“The British and Foreign Bible Society decided that the number of Syrians in Melbourne was enough to warrant translating the Bible into Arabic.”

Most of the so-called ‘Syrians’ who immigrated to Victoria in the 1890s came from current day Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire. In moving from Syria to Melbourne, these men and women transgressed imperial and colonial borders.

Susan and Joseph Malouf’s family, pictured here, illustrates the growing number of Syrians based around Lonsdale Street.In 1897, two importers called Joseph Chehab and Abraham Khaled moved from Beirut into ‘Little Lon’; an area where Arabic was becoming a common language. As early as 1893, the British and Foreign Bible Society decided that the number of Syrians in Melbourne was enough to warrant translating the Bible into Arabic.

Joseph and Abraham played no small part in creating Little Lon as a multi-lingual and bustling place. By 1898 the partners had two had established import warehouses at 18 and 56 Lonsdale-street and commanded a stock of over £4000 in value.

In 1898, Joseph was tried in the Supreme Court for manslaughter. Joseph had allegedly shot Abraham out of jealousy - they were both romantically interested in a woman who lived next door, Cassie Hamilton. Joseph gave testimony in English, while other warehouse residents testified in Arabic via an interpreter, Joseph Vincent. Joseph Chehab was found guilty and given the death sentence. European and Syrian merchants, though, rallied against this decision and to Joseph’s great relief, his sentence was reduced to 15 years imprisonment.

While Syrians were often lumped under the generic category of ‘Asiatics’, during the manslaughter trial the press cast Joseph and Abraham in a positive light. ‘Chehab’, the Bairnsdale Advertiser told, ‘was said... to hold a rank equivalent to an English Count. Both [Joseph and Abraham] speak English withmore or less fluency, and are altogether of a superior class.’

As this case shows, in the 1890s Europeans’ attitudes towards individual migrants were shaped by race, gender, language and class. Indeed, then Chief Secretary of Victoria, Alfred Deakin stated that Europeans who spoke English were the most ‘desirable’ of settlers; an idea that complemented his vision that Australia would join ‘a union of the English-speaking race’.