South Asian Islam in Early Australia, 1880s to 1930

In the period ca. 1880 to 1930, thousands of south Asian men migrated to Australia to work in the transport industry as cameleers in the country’s arid interior, particularly within the growing mining industry. Most of these men were Muslims, and they maintained their faith by constructing mosques where they travelled and worked throughout the country. An historical archaeological study of three mosques in Western Australia revealed considerable detail about the men’s religious lives and the elements of Asian Islam that were imported into Australia. These three mosques showed active Islamic life across Australia, possibly with a detailed Islamic landscape in Coolgardie. Mosques were devoted to specific tribal groups, to the veneration of an unnamed pir or ‘saint’, and to the needs of travelling, working Muslim cameleers for prayers in a remote trackside location. The principal mosque in Perth in Western Australia was built in 1905, and was closely styled after the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore (many cameleers would have been familiar with Lahore). Other mosques from the period express a very Australian, vernacular influence: Queenslander-style mosques on stilts and, in Western Australia, mosques commonly built of corrugated sheet iron. Pressed metal sheeting, a common and cheap article of architectural ornamentation at the time, may have become a style of beautifying mosques while maintaining the Muslim prohibition on representations of humans. Cultural/religious practices were also changed: Christian Australians participated in some Muslim religious activities, seemingly very different to how it likely happened in the Asian homelands.