“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 Mt Druitt. Read about Bankstown and Parramatta .
***
2770.
It’s a famous postcode. And one of the most notorious 'hoods' in Sydney.
Mt Druitt is also where I come from. Yes, shoes disappear from the stoops of houses (the top Google search term for the area - is Mt. Druitt dangerous?) but there is an energy in these streets. Like walking into the local Starbucks, a kind of professional epicentre for The Area's freelancers and students, its car park full of young people breakdancing at sunset to a beatbox.
Sitting on a train, while police dogs sniff annoyed teens, the melodies of Polynesian kids singing gospel fill the air. There’s the luxury seats of Hoyts Cinemas, inheritor of the 1990s Astro cinemas. I’m a teen again, roaming. In the absence of anywhere else to go, air-conditioned corporate space becomes the de facto public square.
Sydney is a city of boroughs. Certain boroughs receive all the glamour: Sydney’s East has its iconic beaches; cool kids flock to the Inner West; there's the bible belt of the southern ‘Shire’; the bushland of the North. But the boroughs of Sydney's West remain overlooked. Home to almost half of Sydney’s population - the region forms Australia’s third largest economy, and with massive developments and a proposed second airport at Badgerys Creek, that number is set to grow.
Historically when The Area does get attention, it's often for drive-bys and violence. Its reputation hardened as an industrial blot, a vacuum of depressing disadvantage. An awkward geographical footnote to be stowed away as you ascended Sydney’s social hierarchy.
Home to almost half of Sydney’s 2.12 million population - the region forms Australia’s third largest economy.
But today, what I find is a creative and complicated place, teeming with stories: third generation bakeries and family-owned restaurants and supermarkets; a burgeoning hip-hop and arts scene; a place where waves of immigrants created a home; a melting pot of food, culture and even entrepreneurial wealth.
Located between Penrith, at the foothold of the Blue Mountains, and Blacktown, the Mt Druitt district captures the satellite suburbs of Bidwill, Doonside and Emerton. It is gritty, urban and flanked by a massive train station nestled near a Westfield. Named after English Major George Druitt who was given 2000 acres in the 1800s, the traditional custodians of much of modern day Western Sydney are the Indigenous Darug nation.
My family lived in a tree-lined suburb nearby. In their retirement my parents moved to Mt Druitt, attracted by the newly arrived Pakistani-Polynesian communities crowding the churches and mosques that have emerged over the past two decades. They have migrant wealth – a Monopoly board of properties, earned after a lifetime of labour - but are too thrifty to fit in anywhere that doesn’t feature an Aldi superstore.
The mention of Mt Druitt can spark an almost visceral response.
After a decade of living away, I find myself, during COVID lockdown, casting an eye to the place that has formed me. I'm seeing it through the eyes of a new generation - proud, fierce and unapologetic about their roots.
The mention of Mt Druitt can spark an almost visceral response in other people.
'The response' is a feeling Adele Luamanuvae knows too well. During her first year as a journalism student at Macquarie University in north-west Sydney, Luamanuvae would dread the meet-and-greet ice-breakers forcing her to reveal her hometown.
There would be a kind of pause, stunned silence, discomfort and practised recovery.
“When I say I’m from Mount Druitt, [people would respond with] ‘Ohhh’… I would cop that so much,” Luamanuvae says.
Luamanuvae tried being vague, telling fellow students she was from ‘greater Western Sydney’. At the end of her first year she wanted to quit: “I just couldn’t find the connection I wanted with people.”
It was made more painful by the dysphoria growing up as a self-declared ‘halfie’, with a Samoan dad and Maori mum. Seeking to fit into mainstream Australia, Luamanuvae’s parents didn't want to impose Islander culture, a decision that left her with a thirst to learn more about her roots.
When I say I’m from Mount Druitt, [people would respond with] ‘Ohhh’
“I didn’t look or speak Samoan. I felt like a ‘fake’ Samoan. I felt like I couldn’t validate how Samoan I was,” Luamanuvae said. At school she tried to connect with other Pacific Islander kids, but her saving grace was the Palms Pacific supermarket in nearby Emerton Shopping Centre.
Entering the store as a kid, Luamanuvae says was like a ‘hallelujah’ moment. The superstore sells everything from straw skirts, mats, coconut oil, green bananas, fresh taro, even fruit-flavoured dental products. But it was the food Luamanuvae remembers - sapasui noodles, corned beef and coconut palusami and fried panikeke pancakes sold in the canteen.
“The food there was bomb,” Luamanuvae recalls. “The place was always drenched in memorabilia of the islands, with a painted blue colour that washed over every inch of the walls, reminding you of the Samoan seas,” she says.
Mt Druitt is a hub of workers and new migrants. According to the , the median personal income in Mt Druitt is $500 per week, $164 less than the state average, and the most common occupations in the area are machine operators, clerks and labourers, with the top industries being supermarkets, the aged care sector and child care.
Norm Saad, the owner of Pacific Palms supermarket, was one of those workers, now turned boss. The 68-year-old migrated to Australia from Lebanon as an 18-year-old with his wife in 1969.
Saad worked in factories before opening an ordinary grocery store in Lakemba. It was a magnet for Pasifika customers: “They used to say, ‘Can you get this product? Can you get this product?’ So we started putting our weight behind it.” He saw a market in Mt Druitt and opened Pacific Palms in Emerton two decades ago, later shifting to Bidwill. He still makes twice-yearly trips to the Islands – Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Cook Islands and New Zealand - to source produce, but has passed the reigns of his supermarket empire to his son.
Family-run and bulk produce is a theme in Western Sydney.
I chuckle as I see the line for the Filipino bread shop snake down the street as women with huge bulk bags emerge from Starlight Bakery, a tiny storefront on the main road of Doonside on a Saturday morning. The bakery shares the strict, no-nonsense vibe of Seinfeld's ', with a brisk ‘buy and move on‘ policy.
Mark Mariano Source: Supplied
“People all over NSW flock here,” Doonside resident Mark Mariano explains as we pick up rolls of purple ube bread. One of five children of Mormon Filipino immigrants, Mariano says his own mum would come to the bakery to stock up.
His native Tagalog is second only to Urdu as the most spoken language in Mt Druitt after English. As for religion, the Catholics (31.0 per cent), beat out the Muslims (22.2 per cent), with 9.3 per cent of the area's population claiming no religion.
Mariano points at a bread stick covered in cinnamon sugar in the window called bitsu bitsu. “I grew up eating this bread. It’s one of my favourite things.”
The 25-year-old moved out of the family home after getting a media job in Sydney’s lower north shore. “I thought, 'I am going to be stagnant [if I don’t move out of the West]. I'm going to be stuck here. I am never going to improve as a person or have any career progression'."
I thought, 'I am going to be stagnant [if I don’t move out of the West]. I'm going to be stuck here. I am never going to improve as a person or have any career progression'."
He also being a young gay man in a conservative environment, but trying to 'make it' in the inner-city areas came with its own difficulties. “I thought you needed to be gorgeous and float everywhere and walk with confidence and stomp around in heeled boots. I tried to forge that and it took me a long time to realise that wasn’t me," he says. "I am a small town person. That doesn’t need to be something I look down on in disgust. It can be something I look at with pride.”
The decision to move back to 'the West' came after a fortuitous meeting last year with the editor of the community zine, who invited him to co-edit the website as a volunteer. “I took that as a sign from heaven. It was the West calling me back,” Mariano said. He left behind loneliness and high rents of the North, and found a rare one-bedder in a district known to house large families.
The job opened him to a world of emerging artists in his own backyard. “It was so exciting, and it was liberating to realise that I could combine my passions: my love for writing and my love for media and my love for my hometown."
For Mariano, an Oscar's chicken kebab always feels like home, and it was the ultimate de-stressor during HSC exams. “It’s a thing I know will always be the same and I feel like I’m at home. That’s the magic of food and cultural food. It’s about connecting to home and the greater multiculturalism of Australia.”
Oscar's, a Turkish kebab store run by Ali Semerci, selling pide, doner kebabs and salads, is the pride of Doonside. Semerci immigrated from a small village in Turkey to Australia when he was four. He inherited the passion for food from his mother, his favourite dish being dolma- rice and spiced mince wrapped in cabbage or grape leaf. Semerci, 34, took over the family business nine years ago.
“In the West there are more kebab shops than McDonalds,” Semerci says as he rolls out dough. Competition is fierce, so only the best survive.
Tamana Toga at Oz Fried in Emerton with the chip and chicken snack pack. Source: Supplied
Boumelhem, 60, used to work for KFC and then thought, why not do chicken himself? Here, customers can mix preferences from the menu as it suits them.
“We don’t say ‘You can’t have this or that’. You give and take," he says.
For Tamana Toga, the third of seven Fijian-Polynesian siblings who grew in a public housing estate in Bidwill, the Oz Fried chips are iconic. Doused in chicken salt and vinegar, they were the go-to after summers spent swimming laps at the local Emerton public pool.
You still get put in a box. People call you ‘houso’ as a nickname, sometimes that cuts deep, I just reacted differently to it and used it to fuel myself.
Toga, 36, lives with his wife in Jordan Springs, near Penrith, and works as a drug and alcohol rehabilitation worker. He often takes the youth he works with through his hometown. He says this transparency and vulnerability helps him connect with kids from similar backgrounds.
"A lot of people would say they are embarrassed to be from Mount Druitt but I am not. It’s something that I’m actually proud of.”
Toga remembers a bruising time spent doing construction at Randwick racecourse in Sydney’s east.
“You still get put in a box. People call you ‘houso’ as a nickname, sometimes that cuts deep, I just reacted differently to it and used it to fuel myself.”
Tamana Toga at Emerton pools, in Emerton, western Sydney. Source: Supplied
Every August, the Emerton pool would be drained and converted into a creek by authorities who would manually add fish to the pool. Prizes would be offered to father-son teams with the biggest catch. It’s a winter memory that has stayed with Toga.
God would have to put his hand out and pull me out of Western Sydney because I wouldn’t move.
“Home is Western Sydney for me. I’d never move out. God would have to put his hand out and pull me out of Western Sydney because I wouldn’t move.
“It’s real out here. There’s a big wave of Western Sydney coming alive. People don’t want to leave. There’s too much of what they’ve been brought through and too many memories for people to want to shift.”
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
