Pauline Hanson - on the campaign trail again

from the New Zealand Listener....

It might be news to Pauline Hanson that Muslims
played a key part in opening up the outback

Few Australians have heard of the Marree mosque — and Australian
politician Pauline Hanson is not likely to be one of them.

By BERNARD LAGAN | Friday, 23 September 2016

The mosque at Marree. — Photograph: State Library of South Australia.

DEEP within Australia’s desert lands sits a wind-scarred timber frame topped with the wispy remnants of a thatched roof. It is a mosque — still tall and straight on its mud foundations.

Muslim men erected it 155 years ago outside the hamlet of Marree on a dirt track some 700km north of Adelaide. Unsurprisingly, few Australians have heard of it, let alone visited the old mosque; this is waterless, baking country of the sort Britain tested atomic weapons in in the 1950s and '60s.

The Marree mosque was built by some of the thousands of cameleers brought to Australia in the 1860s from Afghanistan, India and Pakistan to penetrate the outback on their humped mounts. Their mosque was Australia's first.

When Pauline Hanson, the leader of Australia's far-right One Nation, rose from her seat in the federal Parliament's upper house — the Senate — in mid-September and delivered her hell-raising speech in which she said Australia was in danger of being swamped by Muslims who should now be banned, she tapped into a rich stratum of Australian phobia: the dread of being stealthily invaded from within.

It is an ancient foreboding; a century and half ago, even far off Marree was segregated on racial lines. The Afghans were confined to the north side of town, the Europeans to the south. Even the town's cemetery was divided, with Afghan graves marked by a single pole, such was the aversion to foreigners.

It was, of course, not the first time Hanson had railed in Parliament against migrants. When she won a lower-house seat in 1996 — she was turfed out two years later — Asians were her first target; in her maiden speech back then she said it was they who were swamping Australia. She and her party became wildly popular in semi-rural, archly conservative Queensland. One Nation scooped up 11 seats in the Queensland Parliament in that state's 1998 election, only to be consumed a year or two later by internal feuds.

Time has not wearied Hanson, now 62 — or her supporters — during her 18-year absence from Parliament until her return in July's general election. And she is not alone; three other One Nation candidates now sit alongside her in the 76-seat Senate.

How to explain the comeback of a backwards-looking, frequently muddled movement — filled also with climate science deniers and trade protectionists — just as the lucky country celebrates 25 consecutive years of export-driven economic growth? That's only nine months shy of the Netherlands' world record.

The resurgence can be partly explained by the embitterment of those who believe Australia's growth years have passed them by. And the armies who won, then lost; those who got used to wage packets of $100,000 or more a year in the mining boom, only to see their jobs dry up, an experience they share with Donald Trump's legions of resentful white working-class supporters across the US's withered Appalachian coal towns.

But there is something else. Hanson defines Australia as essentially Anglo and under attack from multiculturalism, Asian and, now, Muslim migration. She follows a long, flush seam in Australian literature and public life that has imagined the country, by dint of its Southern Hemisphere location and surrounded (save for New Zealand) by hostile foreigners, as vulnerable to invasion within its great, unoccupied, fear-giving emptiness.

Yet it took Muslims on camels to find the early paths through the mysterious far inland Australians so feared. The old mosque they left behind might be seen as a testament to courage rather than a well of unease.

• New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for The Times, London.

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