Underground (25 page)

Admittedly, it was never really my part of town. I was an eastern suburbs boy. But Brunswick and its main thoroughfare, Sydney Road, was very much the place to go in search of exotic Middle Eastern foods. There were some popular Turkish restaurants and bakeries, for instance. And it was a colourful area, a bit ramshackle and run-down, a bit foreign, but all in a good way—which was how most of the ethnic enclaves were, back in that far-off time when multiculturalism was not a dirty word. Not that everyone who lived in Brunswick was from Turkey or Egypt or Lebanon—you still saw lots of white faces on the street—but you certainly saw Arabic faces too. And scarves or veils on many of the women, even the occasional
full-length burqa. If I’d been asked, before all the troubles, to find a Muslim community in Melbourne, I would’ve gone to Brunswick first.

It was no surprise then—in the wake of the Canberra bombing—that Brunswick became one of the designated detention suburbs. Of course, it’s by no means the biggest Muslim ghetto in the world. Brunswick is downright tiny compared to those in America or England. Nor is it the biggest ghetto in Australia. That, I’m pretty sure, would be Bankstown in Sydney. It’s not even the biggest ghetto in Melbourne—there are more people confined to the northern suburb of Broadmeadows. Still, jammed into those few city blocks of inner Brunswick are something like forty thousand Muslim souls, the vast majority of them forcibly removed from somewhere else.

Oh, they kicked up a fuss about it. As did the non-Islamic residents of the area, who were compelled to move away. As did Melbourne commuters, when a stretch of Sydney Road was cut off by the new walls. But my brother was quite adamant. There was, he declared, a poisonous two per cent of the population that needed to be dealt with. Too many to deport (and besides, no other country would take them) and too many to detain in the regular way. So ghettos were the answer. Or, officially, ‘cultural precincts’. Not prisons, my brother said, but merely a convenient method of collecting the Islamic community into central locations, as much for their own protection as anyone else’s, what with anti-Islamic feeling running so high. In the precincts, Muslims would be safe and sound amongst their own kind.

Sure. Absolutely. And never mind the walls and the watchtowers and the spotlights and the heavily guarded checkpoints leading in and out.

The irony, however, is that since the Muslims have all been locked in—with only approved workers allowed out on daily passes—it seems that the authorities have been content to leave the inmates to stew in their own juices. After all, what harm
can any extremists do if they’re never allowed outside their own zones? Who can they blow up or terrorise, apart from themselves? And so the ghettos have become the one part of Australia that
isn’t
constantly under surveillance. The police stay outside the walls. There are no video cameras, no hidden microphones, no phone tapping, no internal checkpoints, no rules, no laws. In fact, before I actually went into one, all I’d ever heard about the precincts was that they’d been left to run wild—an overcrowded chaos of poverty, violence and gang warfare.

You can see where I’m headed with this, can’t you, interrogators? What more natural haven for an outlaw group like the Oz Underground can you imagine than in the heart of lawlessness itself? The Underground High Council certainly thought so. Brunswick was the only place in Melbourne where it was safe for them to hold their secret gatherings. Which was why Aisha and I had been brought there, so that we could be called before the OU hierarchy. Indeed, a meeting had been arranged for the evening of the very day we arrived.

It seemed they were eager to get a look at us.

In the meantime, we were kept out of sight. The tunnel had deposited us in another warehouse, this one much smaller than the one on the other side of the wall. Apparently it was the depot for what had once been a company dealing in eastern spices—the smell of them still lingered: cardamom, anise, turmeric—but for the moment the place held only piles of sacks containing government-supplied rice. And there we stayed until night fell. Not alone, of course. Harry had disappeared off somewhere, but Aisha and I were left with an honour guard of about a dozen young men and women from the ghetto.

And a strange lot they were. I mean, by their very presence I knew they had to be Muslims. And I won’t lie, it felt
weird
to be sitting amongst them. You just don’t meet Muslims en
masse in this country anymore. True, there were those men we encountered in the desert, but they were foreigners. Aliens. These people in the warehouse, they didn’t seem foreign at all. Okay, many of them looked vaguely Middle Eastern, but their accents were Australian, their clothes were Australian. Indeed, take them out of the ghetto and there was no real way you could have picked them. Which was the whole point, wasn’t it? They were the internal nemesis against which we had all been warned. Looking like us, sounding like us, existing as us—and yet hell-bent, according to the government, on our overthrow.

But they seemed perfectly friendly. They gave us cold Turkish pizza to eat and new clothes to wear and we all reclined on the rice bags, watching the windows as the daylight faded. And for once no one was yelling at me, or pointing a gun.

‘Are you in the Underground too?’ I finally asked one of them who was sitting near me, a young man with an air of some authority over the group.

‘Sure, brother.’ He was a squat, well-muscled youth, dark-skinned, with a shaved head and a restless manner, dressed in jeans and a faded Essendon football jumper. Gold jewellery hung from his neck and his wrists, and his accent was pure western suburbs—so much so that I could picture exactly the sort of sports car he would have driven in the old days, cruising down Chapel Street with a sub-woofer thumping in the boot. ‘We’ve been waiting on you guys for days now.’

‘Um . . . Are many of you members? In here?’

‘What? You mean Muslims? In the ghetto?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘A fair few of us.’ He was reading a folded newspaper, and glanced up from it. ‘Fact is, we’re all underground in here, aren’t we, like it or not.’

It made sense, I supposed, although it still seemed unsettling—Muslims and the OU in alliance. But maybe I was
just too brainwashed to imagine Muslims in alliance with anyone in Australia these days. They’d been the enemy for so long. Abashed, I found myself staring at the newspaper on his lap. It was a
Herald Sun
. The front page was taken up by the report of a crashed airliner in a paddock somewhere in New South Wales. One hundred and twenty dead. Australia’s worst-ever civilian air accident, it seemed. Terrorism not suspected.

‘You get papers in here?’ I asked.

‘We smuggle them in. This is a couple of days old, though . . .’

A couple of days. I tried to remember—where was I a couple of days ago? Lost in the desert somewhere? Riding in the Humvee? But try as I might, I couldn’t piece it all together. I was too tired. I needed to sleep.

Aisha, meanwhile, was engaged in an animated discussion with some of the others, over on the far side of the warehouse.
She
wouldn’t be worried or confused. She was probably feeling fine, amongst her own people at last. But I didn’t want to be anywhere close to Aisha. In fact, since our time together in that metal box, skin pressing against skin, my flesh crawled at the thought of being near her. I’d never liked her, obviously, because she was a fanatic who had wanted to kill me. Still, during those moments in the box, when I’d glimpsed the human being behind the terrorist, the girl named Nancy, I’d thought that my feelings might have softened. But the final revelation about her parents—that had crushed any such impulse. Could it really be true? Had she actually done it? It was unspeakable, even if it was only a story she’d made up to shock me. It spoke of a deeper psychosis than just religion or politics.

The truth was, Nancy the human being actually depressed and repulsed me more than Aisha the terrorist had. Terrorists you can at least fear and hate, and that’s a kind of respect, really. A failed, mixed-up human being, however, with a hatred for her family, her background and probably herself . . . Well, the best thing you can feel is pity. But when that person has a gun
and an ideology and a willingness to kill for it, then even pity doesn’t work.

I looked away from her, lay back on the bags and slept a while. And somewhere in my dreams I’m sure I heard, from outside, on distant loudspeakers, a reedy voice calling the people of the ghetto to prayer.

God is great, God is great, I bear witness
. . .

And I thought, if only it was that simple.

The boy in the Essendon jumper was shaking me awake.

‘We’re outta here, pal.’

‘What?’ I saw darkness through the windows. ‘Where?’

‘The council.’

‘Right,’ I said, lumbering up.

With the ghetto youths as escorts, we left the warehouse through a doorway that led into a small alley. The alley was deserted, but only fifty yards along we merged into the residential streets of Brunswick. And while at first it all looked familiar—the little old houses, the tree-lined footpaths, the corner shops—a sense of dislocation soon swept over me. This was like no night I’d ever experienced in Melbourne before. The sky had the usual orange glow, but in Brunswick itself, the streets were black. There were lights on in windows and doorways, but not a single streetlight shone anywhere. It was like being in some erratic blackout. There were no cars either, not parked, not driving. But people were everywhere. A mass of shadows and voices, moving slowly up and down the narrow streets. Cigarettes flared in the darkness and, somewhere further off, I could hear what sounded like drums and flutes playing.

Aisha and I walked in the middle of our guards, a loose cordon around us, moving carefully at the crowd’s pace. The Essendon boy was beside me.

‘Does the whole place know we’re here?’ I asked him.

His eyes were dimly visible, scanning the streets. ‘No.’

‘We won’t be recognised?’

‘There’s no reason why anyone should notice you. We got plenty of white faces in here. Albanians. Bosnians. Even fair-dinkum Aussies who were dumb enough to convert, and even more dumb not to convert back while they had the chance. Besides, it’s dark out here. Don’t worry.’

I stared at the dead streetlights. ‘Have the authorities cut the power to them?’

‘They didn’t do it. We did. Smashed ’em all with rocks.’

‘Why?’

‘Choppers. They fly over once or twice an hour. Keeping an eye on us. So we thought, fuck it, no reason to let the bastards see what we’re up to.’

And true, the darkness was comforting. I caught smells of food cooking, and then heard a burst of singing, and more laughter amongst the crowd. I was reminded of a kind of fete or street party. A poorly lit street party, but one with a pleasant hum, on a good, warm summer’s evening. So where was the misery and poverty I’d heard so much about, where was the violence?

‘There’s no curfew? People can just wander around?’

My companion laughed. ‘Shit, man, this ain’t Warsaw under the Nazis. We live pretty much as we please. And it works in a way. Plenty of people still get out to go to their jobs, and bring in money, and food. And the government supplies us with most of the basics. It’s crowded, sure. Two or three families to a house. But no one’s dying in the streets.’

‘I’ve read stories about gang wars . . .’

‘Yeah, well, the papers like to pretend we’re all animals in here.’

Indeed. We were coming up to Sydney Road now, and if you ignored the lack of street lighting, and the absence of cars, it might have been Sydney Road just the same as always. There were shops and restaurants and cafes open, and a steady stream
of people moving up and down the footpaths. There was even, to my amazement, a single tram running along the tracks in the middle of the road, its bell dinging as the vehicle eased through the pedestrians. The faces of two old ladies, their heads wrapped in scarves, peered out from the front seat.

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said, nodding at the tram.

Essendon boy was amused. ‘Yeah. They left us one old rattler, and power in the overhead lines. The bloody thing just runs up and down the street, from the south wall to the north wall. But hey, we got no shortage of unemployed tram drivers in here. The poor buggers aren’t allowed to work outside anymore. The government says their jobs are too sensitive.’

‘Driving a tram is too sensitive?’

‘I know. As if you could crash one of
them
into a building.’

We sauntered on, still loosely surrounded by the guards. I caught a glimpse, over roof tops, of the city skyscrapers only a few kilometres away, a whole different world. But there in Sydney Road, families walked in and out of restaurants, and children ran about shrieking, and groups of men sipped coffee and smoked and studied the sky. I still couldn’t shake the image of a street party from my mind. Except that it was too peaceful. At a normal Australian street party there would have been beer, and drunks spilling out of pubs, and sausages and steaks frying on barbecues. Here the cooking smells were of spices and rice, and there was no beer, no drunks reeling about—indeed, the one pub we passed appeared to have been converted into a coffee house. Brunswick had become a ‘dry’ suburb at last, just like dear old leafy Camberwell had been in my childhood.