 1829. Blainey
argues that this abandonment was a mistake for by 1829 "Regular
contact with the Indonesian fleet had at last been made." [24] Thirty-four
prahus with more than 1000 men had arrived but there were no
merchants at the trading post to barter textiles and metals for their
trepang. It was abandoned too quickly, possibly on the verge of success,
based on an outdated 1827 report. Thus died the hopes for great trade
with the near north for another hundred years.

The trepang trade continued but it was viewed with jaundiced eyes by
the new masters of the north coast. Searcy, sent to impose customs
duties upon the prahus, revealed the thinking of the time. "So long as
this portion of the coast was waste there was no reason why the Malays
should not gather the annual harvest and turn it to their own profitable
account. But now that there was some chance of Europeans following
suit, and with the idea of local trading on the coast, it was decided that
the time had come for the Malays to be placed on an equal footing with
the local people, and to pay something towards the revenue of the
country.. " [25] Oppressive imposition of the customs dues by men such
as Searcy, growing racism in Australia after the introduction of the 1901
Immigration Restriction Act and jealousy over Macassan success,
combined to crush this link with our neighbours.

A telegram which appeared in the S.A. Register 9 September 1904
reveals something of the thinking about this trade and of the tactics used
to destroy it. It is significant that Searcy included it in the preface to his
1909 publication. "The Malays who man the proas which sail down from
Macassar to Port Bowen in the Northern Territory, are suspected by
of icers of the Customs Department of smuggling, and it was recently
suggested that some of their number also obtain admission to Australia
despite the Immigration Restriction Act. After considering these
representations, the Minister for Customs determined to close Port
Bowen as a reporting station from January 1, and make overseas
Asiatics who wish to engage in the trepang industry go to Port Darwin. It
is believed that the trade-winds will not enable proas to go to Port
Darwin, and therefore they will in all probability be prevented from visiting
Northern Australia." [26] By changing the reporting station at which

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custom dues were paid, the administration opened the way to intensify
harassment of the Macassans so that they would cease their annual
visits.

The trepang trade with Macassar had ceased by 1907, but the frequent
arrests of Indonesian fishing trawlers of Darwin indicates that old habits
die hard. Fishermen used to centuries of traversing waters to our north
are hard to deter. Indeed the Sultanate of Gowa, in southern Sulawesi,
the old Macassan Kingdom, included the coast of northern Australia
within its realm. [27] Arnhem Land Aborigines performed an opera about
the historical links between the Yolnu people and Macassar at the
foundation day anniversary of the city of Gowa in 1997 [28]. That sense
of belonging does not vanish without trace.

The Impact of Macassar

Contact brought changes to language. The languages of the tribes along
the northern coast can be as distinct as English and Greek. Although the
children of Marege grew up in communities which had a variety of
language and were all multilingual, [29] contact with tribes from different
areas could be dif icult. As the Macassans were in contact with widely
dispersed tribes, their language became a lingua franca right along the
coast. Searcy's vessel was manned by Malays, who were valued by the
English colonists, as they had the ability to communicate with the prahu
masters and the local inhabitants. There are several vocabulary lists
demonstrating the widespread use of Macassan terms [30] [31] but there
is evidence of a deeper influence than just vocabulary. "A number of
verbs in Gupabuyngu, the best known language of northeast Arnhem
Land, are used in irregular fashion. All are derived from Macassarese."
[32]

Another consequence of the relationship with Macassar was noticed by
several British explorers. Stokes, who visited the northern coastline on
several occasions between 1837 and 1843, reports observations by
Captain Grey in 1838 and a Mr Usborne in 1840 that they had noticed
individuals of different physical appearance from their peers in groups of
Aborigines they had encountered in the north. [33] While Grey
considered that they were probably the descendants of shipwrecked

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Dutch sailors, Stokes was more of a mind that they were Malays either
captured from the trepangers or voluntarily associating with the locals.
There was quite close contact between them. "As we know that the
Australian not infrequently abandons his country and his mode of life, to
visit the Indian archipelago with them (the trepangers)." [34] There were
several documented cases of Macassan Muslims living amongst the
Aborigines. Timbo, a Macassan left at Port Essington in 1839 to act as
interpreter with the Aborigines, walked into the interior with the local
tribespeople and was gone several months. Da' Atea from Macassar
deserted a prahu in 1829 and walked across the northern part of the
Cobourg Peninsula. [35]

Searcy in the 1880s also remarked upon the results of association with
the Macassans. "Naturally some of the aborigines showed unmistakable
signs of having Malay blood, in the way of a lighter skin and sharper and
more refined features. In some of the women it was very marked." [36]
Using (Hussain) Daeng Rangka had children to an Aboriginal wife in
eastern Arnhem Land and one of his Australian daughters visited
Macassar. [37] In 1985 his 81 year old daughter, Ibn Saribanung Daeng
Nganna, appealed from Sulawesi through the Northern Territory News
for contact with her Australian relatives. The result was a field trip by 11
teacher trainees from Batchelor College to Sulawesi to re-establish
family relationships. [38]

The introduction of new commodities into tribal communities, such as
metal knives, axes and spear-heads, increased the ef iciency of hunting
and gathering. The Macassan dug-out canoe, which replaced the more
fragile indigenous bark canoe, also permitted expanded trading and
contact with other tribes. Inter-tribal trade appears to have expanded as
a result of the introduction of such commodities. [39] The pearls, pearl-
shell and turtle-shell prized by the annual visitors also meant that there
was some specific production for the market. Aborigines occasionally
worked for payment in the process of trepanging, an unusual
development in a hunter-gatherer economy.

Despite these innovations there was little impact upon the dynamics of
tribal society. This has been attributed by European commentators to the
great strength of tribal culture with its focus upon social relations. In a

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society in which kinship is the dominant feature, capital accumulation
cannot occur. According to Worsely, writing in 1955 "Since everybody in
such a society is closely related, there is no chance of accumulating
wealth when one's relatives cannot rightly be refused if they are in need."
[40] Whatever the reasons, Aboriginal culture was not disrupted by
contact with the Muslims, something which cannot be said about the later
cultural contact experiences of these now oppressed people.

There were cultural and religious ef ects from contact with the
Macassans, but these were not destructive either. New developments in
carving, particularly carving in the round, are found in Marege, "unknown
elsewhere in Australia except in that part of Cape Yorke Peninsula under
the influence of the culture of the Torres Strait Islands." Worsley
commented "Mourning ceremonies, magical practices and important
religious ceremonies.. are all shot through with Macassarese
influences". He also mentioned that the totemic system on Groote
Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria was also modified with the introduction
of the Ship totem and of the north-west and south-east wind totems. [41]

Arnhem Land Aborigines later spoke of the period of contact with
Macassar as a Golden Age. There is a resentful undercurrent in some of
the European commentary, for this attitude of the indigenous people
contrasted starkly with relations during the period of assimilation and
oppression under the white colonial administration. Worsely understood:
"The contrast is plainly between the generosity and democracy of the
Macassarese and the parsimony and colour bar of the Whites." [42] Both
Macassans and inhabitants of Arnhem Land remembered each others
names, significant from the Aboriginal viewpoint where identification
implied some 'placement within the kinship framework'. Revealing an
at itude similar to that of other white commentators, Macknight adds "but
the clan af iliations suggested by some informants for several names
may reflect later rationalisation rather than the reality of direct contact."
[43] Today the positive at itude remains despite decades of separation.
[44]


[1] Blainey, Geof rey. The Tyranny of distance. Sun Books Melbourne.
1966 p. 2

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[2] Clark, C.M.H. A History of Australia Vol I MUP 1999 p. 3
[3] Liu Chih. The Life of the Prophet. 12 vols. 1721
[4] Majul, Cesar Adib. Muslims in the Philippines. University of the
Philippines Press. Quezon City. 1999 p. 41
[5] Majul, Cesar Adib. Muslims in the Philippines p. 44
[6] Gowing, Peter Gordon. Muslim Filipinos - Heritage and Horizon. New
Day Publishers, Quezon City. 1979 p. 15
[7] Whitehouse, Eric. B. Australia in Old Maps 820-1770. Boolarong
Press. Queensland. 1995 p. 65
[8] Whitehouse p. 16. 66
[9] Ibn Bat uta. Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354. Translated and
Selected by H.A.R. Gibb. Augustus M Kelley Publishers. NY 1969 p. 274
[10] Marco Polo. The Travels. Penguin Classics. 1979 p. 253-254
[11] Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet
of the Dragon Throne. Simon and Schuster. N.Y. 1994 p. 197
[12] Worsley, P.M. Early Asian Contacts with Australia. Past and Present
1955 pp. 1-11
[13] Clark, C.M.H. Vol I p. 8
[14] Clark, C.M.H. Vol I p. 9
[15] Clark. C.M.H. Vol I p. 11
[16] Macknight, C.C. The Voyage to Marege MUP 1976 p. 67, 98
[17] Levathes, Louise. p. 198
[18] Macknight, C.C. p. 95 quoting from Alexander Dalrymple A Plan for
Extending the Commerce of this Kingdom and The East-India Company.
London 1769 p. 92
[19] Macknight, C.C. p. 96
[20] Worsley, P.M. p. 1
[21] Macknight C.C. p. 94-95
[22] Searcy, Alfred. In Australian tropics. 2nd edition. George Robertson
and Co. London 1909 p. 15
[23] Macknight C.C. p. 48-60
[24] Blainey, Geof rey. p. 87
[25] Searcy, Alfred. p. 13
[26] Searcy, Alfred. p. vi
[27] Batchelor College Report 22 June-4 July 1986. Makassar and
Northeast Arnhem Land: Missing Links and Living Bridges. 2nd printing.
Batchelor College N.T. Oct. 1987 p. 45-46
[28] Alan Whykes, group interpreter and assistant to the Coordinator of

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