Local Islamophobia : the Islamic school controversy in Camden, New South Wales

This chapter focuses on the 2007-09 controversy surrounding the proposed development of an Islamic school in Camden, a town settled by Europeans in the early nineteenth century that is in the process of being absorbed into the low-density sprawl to Sydney's south west. It describes the resistance that was mounted by local opponents of the proposed school in a xenophobic campaign that was vastly disproportionate to the fairly modest development application 1 . However, this was not simply a local matter. The popular reaction to the school erupted at a time in which contemporary global tensions have undermined official multiculturalism in Australia. The case is symptomatic of wider popular anxieties that alien values and morality are incubating in the space of nation under the ground cover provided by liberal tolerance. The school proposal sparked fierce local opposition and attracted the participation of right-wing nationalist political groups. To school opponents, Camden became a symbol of national traditions under threat from globalization. Pioneering narratives were central to local memory and informed the popular view that the Anglo-Australian Camden 'community' had the right to assert territorial claims against Muslim encroachments. Opponents drew on a catalogue of moral panics in recent history concerning Islam and people of Muslim backgrounds in order to gain support for their Islamophobic campaign. Further, the school was represented as a symptom of the spread of multicultural Sydney, and the demise of the bush town. From this perspective Camden was a beleaguered outpost of 'little Australia'.