“Are you from The Area?”
It's 'The Code' that invokes an intimacy. Are you part of the club? Are you one of us? Both generic and particular, it could apply to anywhere in Western Sydney.
This series, 'The Area', explores race, culture, class and immigration in Western Sydney through conversations with locals in their favourite haunts. In this story we visit Bankstown. Read about Mt Druitt and Parramatta .
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For Rameen Malik, a hijabi who attends the University of Sydney Law School, there's disruption in merely existing.
“I genuinely love being in environments where I feel uncomfortable or I’m make other people feel uncomfortable. It’s like so much fun. You’re existing and people are uncomfortable around you, how freaking weird is that? Who has the power in that situation? I definitely do,” she laughs.
Malik mirrors the rise of Western Sydney - underestimated, youthful and full of a blistering energy that no longer seeks permission from the mainstream to exist.
She suffered her share of microaggressions at university, from the assumptions (she felt obligated to debunk constantly) that she was an affirmative-action scholarship kid to being mistaken as a junior when she was team leader. Overall though, the experience helped give her permission to ‘think big’, combined with the frustration of feeling like she had to catch up to take advantage of the opportunities she never knew existed.
“White male confidence - I genuinely learned that when I went to USyd," she muses. “(I thought) I’m not intimidated by you, you really think you’re top s**t and here I am basically coming here with nothing and I’m here amongst you, and I didn’t pay 50k a year to go to a private school. That was really empowering; and these people are aspiring to be leaders of our country, [so] what’s stopping me?”
Born in Bankstown Hospital, the 24-year-old grew up as eldest of three to working class Pakistani immigrants. Her dad was a Timezone arcade manager so Malik and her siblings would get to play Mario Kart for fun. And he’d always buy her books, because he knew she loved them.
Rameen Malik at Bankstown library. Source: Supplied
In her HSC year, she’d head to the newly built three-storey glass wonder that is Bankstown Library. In this space between school and home, she had room to study, to think, to dream. For her Malek Fahd Islamic School mates, it was also chance to interact unsupervised with the opposite sex.
The library time paid off, Malik blitzed the HSC and joined the rarefied ranks of University of Sydney Law School, where young men with ‘Oxford boy’ haircuts, R.M. Williams boots, Ralph Lauren polo shirts and leather satchels sat in classes.
“You could walk in and spot who is going to be a future high court judge or Prime Minister of Australia,” she says.
Malik heads to Canberra next year to take up a public service job, but credits her confidence and cultural nous to growing up in Lakemba, a neighbouring Bankstown suburb. Here she was inspired by the lyrical swagger of the poets at the Bankstown Poetry Slam. Now the biggest spoken word competition in the country, Malik says it's what ‘indoctrinated’ her into loving the Area.
“Lakemba gave me a lot of personality, it made me the person who I am…I love it, it’s loud, it’s itself, it’s really accepting…It gives you a lot of spunk… growing up in Lakemba teaches you to stand up for yourself.”
Bankstown library. Source: Supplied
Bankstown and Lakemba, as well as Greenacre and Condell Park, are part of the Canterbury-Bankstown district in South-West Sydney, named after botanist Sir Joseph Banks who sailed with Captain Cook.
The original inhabitants were the Bidjigal, Darug and Gweagal people. Now Arabic is the dominant language group with 17.2 per cent speaking the language, and Catholicism (23.4 per cent) only narrowly beating out Islam (20.8 per cent) as the dominant religion.
It’s also a place of contradiction, a place in flux as rapid gentrification transforms Sydney. The area's most well-known suburb, Lakemba, was once famously labelled ‘Muslim Land’ by an Australian newspaper - and hosts the annual Ramadan markets, now a hip place for Instagrammers and foodies.
Music manager Zig Agnor, who grew up in Condell Park, is fiercely proud of his roots. Although he's made it big in the hip-hop scene, he still calls the area home.
Zig Agnor at Watsup brothers kebabs in Condell Park. Source: Supplied
The 30-year-old half-Ghanaian has travelled to the US, UK and France for tours and music business but always returns to his studio in the suburb where he grew up. “I’ve always felt this is where I belong,” Agnor says.
The area is a natural home for the hip hop scene, where counter-culture is currency. The art form is closely linked to story and place. Pig Latin and references to the area gave the local music a sense of power and pride and made Agnor feel represented.
“With hip hop you need to be authentic, you need to be you, you need to tell your story and that’s what people connect to,” Agnor said.
As Bankstown rapper Hooks told Sydney‘s hip hop scene was fuelled by the working class cultural mosaic of the 'forgotten areas' of Sydney.
"Every second suburb is like going to a different country...You go to Mt Druitt where there’s Islanders and it’s nothing like Bankstown and Punchbowl with the Habibs. Cabramatta has the Asian culture. There’s Blacktown with the heavy African influences.
“Western Sydney, It’s gritty and grimy. Nothing’s for free in the West. It’s how it is. You gotta work for everything you’ve got.
It can be an isolating experience entering the corporate world where there is a lack of representation and diversity and you put away parts of yourself to get through your day-to-day job.
Agnor was a shy and aimless kid, chasing Centrelink cheques and desultorily pursuing a TAFE course before discovering music.
“Music, I wasn’t out there looking for it, it kind of came and fell into my lap. I was blessed in that sense. I had no idea what I wanted, it was given to me and I took it and ran.”
He now works with about 15 artists including Manu Crooks, Hooligan Hefs, Day1 and HP Boyz.
Transitioning into being a manager was a steep learning curve but Agnor was motivated by a desire to show local artists, circled with interest by outsider record companies, the possibilities of controlling their own stories and finances.
The emergence of a confident Western Sydney hip hop scene, one that previously imitated its black American counterpart, has been inspired by the UK. It has been carved out by a generation using the internet to upload music, build brands and bypass traditional gatekeepers.
“I think for young Black males growing up there is an identity crisis in a sense ‘cause especially for my area, African-Australians, we didn’t have anyone to look up to… the only Black people we see are in the US… [and] they wanna be cool like an American. [Now there's an] understanding that it’s good what we are, that’s us, so we should be proud.”
As aspiring home buyers flee to the country, those who remain in Australia's most expensive city become de facto multi-millionaires. Older migrants in Greenacre owning brick two-storeys furnished with lion statues and Corinthian columns now live in highly-priced homes.
With population growth stretching the expanses of Sydney into new outer suburbs, and faster trains and highways shrinking commute time, the question Agnor himself poses is - will there be a new West? Will the ‘current West’ become the established old guard?
If Eastern Suburbs rituals coalesced around a drinking culture, in the West, food was the bonding glue.
Youth is the heart blood of Bankstown. Agnor remembers being approached by the then 12-year-old artist and working for years in the studio to develop his sound, before the teen artist exploded in the US. Married with kids, Agnor is thoughtful and tribally loyal to the hood. “For me, family is what means the most to me (and) building the culture here.”
After gruelling late-night recording sessions, Agnor takes his artists to Condell Park’s Watsup Brothers Kebabs. If Eastern Suburbs rituals coalesced around a drinking culture, in the West, food was the bonding glue. Watsup Brothers is a place of meat and men; grizzled construction workers give their orders to a bearded production line serving sizzling grilled meat, until the morning hours. “We come and just top it up and it’s good to just break bread and share a meal”.
This tension of being underestimated and overachieving, the hustle and hunger, and nimbly navigating constantly contrasting power spaces in Sydney resonates.
The hustle culture sits side-by-side with the hospitality of Western Sydney. It's a place where you elbow your way into a 6am line and get a token, to buy a 65-inch ALDI plasma TV for $600, because opportunities are rare and need to be snapped up.
And, like me, you can draw teenage Bankstown car habibs to matter-of-factly charge your broken-down car battery before they leave, vanishing into the night.
For feminist artist , 32, named Bankstown’s Local Woman of the Year, it's these suburban scenes that inspire her. From painting Arab grannies sitting on white plastic chairs in the park to the eastern mosaic tiles of her favourite local café Glaçage, the area is her living canvas.
“It got me thinking about how we use these tucked-away spots as women to have conversations to gather. You see the mums with the strollers and there’s a sense of familiarity and intimacy and trust that is built in a local café, that’s a really special thing and it never really gets celebrated,” Haydar says.
Amani Haydar at Glacage in Bankstown. Source: Supplied
'Solitude in the Café', by Amani Haydar, developed during a residency at Incubate Artist Studios, Bankstown Arts Centre. Source: Amani Haydar
Haydar, who worked as a city commercial litigator in her 20s, remembers being asked by a legal colleague if she’d move to the ‘right side of the bridge’ once she could afford it. The truth was, she found the upward hustle unfulfilling. “It can be an isolating experience entering the corporate world where there is a lack of representation and diversity and [you have to] put away parts of yourself to get through your day-to-day job.”
In 2013 she got married and she and her partner moved to a Bankstown house with a large backyard, close to extended family. She later left law to pursue art and advocacy, adopted the hijab, and is now on the board of several local community groups. Along with exhibiting her work, she finds fulfillment solving the problems of the area she cares about – from youth and migrant women’s access to education, employment, experiences of racism and domestic violence.
Owned by local couple Asma and Belal Hamdan, café Glaçage is filled with plants and dainty seats, and hosts a multitude of hijabi mums’ groups. It was a safe place Haydar could meet colleagues for work or to just think. She noted a paradox between the larger-than-life matriarchal characters of the community, who at the same time face double challenges of being minorities in a wider society, and often subsumed by caretaking.
'Grandmas In the Park', by Amani Haydar, developed during a residency at Incubate Artist Studios, Bankstown Arts Centre. Source: Amani Haydar
“They do have experiences where their needs are silenced in favour of the collective, of the family, where their work and their lifetime becomes about servitude and about gatherings and supporting other people’s emotional needs.
“Here you’re not worried if you’re going to feel unwelcome or uncomfortable or if you can find halal food…this is where you break away from that role.”
Sarah Malik is a Walkley-award winning journalist and SBS Voices senior writer. You can follow her on Twitter , or . Her work covers migration, feminism, domestic violence, representation and cultural diversity. To contact her for engagements, see her
