The final week of SBS’ four-part documentary series Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl brings us to the last decade’s crises for Lebanese Muslim communities in Sydney’s west, and the path to redemption they have sought to follow. It is a story now that both unites and divides Sydney’s Lebanese communities.

The Lebanese-background population in Australia remains majority Christian, with the simple Muslim/Christian differences complicated by sects and tensions within and between each of the main blocs: Maronite Catholics, Melkites and Eastern Orthodox, Shi’a, Sunni and Alawi, Druze, the political and the non-religious.

Whatever the specific religious belief system they follow, there remains among them a shared cultural concern for respect, a currency that sustains the networks of families and clans. Sometimes that cultural economy of honour and shame can become toxic under the impact of fear, hatred, violence and crime. The Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl series starts from that point of tension to explore how the image of the Lebanese has become so corroded in Australia.

The series has revealed that the Lebanese-Australian story today is an Australian story, forged from the interaction of people fleeing war, and finding a society unprepared for their arrival and the problems they carried with them.

For a century, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants have travelled to Australia. Earlier generations battled White Australia to become a respected part of our diversity, ultimately providing long-standing and much-loved New South Wales governor Dame Marie Bashir.

In comments I have received (and more than 130 on a previousConversation article exemplify these trends), there are four themes which find themselves at loggerheads. In a sense they reveal the backstory to the series, and the ongoing debate that Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl has entered.

The most poignant moment for me came when I took a call from my local mechanic, a man I knew by his Australian first name. He had come to Australia as a 16-year old during the civil war in Lebanon after his Muslim family fled the violence. He had experienced racism throughout his life, changing his name to avoid the disdain his Arab name used to attract. He now runs a successful operation with his very Australian son.

For him, the archetypal successful family small businessman, Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl had been the first time he had ever seen any recognition of his people and their lives in Australia outside the repetitive media stereotypes of inarticulate thugs into guns and gangs.

The previous evening I read an email – one of many I have received over the years offering similar poisonous insights. The author, whose name appears Anglo-Australian, was certain of many things about Lebanese Muslims and about me as the series interlocutor:

[Your] one sided viewpoint (was) truly terrifying. I assert it is people like you that are responsible for the horrendous issues now facing Europe … Overly liberal do-gooders like yourself doing your best to ensure the islamisation of proud European nations populated by law abiding people enjoying their own impressive cultures.

For this man, there could clearly never be a Muslim who was acceptable, no matter how moral, peaceful and productive.

One of the other issues raised but in no way resolved by the series has been the Christian/Muslim divide. Filmmaker George Basha, one of the main characters in the series, is of Christian background, and his parents and the Muslim Lebanese parents in the series shared many experiences of difficult settlement, as their children did of racism.

However, there is a growing apprehension among some Christian commentators that the series made three wrong moves. In private conversations it has been put to me that Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl suggested problems that they feel are essentially associated with Muslims but have been sheeted home to all Lebanese.

It has also been said that this is the first real story of the Lebanese ever shown on Australian TV and should not have focused so much on the dark side of crime and violence when Lebanese have contributed so much to Australia’s development; and that the series resurrected “bad news” stories from the past that were best left undisturbed.

The fourth type of response comes from people who were not part of these more intimate and impassioned engagements. The absence of stories of immigrant communities from most media unless they are a cause for fear, concern or momentary adulation (usually as sportspeople) has contributed to an extraordinary ignorance among Australians about our shared and complex histories.

Similarly to the interest evoked in Vietnamese settlement by the Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta series in 2012, viewers have found that this series provided a very accessible history lesson, which integrated cultural awareness, personal narratives and social and political analysis.

Viewers have appreciated the very non-stereotypical characters (discounting yours truly playing the sociologist) and understood the commonality of experiences and the reciprocated concerns expressed by Muslims and Christians about each other’s situations.

Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl has a very clear central concern. It wants to take the headlines and look behind them; to take the stereotypes and humanise them; to take the issues and reveal their complexity. As with Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta, in this series we can see how culture and power meld, and how the powerless seek to find respect, and a fair place in society.

The past few years in Punchbowl have seen the passing of two symbols of the old regime, both of whom who are carefully bypassed in the series despite the consequence of their actions. Sheik Hilaly, the former imam of the Lakemba mosque has retired, and his worst excesses have faded.

Not far away, the political machine created by Christian politician Eddie Obeid is crumbling as the Labor Party he thought he once owned tries to recover. New players are now filling the void in politics, business, government, religion and crime. Perhaps now we might become more interested in and more aware of what that future holds.

Lebanese Australians have played a key part in building the nation – providing some of its most beloved leaders, including Dame Prof Dr Marie Bashir, retiring governor of NSW, and her husband former Rugby international and Lord Mayor of Sydney Nick Shehadie. They have been sports stars such as the NRL’s Hazem El Masri and Benny Elias, and business leaders like Talal Yassine and  Samir Dandan.  

They’ve also achieved notoriety as criminals, like “Kings Cross identities”  John Ibrahim and Bill Bayeh, or as violent thugs like Bilal Skaf and murderers like various members of the Razzak and Darwiche clans.  They feature amongst potential terrorists convicted in the aftermath of Operations Pendennis and Neave. We can hardly forget Eddie Obeid and his sons. 

The Australian media have been mostly taken by the dark side, with its bizarre terrorists, outspoken clerics, foul-mouthed hoods and over-the-top bikie gang lords.  Yet little opportunity has been provided to Lebanese Australians to tell their own stories, to present their experiences of being part of multicultural Australia, and of surviving in a world where honour is important, yet the wider society tends to prefer labelling them with shame.

Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl , one story of Lebanese Australians, is back on track after a bumpy first start, when an aspiring actor decided to act out for the producers being a crim until thankfully sprung by News Ltd. The SBS program delivers a sustained insight into the dynamic through which Lebanese Australia has come to be such a controversial though important part of our contemporary diversity.

While earlier generations from the Lebanon succeeded in finding a place despite the barriers of White Australia, it was the Civil War of the mid-1970s which really set the conditions for the last few generations’ experience of settlement and integration. 

This period was not easy – thousands arrived from the War with few skills, no English, into an environment that offered little employment, schools with few capacities to respond to their needs, and a wider society unprepared for a large Muslim intake. White Australia was but a breath away, and racism had been a way of life for Australians since long before Federation in 1901. While the Lebanese population had been mainly Christian and Europe-centric beforehand, the War was to raise the proportion of Muslims dramatically and in very short order.

The Lebanese have been affected by global events in ways far beyond that delivered to other immigrant groups. As Arabs they have born the opprobrium of the West’s fear of the Oriental Arab; as Muslims they have carried the can for any act of Islamist terrorism. The big inflow of the 1970s occurred in parallel with the end of White Australia and the advent of multiculturalism. Their first decade or more occurred as the rhetoric of non-racism and multicultural equity intensified, even if the reality did not live up to the promise. Jobs were few, social provision minimal, education stretched.

Even so their first big “shock” came when they were confronted with a racist outburst against Arabs during the first Gulf War, when PM Hawke committed Australia to the anti-Iraq war. Australia’s Arabs were asked, whose side are you on? They had been promised that they could be both Arab and Australian: now they were told, especially by the media, that they had to choose.

Sydney became the focus for anti-Lebanese action by the authorities. A 1993 Arab picnic attended by 35000 people, degenerated into a brawl as the police attacked with dogs to break up a small altercation. The popular media saw this as an “Arab riot”. Things began to worsen as trust in the authorities declined; their young people were targets for what they saw as harassment, and the police would not protect the mass of citizens from a predatory criminal minority.

Through the 1990s, with the rise of Hansonism, public opinion hardened against the Lebanese, and in particular, against Lebanese Muslims. Key contributory events included the murder of Edward Lee by members of the Telopea St gang, a renowned centre for drug distribution, a widespread swoop on “Middle Eastern youth”, and a retaliatory drive by shoot-up of the Lakemba Police Station.

Then in 2000 a series of gang rapes by young men who claimed they were doing it “Leb style”, inflamed the popular press and public hostility. This was soon followed by an unconnected but murderous inter-family war over drugs, honour and the demand for a toxic form of respect 

Global events came back into the mix: Lebanese Muslims were portrayed as the proxy perpetrators of the 2001 New York and Washington Al Qaeda attacks, the 2002 Bali bombings, and the enemy within for the 2003 re-invasion of Iraq.  The Islamist radicalisation of a minority and the alienation of many more intensified during this period, culminating in the 2005 Cronulla “riot”, and the Punchbowl-centred retaliation. Thousands of people, Lebanese and not, Muslim, Christian and other, gathered in Lakemba to protect the Lebanese mosque from rumoured counter-retaliation.

While shock-jock attention (and participation) centred on these moments of inter-communal violence, the Lebanese communities were seizing back the day.  A new generation of Australian Lebanese leaders were running the community programs, building the schools, and developing the economy. When the Islamists tried to take on the police in a Sydney centre demonstration in 2012, these new leaders addressed Australia and said their behaviour was unacceptable.  But they also said that continuing racism against Lebanese, most of whom were fully integrated, was also no longer acceptable. They demanded that they be treated with respect, the same respect they accorded the Australian society that they had chosen.

Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl, produced by Northern Pictures,  is broadcast over four weeks from June 19, SBS 1, 8.30pm. 

The Conversation    Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl: SBS

Mediterranean societies have been described as communities of honour and shame. The fundamental currency of their social order is respect. When the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, drove thousands of its citizens to seek refuge in Australia, a moral economy of respect travelled with them. 

 This moral economy confronted a society not ready to receive the migrants; nor were they expecting what they found. The story of the sometimes fraught relationship of Lebanese immigrants, their children and Australian society underpins SBS and Northern Pictures’ four-part series Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl.

 In the midst of Australia’s confusion in 1976 over how it should or could respond to people fleeing crises, the Fraser government put together a Lebanese concession that eased restrictions applying to normal immigration applications, especially in relation to employment skills, language and assimiliabity.

Over the next four years around 20,000 Lebanese arrived in Australia, just under half Muslim (mainly Sunni but also Shia from the south), joining a Lebanese Arabic community that had been until then overwhelming Christian with smaller Druze and Alawi groups. 

As a government report of the day shows, many of the refugees from rural parts of Lebanon were poorly educated, and lacked skills necessary for work in Australia. They were often traumatised by the war, and had often lost family and homes in the back-and-forth movement of forces. They also entered the country as industrial employment opportunities were contracting, and investment in education was being reduced.

 As a result, the conditions were put in place that would lead to significant and growing frictions with the wider Australian society, especially for a minority that would become more marginalised and alienated.

 These initial conditions of settlement were not to be resolved. Sociological research suggests that in the first period of immigrant settlement all is chaos, and the first things to get organised are crime and religion. Each struggles for the hearts, minds, money, fears and hopes of people setting out on new lives. 

By 1977, the first Lebanese Sunni mosque was established in Lakemba in Sydney’s southwest, but there were also signs that both the longer-established Christians and the newly arrived Muslims were generating what would become significant criminal networks. There is some evidence that it was the Christian-background criminals who were moving in on Sydney’s lucrative Kings Cross drug trade that were recruiting Muslim-background youth from the western suburbs to provide muscle, and deal the drugs at street level. 

 This latter group would later break away – or be forced out – and build its own black economy in Punchbowl around Telopea St and Punchbowl Park. Meanwhile, the same generation of refugee Vietnamese youth was doing much the same in Cabramatta, a few suburbs away.

The Lebanese story has been marked by moments of public crisis, and these have served as the backbone for the Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl narrative. The 1991 Gulf War, where anti-Arab racism was widespread in public and media reactions to the conflict, confronted the Lebanese with questions about their loyalty to Australia. As during World War Two when Australia interned thousands of Italians, many of whom were citizens, paranoia about the enemy within was widespread. This had a major impact on a generation of young people who had been promised they were both Arab and Australian in contemporary multiculturalism, but were now told they had to choose.  This period marked the first major upsurge in anti-Arab sentiment.

By 1993 tensions, especially in southwest Sydney, were growing between police and young people. Facing an education system that had systemically failed many of them, facing mainstream racism and being drawn into alternative ways of gaining respect in criminal networks, some found a certain freedom and respect in a world of drug use.  In October police attacked a group of young people at an Arabic community picnic, using dogs and batons to break up what they later claimed was a riot. Later inquiries supported community claims of police racism.

 The situation deteriorated further with the rise of Hansonism in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Into the midst of these local events came a series of new global crises involving Australians – the September 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, the murders of Australians among others by jihadists in Bali in 2002, and the 2003 invasion of  Iraq in which Australia was also involved.  Each event set up the enemy as either Arab or Muslim or both, and with the largest single group of Muslim Arabs in Sydney coming from Lebanon, despite their not being involved in any of these events, they became the proxy target.

These events also introduced into the Australian mix a new dimension, radical jihadism. Some young people found in the increasingly militant language of  some minority Islamist preachers the promise of new meaning and a form of ego-asserting salvation. Imbued with a masculinist discourse which confronted the demeaning racisms that had undermined the perceived honour of men for generations, many were drawn to the space in which faith could be sometimes used not to reassert a Muslim identity within Australian society, but rather assert a new identity against Australian society and the wider targets of jihadism. 

A more volatile situation could be hard to design. It boiled over in December 2005, when spurred on by Sydney radio shock-jock Alan Jones, Cronulla beach became the scene for savage attacks on anyone of Middle Eastern appearance.  That evening young men gathered at Punchbowl Park and moved east in convoys, retaliating against those symbols of the other Australia that had so debased them. The RSL at Brighton–le-Sands, cars and shops in Maroubra, Anglo-looking men walking along the darkened streets of the eastern suburbs, all became targets for revenge.

Out of that conflict arose a new determination by the mainstream Lebanese Muslim community to assert a right to be seen as part of Australian society.  This took on a number of forms, from the conservative to the deviant.

Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl tells this story and others through the eyes of those who have lived it. If anything is clear it is that the politics of respect has to be rescued from those who have turned it toxic, and that the perpetrators exist on all sides.

Our joint article is in Holocaust Studies Autumn 2013.

(From The Conversation 31 January 2014)

Polish reactions to the German TV series Generation War, which has just screened in Australia, confirm that the history of World War Two remains highly contentious. The resulting public debate tested Polish-German and Polish-Jewish relations and placed historical memory at the forefront of the disputes.

The series first aired in Germany last March. It told the story of five young Germans in the 1940s who, as German newspaper Der Spiegel put it, “lose their innocence without being malicious”. The broadcasts contributed to Germany’s ongoing re-assessment of its past, especially among post-war generations.

The series inevitably raised questions about the responsibility of ordinary Germans for the crimes of the Nazi regime. More specifically, questions were asked about these depictions on public television in a historic drama miniseries, which was sure to attract a wide audience.

The reactions in Poland focused less on Germans being presented as likeable human beings caught in the war than on Poles being portrayed as anti-Semites. Such depictions (in only a few secondary scenes) led the director of Polish public television, Juliusz Braun, to fire off a protest to the German TV station. His letter objected to the injurious and false simplifications of the historical image of Poland, which could not be justified by the creators’ artistic freedom.

Protests by Polish public organisations led a month later to the government issuing an official letter of protest signed by the Polish ambassador to Germany. The Polish embassy in Washington protested at plans to broadcast the series in the US.

The news in August that the BBC would air the series caused another uproar in Poland. The sizeable Polish community in the UK held protests against screening “a film slandering the Polish Home Army”.

In Poland, the broadcasts on three consecutive evenings last June was preceded by an aggressive drumming up of expectations of controversy about a German director’s negative depiction of Poles. It was difficult to watch the series without anticipating those most “controversial” bits. These became the focus of a debate aired live after the last episode.

In an ironic turn of events, Juliusz Braun was heavily criticised for screening the series on public television in Poland. The leading Polish right-wing party, Law and Justice, demanded his immediate resignation. The Polish Anti-Defamation League contacted the Attorney-General’s Warsaw office to report a crime of “public slandering of the Polish nation”.

Why has this series caused such a strong reaction in Poland and among Polish diaspora around the world?

Power of the myth

In the post-war Soviet takeover of Poland, the Polish Home Army was dismantled. Its members were vilified, persecuted and executed (or otherwise exiled for life). For many generations of Poles, the Home Army soldiers came to symbolise honour and ultimate sacrifice in the fight for freedom.

Accepting that the Home Army was anti-Semitic would go against the myth of the glorious Polish soldier and survivor. The notion of martyrdom that this evokes, centuries-old and all-important in the Polish imaginary, is always accompanied by tales of heroism.

In this TV series, instead of heroes, we see a bunch of dirty and primitive bandits who commit very questionable acts and display questionable attitudes.

Historical truth

Since 1989 Poland has sought to recover the “historical truth” after half a century of Soviet propaganda. Contemporary Poles, who in their vast majority rejected the Soviet version of history, have been engaged heavily in making public the “real historical truth” – the version of history silenced by the pro-Soviet regime. Truth about the Katyn massacre is a perfect example.

However, within this project of rewriting the national history, it is difficult to fit in multiple interpretations and varying viewpoints, especially on the most sensitive topics.

Victims and perpetrators

Generation War’s five main characters are portrayed as young, idealistic and somewhat naïve. The experiences of the war lead them to certain actions that might be questionable, but, as in any film or TV series, the viewer cares about and feels for them.

The implicit message is that these were the average Germans. Caught in the enthusiasm for the war project without being ideologically involved with Nazism, when faced with harsh reality they were forced to act as they did by circumstances and not by their own will.

The character of the SS officer does not in itself balance the overall impression that the main German characters are almost the victims of the war and not the perpetrators.

Among non-German characters, on the other hand, the Polish Home Army soldiers are probably the least sympathetic of all. In the scenes that most outraged the Polish public, they are simply repugnant and framed almost as perpetrators of the Holocaust.

This is an issue so sensitive in Poland that after US president Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, heformally apologised for the “inadvertent verbal gaffe”. Obama acknowledged that these were, in fact, Nazi camps located on German-occupied Polish territory.

Polish anti-Semitism

So, were/are Poles anti-Semitic or not? Well, yes and no. The fury over the TV series confirms that this issue remains highly problematic.

It is difficult to accept expressions such as “Polish death camps”, with its implicit message that these were Polish-orchestrated and operated. It is equally difficult to accept that there were no anti-Semites in the Polish Home Army, or anti-Jewish crimes committed by Poles. Poles were victims of the Nazi terror, but some Poles also perpetrated anti-Jewish violence. Neither one nor the other can be denied.

A fully accurate re-examination of this chapter of history will be impossible. This is because of the unreliability of primary sources from the WWII-era, due to the age of first-hand witnesses, as well as Soviet authorities’ heavy postwar manipulation of the collecting and archiving of testimonies. Thus the goal for the historians will be to engage younger generations in a constructive dialogue by carefully considering multiple viewpoints and experiences.

The national project of rewriting Polish history ought to have room for a re-evaluation of Polish attitudes towards the Jews. Poland should seek a reconciliation with this difficult chapter of the past and ultimately a celebration of a 1000-year Polish Jewish history so that, as Michael Gawenda wrote, the story doesn’t have to end in a cemetery.