In the late 1990s, a follower of Jack van Tongeren’s white supremacist Australian Nationalist Movement, convicted of blowing up his local Chinese restaurant in Perth, confessed in a TV documentary that he and his wife had later missed being able to eat there.
While there is a certain dark humour to the bomber’s lack of intelligence, the less funny truth is that racism is most easily propagated in less-educated communities. And the story not being told about the “racially motivated” murder of Indian accounting graduate Nitin Garg, is that the park in which he was stabbed is bordered by some of the poorest and most poorly educated suburbs in Australia.
Walk due east, and you walk through up-and-coming Kingsville and into the already gentrified Yarraville — sold by real estate agents with the slogan “Live nowhere else”.
Walk west or north-west and you find yourself in dusty Brooklyn, which boasts miles of industrial estates and a giant landfill site (source of the dust); Tottenham, where even the tattoo shop has closed down; and Braybrook, judged by one recent study to be the fourth poorest postcode in the country.
These western suburbs have long been a “vibrant multicultural community” in local councillor’s election speeches — and indeed they are, with shops, temples, restaurants and festivals brimming with people from Vietnam, Ethiopia, Sudan, India, Uygur refugees from China, and Karen from the Thai-Burma border — even a few shell-shocked Anglos escaping the high rents of St Kilda.
But the flip side of all the “vibrancy” is that many of the new arrivals, and plenty of the older ones — including a well-established Anglo-Celtic and southern European working poor — do not have the education, community facilities and job opportunities that overseas critics of “racist Australia” would assume is the Australian birthright.
Veteran social worker Les Twentyman — who, with high-profile priest Bob Maguire, has offered to mediate between Garg’s killer and authorities to ensure proper legal process — told Crikey that “thousand of kids in these suburbs won’t be turning up on the first day of school in February because their parents can’t afford books, school uniforms or anything else”.
The limited recreation facilities in the region concentrate listless kids in a few locations, says Twentyman, and gangs beckon for teens with limited education and no job prospects: “I’d like to see a program to give the jobs in the west to people in the west,” says Twentyman. “There’s an army of professionals who cross the Maribyrnong River every day to do the good jobs over here, then drive home again.”
Twentyman is one of the few voices in the Australian media maintaining Garg’s murder “may have been racially motivated”, though his elaboration on this point might surprise critics in India. “It could have been someone from any of the ethnic groups that killed him,” he says. “There’s a kind of a status thing between the poorer kids and the Indians. They see Indians working for department stores or debt collectors or banks — jobs they can’t get. They see Indian guys as physically weaker — easy to push around — and financially better off. And what have they got to lose? You’ve got kids arrive here from war zones — you meet kids who’ve seen their parents beheaded and who never get properly debriefed and counselled. They’re not scared of jail — after what they’ve seen prison looks like a five-star hotel.
“It’s the poor suburbs that have always had to digest these groups of people — the more you pour into one area the more it tops up the problems. I’d like to see it spread around the city more.
“Jobs, education and recreation are what give these kids something to live for besides joining gangs and getting into heroin. I’ve been warning about gangs and weapons here for 20 years. Now suddenly everyone’s saying ‘shit, what can we do about that’?”
Rob Burgess is commentary editor for Business Spectator and writes on education and social issues for the Guardian Weekly.
“…Twentyman is one of the few voices in the Australian media maintaining Garg’s murder “may have been racially motivated”…”
Yet Twentyman – -or anyone – has no proof whatsoever of any racial element to this crime.
This is made all the more implausible when one considers the ethnic make-up of the suburb the attack took place in.
This guy was gutted like a fish from a single knife wound to the chest from the front.
Nothing was stolen from him and he was ‘allowed’ to ‘flee’, eventually reaching his place of employment.
Robbery clearly wasn’t the motive. Neither was murder (or he would not have been allowed to run).
That suggests he knew his attacker. It also points a possible cultural motive for the style of attack.
‘Social’ workers and media types are so quick to put crimes like this into a convenient ‘racist’ box.
It helps explain their deep self-loathing.
Yet they have been caught out time and again, most recently with the ‘attack’ in Essendon on an Indian male who swears he was attacked and burnt by four white males while sitting in his car.
Wrong. That’s not what happened at all.
The current investigation will reveal the real truth.
I note Twentyman hasn’t made any impassioned pleas to the Indian authorites for the extradition to Australia of Indian national Puneet Puneet to stand trial for killing an innocent pedestrian whilst driving drunk.
He was murdered in Yarraville and died in West Footscray.
Was in the next suburb twice last week staying with a relative. A class mate is now a regionally based PO-lice so we talked The Wire.
Did a decent foot tour around Footscray for 3 days, 2 train stops from Yarraville site of the foul murder if memory serves. Would be hard to find a more coloured and vibrant part of urban Australia including sections of Redfern and say Canley Vale or some other western sydney train lines like the proverbial Blacktown (yes quite a few African folks there). A more intense version of Marrickville perhaps.
A big sense of melting pot: African and Viet business is well established and well run with plenty of foot traffic. Police conspiciously present. A bare few street dealers and/or users of anglo variety to my eye. Victoria Uni, Coles, art cafe, big clothing charity store, big market. Great food. What’s not to like? Cheaper than an overseas holiday. Totally safe in daylight.
On the drive back to the city I was speculating with ‘George’, about the themes in the acclaimed The Wire which definitely alludes to neglect of black victims of crime (esp season 5): Wondering if this might be a ‘script’ for the distant feisty Indian media?
Perhaps the Gandhi thing is working against the Indian students?: The young tall strong African guys, as mild and self interested as they were, looked very fit to me and no easy mark.
One thing – the Footscray rail station upgrade. It symbolises a degree of chaos with temporary ramps the rule. I walked around on the heat wave night and it was okay but I was watchful all the same and kept to the lit areas as you do in any city, not least Marrickville.
All the talk in this case is (as usual) about the causes of the violence in this area but hardly anyone wants to talk about the solutions.
I personally find Twentyman to be one of the more irritating people on this planet but in this case agree with him wholeheartedly. The majority of issues our neighbourhood faces are resource based. Poverty is a massive driver of most of the social issues we have and the few people we have here to deal with the issues are ludicrously underfunded and over worked.
What services we do have here tend to have a tenuous existence thanks to funding. The most important community event in Braybrook – the Braybrook Big Day Out – was cancelled this year due to no funding. The council couldn’t even fund someone part time to try find sponsorship to run the event. This is despite a community survey findings that this is the most important community pride enhancing event on our calendar. The few programs we have for kids have limited funding runs or don’t run during school holidays when kids are most bored. No surprises the number one fun sport round here is smashing glass. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that crime and violence rates go up when schools out for summer.
And yes ethnicity is a big issue because our community has such diverse needs. Fifth generation welfare recipient european kids have totally different needs to the kids that grew up in Sudanese refugee camps. And sadly there isn’t the money to deal with both. So often care workers have to make the impossible choice. Naturally, resentment follows.
So while we see politicians on the tv condemning the violence and claiming that they’ll do something about it there’s never any money to back it up. Unless of course it’s in the form of policing. Which is not a long term solution by any stretch of the imagination. The use of Nitin’s tragic death to justify an already planned human rights abusing weapons sting last week was sickening and not what I, as a community member want to see going on.
I adore living in Braybrook. Compared to my previous location of Hawthorn I rate the quality of life ten times higher. The kids all play in the street instead of living in front of xboxes, we know our neighbours and I’m not likely to get run over by a Hummer Mama trying to drive an SUV while drinking a latte and talking on the phone, as I walk down the street. Sure it’s pretty poor round here, but at least it’s still the norm to say hi to people when you pass them in the street.
I look forward to the day that some of the fantastic community run programs that run of the smell of an oily rag and some serious local hard work get some much needed support from our local and state government. And we can start to address the fundamental issues that our community faces.
Agree, Kakariki, with a lot you have to say and particularly how irritating Les Twentyman is, and he’s not a social worker, he’s a youth worker. I live in West Footscray about 5 minutes from where Nitin Garg was attacked, and reckon just given the ethnic mix of this neighbourhood, that if you were going to be attacked by someone outside your own family, it’s a fair bet the attacker would be from a different ethnic group and that that is neither here nor there. It’s the poverty and lack of opportunity that is at least part of the problem. Not all of it, as one of my work colleagues, for example was a heroin addicted , knife wielding gang member in his youth. All of his gang mates are dead, but he went interstate, straightened himself out and is just now finishing his training as a medical specialist. It’s also been a feature of the west historically that inter-ethnic violence is no new thing, for instance, I can remember Serbian and Croatian kids attacking each other with razor blades embedded in wooden rulers in the early seventies, when some bright spark put them in the same class.