“… Indian Hawkers gravitated to Aboriginal reserves and created cross cultural relations with Indigenous residents.”
By the early 1890s, ‘Little Lon’ had emerged as a remarkably polyglot and multi-faith space. Along with Young Street, Fitzroy, this precinct was popularly associated with Melbourne’s South Asian population, which included people from currentday India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, of Sikh, Christian, Muslims and Hindu faiths. Like other so-called ‘slum’ precincts, the area carried associations of crime. Settlers perceived Little Lon as a ‘mixed-race’ street where one could hear the ‘jabber’ of foreign tongues. This 1890 sketch displays to the real and imagined physical violence enacted by self-described ‘White men’ against South Asian men in the era. The centre sketch also points to the emergence of an unlikely diaspora; Indians, Afghans and Syrians were sharing space, food and information in the close-space of boarding houses.
The vast majority of non-European migrants in this era were single men, and from around 1890 newspapers regularly reported settler and governmental fears about the proximity of ‘Asiatic’ men to white and Aboriginal women. These fears underscored the government’s ongoing attempts to exclude Indian British subjects from the colony via administering an English test in the annual Hawkers License Courts, held in Melbourne at the Magistrate’s Court on the corner of Russell and Latrobe Streets.
Even while many South Asian hawkers faced discrimination and were accused by white settlers of being ‘unable to speak our [English] language’, they became a peaceable part of daily life in Victoria. Traveling by train, foot, and horse and cart, hawkers moved goods from Melbourne warehouses to rural areas, where farming communities depended on them.
Using the lingua franca of English, some hawkers also traded on Aboriginal reserves and missions, and the 1890s saw a number of marriages between South Asians and Aboriginal residents of Cummeragunja mission. In 1897, a hawker called Mahomet Abdullah and the Aboriginal daughter (name unknown) of Samson Barber reportedly left Echuca and eloped to Melbourne.
Yorta Yorta Elder, Dr Wayne Aitkinson, recounts that: 'Many Indian Hawkers gravitated to Aboriginal reserves and created cross cultural relations with Indigenous residents, including sharing of culture food and language. Some married into the Cummeragunja community like the common family group name Bux’, a variant of the common Muslim-Bengali name Baksh. The enduring relationship between these groups, Dr Aitkinson tells, saw ‘no conflict except for the divisive rules that were imposed by the oppressive white management regime."