Places reflect the people who live there, their history and their experiences. The built environment of the neighbourhood in the city, suburb or town provides the physical setting by which and in which we live our lives. There are emotional, physical and community interactions in this space which determine our well-being, our identity and civic participation. The built environment is strongly influenced by the social, political and economic influences of the time and often reflects issues of power, resources, ideas and values.
Immigration and immigrant experiences constitute an important element of the way places and spaces are conceived, imagined, constructed and transformed. Memory, nostalgia, estrangement, isolation, participation, dislocation and hope are elements that influence place making. Therefore, in the post-migration period, places are constructed from the contradictory forces of the familiar and unfamiliar, resulting in culturally hybrid places where individuals, community, state and national identities are negotiated and change. The place making of immigrant minorities is even more contradictory and challenging than when immigrants come from the dominant cultural backgrounds, such as British immigrants in Australia. In one sense, the contribution of immigrant minorities to the built environment can be viewed as an attempt at social participation and inclusion through control of, access to and use of public spaces (Babacan 2006).
The expression of ethnic and cultural difference in the landscape—what Dunn (1999, p. 15) called the ‘spatialisation’ of multiculturalism—is evident in Australia in many ways. Although it is rarely recognised in research on Australia’s built heritage, prior to European arrival Indigenous Australians developed the built environment over millennia—some 60,000 years—constructing shelters out of natural materials and building elaborate stone fish traps and ceremonial sites. The British colonial myth of terra nullius—empty land—denied the many thousands of years of Indigenous place making across the continent and their care and management of the Australian landscape (Babacan and Gopalkrishnan 2017; Gammage 2012; Pascoe 2018). While industrial development, urbanisation and natural weathering have seen the disappearance of much of this heritage, many of the stone structures remain intact today. Nonetheless, colonisation has meant that the most dominant influence on the Australian built environment has undoubtedly been the architectural styles and forms originating from the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the styles of British colonial architecture, in particular, that are most commonly recognised as Australia’s built heritage.
However, since the earliest decades of colonisation, non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants and their descendants have also left their mark on Australia’s built environment. We refer to these non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants as immigrant minorities. Their impact in transforming Australia’s built environment is the central focus of this book. For example, despite recent protests against the development of mosques and Islamic schools in Australia, they are hardly a new feature. Temporary mosques were built across the Australian outback soon after the arrival of ‘Afghan’ cameleers in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and the first permanent mosque was opened as early as 1899 (Dunn 1999, p. 233). Today, arguably the most obvious of the places built by ethnic and religious minorities are the grand places of worship, such as the Auburn Gallipoli Mosque in Sydney’s West, or the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Woolgoolga on the north coast of New South Wales. But immigrant minorities have also built less immediately striking facilities including cultural centres, social clubs, schools and aged care facilities, restaurants and shops. Together, these sites can be understood as ‘multicultural monuments’ (Dunn 1999, p. 2)—records of Australia’s cultural diversity in its built environment. Non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants have also brought unique architectural and landscaping styles to Australia’s residential centres (see Armstrong 1998; Pascoe 1987, pp. 178–181; Sandercock and Kliger 1998) and even to suburban backyards (Graham and Connell 2006; see also Morgan et al. 2005; Pascoe 1987, pp. 180–181).
Australian architect and academic Susan Stewart and colleagues have also noted the ‘invisible’ impacts of non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants on the built environment. For example, while some sites may be ‘visually unremarkable’ and show no obvious signs of Australia’s cultural diversity, they are ‘culturally heterogenous in their production and habitation’, having been designed through a process of cross-cultural negotiation (Stewart et al. 2003, p. 240). For planning researcher Leonie Sandercock, all of these patterns of spatial diversity are signs of a ‘mongrelization’, a new condition of cities ‘in which difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, plurality prevail’ (Sandercock 2003, p. 1). They are also a reflection of the super-diversity of contemporary Australian life and of Australian society (Vertovec 2007).
While this book focuses on sites built by non-Anglo-Celtic ethnic groups, there is a complex overlap between ethnic and religious diversity. Hence, many of the sites examined are places of worship built and used by non-hegemonic ethnic groups who also have non-hegemonic religious affiliations. In this sense, multicultural monuments may also be monuments to religious diversity, with expressions of both ethnic and religious difference in the built environment being a testament to Australia’s immigration history.
The spatial impacts of Australian multiculturalism had received little public or academic attention. Tamara Winikoff (1992, p. 140) has suggested that in research on the Australian built environment there has been ‘an obvious bias in favour of British influence’, with the ‘material evidence of ethnic minority settlement… rarely celebrated’. Walter Lalich (2003), too, has argued that while inadequate academic attention has been paid to ethnic community organisations in Australia, even less attention has been given to the buildings and physical infrastructure they have created. Lalich argues that this reflects the cultural hegemony of Anglo-Celtic Australians and an Anglo-centric approach to research.
Similar critiques exist in the heritage realm. Renowned geographer David Lowenthal dubbed it a ‘heritage crusade’ (1998, p. ix). Interest groups have regularly lobbied to have buildings, towns or natural spaces listed on the numerous ‘heritage’ registers that now exist at local, national and even international levels. According to Lowenthal, such listings may recognise and validate peoples’ attachments to place, enshrining symbols of shared identity and allowing the consolation of tradition in difficult times (Lowenthal 1998, p. 1).
Heritage listings may also have significant practical implications. They may confer status on heritage sites—particularly important in the context of heritage tourism—as well as attracting privilege in resource allocation and political influence in development decisions. However, just as the spatial aspects of multiculturalism have been under-researched in the social sciences, the places built by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians have been largely ignored by heritage professionals. As the Australian Heritage Commission found in 1994: ‘the history of many minority groups is relatively invisible in registers of significant places as though the history of such groups is not seen as being of broad public interest and importance’ (Johnston in Lalich 2003, p. 9).
Part of the explanation for this lack of attention lies in definitions of heritage that have privileged the age of structures over their significance to local communities. For example, Helen Armstrong argued that the dominant understanding of heritage in Australia in the mid-1990s ‘derived from the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) model where antiquity, excellence and rigorous evaluation criteria’ prevailed (Armstrong 1994a, p. 480). Heritage assessments based on this model emphasised ‘historic, scientific and archaeological value… rather than social value’ while the ‘concept of social heritage significance [or] what is valued by the community’ was inadequately understood (Armstrong 1994a, p. 480; see also Sandercock and Kliger 1998). Researchers in other Western nations have reached similar conclusions. In the United States and New Zealand (NZ), Dolores Hayden (1995) and Michael Hartfield (2001), respectively, have argued that official definitions of heritage have prioritised ‘elite’ or ‘western’ heritage at the expense of the heritage places of socially marginalised groups. Babacan and Gopalkrishnan (2017) point out that political struggles over heritage and space play out through structures of difference, discrimination, power and inequality.
Since the 1990s there have been increasing calls among both social scientists and heritage professionals to recognise and examine the social, cultural and political significance of places built by ethnic minorities. In the heritage realm, Hartfie...