Firebomb 07 | Close to Home

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Just before we start, this episode contains some strong language and descriptions of violence.

When our restaurant was firebombed, it was kind of like this puzzle for my eight-year-old brain that didn't quite fit together.

And I didn't have all the pieces.

I just had these half-remembered scenes.

And as I got older, I sort of collected more more info, more of these puzzle pieces, and it only came together really slowly.

In some ways, I still don't have all the pieces.

And it wasn't just like this for me.

Other restaurant kids say they've had the same experience.

Like,

take Josh, for example.

His dad worked in the kitchen of the Lingnan restaurant, which was attacked a few months after ours.

And the thing he remembers most clearly about that time isn't the fear or the racism.

It was a kind of game, a roulette game, but with canned food.

So,

after the fire, obviously the restaurant had to close for repairs, even though it was minor.

Josh's dad had to stay home.

And for Josh, he was too young to understand why the restaurant was closed.

This was kind of awesome.

Because now that he wasn't at the restaurant so much, he would actually be home for dinner.

So So then he'd start cooking dinner for us again.

The fire had damaged the restaurant and part of the storeroom and Josh's dad had managed to salvage a bunch of tin cans of food.

Well, we are horners

by nature.

It wasn't a lot, but it's still better than waste.

But the catch was, they had no idea what was in the cans.

Because after the fire, none of them had labels.

Because I thought I got burnt off or washed washed off by the fire hoses.

Every can was a new surprise.

So, you know, randomly will be like, okay, let's try this tin, see what's in it.

It's either going to be fruit salad, corn kernels, tin soup, or something else.

So you kind of pot luck as to what you sort of want.

Then one night, when Josh opened a can for dinner, he found something that shouldn't have been there.

I remember it it was corn and we cracked it open and took the lid off and just get a big waft of smoke like freshly burnt like in a wood fire.

It was just this really strong distinct smell.

It's a smell you wouldn't expect to come from canned food so it kind of brought this experience of sort of joy and happiness and back to why this is all happening.

You kind of just snap back to reality in a way.

That smoke smell was Josh's only experience of that fire at the time.

His parents tried to shield him from it, just like my parents did with me.

In some ways, it worked.

In other ways, it sort of backfired.

For some of the restaurant kids, like me, because we never spoke about it, it's like we never really processed it properly.

And knowing what I know now, I'm not sure that the the rest of Australia ever processed it properly either.

Because when I look around me today, I can see the same signs of what happened in the 1980s bubbling up.

And if we're not careful, if we don't talk about this together, I'm worried something like this could happen again.

People need to know that it hasn't gone away.

The violent anti-lockdown protests create a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

Neo-Nazis marched in formation.

Yeah, it's all talk, they're all just crazy, they're never going to do something until they do do something.

I said, I need to go.

I need to go because we need to help them.

I can't deal with this again.

That's the first I've ever heard that.

Why do you think it's like so intense?

We're still here, we're fucking

still living our lives.

This is Firebomb, the latest season of the ABC's Unravel podcast.

Episode 7, the final episode, close to home.

You can see the wa-key on that.

That's what I mean.

It seems like proper like OG, black char-ness.

Yeah.

It cracks me up that my old family friends Josh and Elaine Churn brought takeaway cha kue tow to their interview.

That's our love language food, you know?

That's the whole Cantonese thing, one sing, you know, just to say the greeting is,

you know.

We've known each other for as long as I can remember, and we have so much in common.

Like me, their dad worked in a Chinese restaurant as they were growing up.

And like me, that restaurant was attacked by Jack Van Tongren and the AM.

But what spins me out is that in all the time that we've known each other, we've never actually talked about what that was like, you know, to have your parents' restaurant attacked by neo-Nazis.

I don't know how what kind of sentiment I was feeling, but I do remember

it was kind of a scary time as a child.

It was a scary time.

And

I don't know for

you guys, do you remember much coverage on it?

I remember the bombings, and maybe you guys were a bit younger then.

I do remember, definitely, there was an awareness of the coverage,

but that was particularly more in the 90s, though, during the trials.

Yes.

We've never really talked about what it was like to have our parents remain silent about what happened.

It was just, oh, it burnt.

That was it.

It wasn't, there was no conversation, there was no explanation.

I'm sure your parents are like, like, we need to go, you know, do whatever we need to do because this has happened.

Yeah.

You know, you'd see the news and you'd be like, oh, everyone hates us.

You know, what's going to happen next?

Yeah.

In a way, I think this is why this story has stayed with me all this time.

It's the dissonance between how my parents see what happened and how I see it.

For them, it was about survival.

And once they survived and prospered, in some ways, it was over.

But for me and some of the other restaurant kids who were born here, I think as we became teenagers and adults, it affected our sense of belonging, our sense of our place in the world.

As an adult, you could probably shake it off easier, but you know, when you're young,

it's quite a scary sort of

place to be.

I mean, other children being racist to you is probably not as bad.

It's adults being racist to children, which

yeah.

That experience has made me and the churns kind of wary as adults.

Like anytime we notice or pick up on the same kind of racist attitudes that led to the extremism of the A ⁇ M's hate campaign, it's like alarm bells start ringing or something.

We know where this leads.

And silence feels dangerous.

Because if we stay silent, threats like this can just flourish without scrutiny.

I think it needs to be spoken because I think a lot of people don't remember it because it didn't really directly involve them.

It's always been there just that no one's taken note because it's not catching anyone's attention.

I think it's quite a right time to have this conversation again to sort of just remind people that it's not that far from flaring up again.

I think people need to know

that it hasn't gone away.

You know, I guess in my mind it's like oh they're they're gone now, they're in jail, everything's okay, but really it's never gone away.

You know, and now around the world, it's on the rise.

Racist attacks towards Asian Australians drew public attention at the start of the pandemic.

I feel scared.

It's really awful.

And then they said that we were the cause of the virus.

In the US and the UK, there were numerous reports of Asian people being punched in the face or attacked.

Here in Australia, last year, almost one in five Chinese Australians report experiencing racist abuse more than two years after the pandemic began.

I think when the COVID stuff happened, that same fear that I hadn't had for so long came back.

Mitzi Cheng is Josh and Elaine's older sister.

She used to wait tables at our family restaurant.

And she remembers the A ⁇ M's reign in Perth so much more clearly than me.

And the trauma that that left behind, you're kind of still living with it now.

But I remember when we were in lockdown, we could go out for groceries and stuff.

I actually chose to go just after the elderly could go, so about eight o'clock.

And I'd literally get in there, I'd run around and grab everything I wanted, and I'd get out there because I was so scared that somebody was going to verbally abuse me or do something worse to me because I was Chinese.

And it's just that abstract fear that someone's going to hurt you for something you can't change or do anything about.

And yeah, I hadn't felt like that for so long.

And I think it did highlight that there is residual trauma from

Jack Van Tongren and his group when the COVID stuff happened.

There's a temptation here to say, sure,

anti-Asian racism may have read its head again lately, but times have changed since the AM last had a go at terrorism.

Policing of extremism is much more effective these days, and out there in the community, we're much more multicultural, right?

That's all true.

But that doesn't mean that the poisonous pockets of racist extremism in Australia are no longer dangerous.

Only a few years ago, an Australian carried out an act of racist terrorism that was way worse than anything the AM did.

I was in my office and I received a phone call.

Mohammed, I'm not sure if you heard the news, but I just want to let you know there's been a shooting in Christchurch.

Dr.

Mohammed Abdallah is an academic of Islamic studies, a Muslim community leader and an advocate based in Adelaide.

I contacted my wife, I contacted my son and my friends and some of the Imams and I said, have you heard of what's happening in Christchurch?

There's a shooting in the mosque.

And that's when we started following the news.

You're watching continuing coverage of the Christchurch mosque shootings.

Here's a recap of what we know.

At least 49 people have been killed at two separate mosques.

More than 20 people are seriously injured in Christchurch hospital.

Terror during Friday prayers.

Police raced to a major mosque following reports of gunshots.

They were confronted with a scene that's shaken New Zealand and shocked the world.

It is clear that this is one of New Zealand's darkest days.

As the numbers of the casualties increased and increased, it became more daunting.

So far one person, a man in his late 20s, has been charged with murder.

Australian Brenton Tarrant took hold of at least two high-powered weapons and walked straight into the crowded mosque.

He live-streamed the entire sickening attack on unsuspecting worshippers.

The video itself itself is far too graphic to show.

Muhammad knew straight away he had to go and help.

took the earliest flight.

Christchurch has a relatively small Muslim community, and Muhammad was afraid the local Imam would be overwhelmed.

I knew Christchurch is a very small place.

The Muslim community is very small.

They have one Imam only.

And part of the rituals of

when somebody dies is the washing of the deceased and the burial.

When he arrived in Christchurch, he went straight to meet up with the team organizing the washing and burying of the victims.

They said to me, at this moment, we are still going through the process.

The bodies haven't been released.

So there was no point in waiting there.

And so I said, well, in that case, let me do something else.

I'd like to go maybe and visit some of the survivors or the families of the victims.

So Mohammed teamed up with a community elder who took him to the local hospital and then to a community hall that had been set up like a kind of crisis support center.

I think that the the feeling, the sense, it was it felt like ghosts walking around.

That's what it felt like, because you could see people walking around, but their mind was somewhere else.

One man instantly stood out to Muhammad.

This gentleman, the Somali man, he was, as he's walking around repeating some Islamic Arabic verses or phrases.

Constantly the man is saying, Alhamdulillah, inna illahi wai nair alhi rajo, and to God we belong and to God we shall return.

So I went to greet him and I hugged him and

he immediately starts telling the story.

He said every Friday we would go early to the mosque and we take the first row and he said we would sit there and my son is with me always.

And he said my son every Friday before the Imam ascended the pulpit

my son would go and take the physical Qurans from the older gentlemen whom he saw as his uncles out of respect so they don't have to get up and go and put the Quran on the bookshelf.

The young boy would go and pick those Qurans and he would put them on the bookshelf.

He said he would always do that and then he would come sit next to me.

He said that morning he did exactly the same thing,

collected the hard copy of Qur'ans from the people, put it on the bookshelf and came and sat in his father's lap.

And then the Imam got up and started his sermon.

The son remained in his lap.

That moment when the shooter came in and of course shot his son, he said, you know, my son died right in front of me and I lied next to him, pretended I was also dead, but I just was lying looking at my son.

As stories like this were told to Muhammad one after the other, He moved around in a kind of daze.

But when it came time for him to go and do what he had come for, to help prepare the bodies of the 51 victims for burial, he kind of hit a blockage.

The truth is,

after seeing

visiting survivors and victims,

families of victims, I wasn't ready to go and wash those dead bodies.

It was just, I just, I couldn't do it.

And I declined actually.

It's easy to think about what the attacker did in Christchurch as the actions of an unhinged crank, an extremist without parallel who hadn't even lived in Australia for years.

Someone targeting a different community in a different country.

Nothing to do with our country, nothing to do with us.

But like many people in this story, the Christchurch shooter was partly radicalized in Australia's underground ecosystem of white supremacist groups.

And the person who first found evidence of that is actually my co-reporter, Alex Mann.

When the Christchurch attack happened, I was actually on holiday.

And I distinctly remember the moment that my phone just exploded with text messages and

screenshots.

And, you know, at one point, somebody also sent me a link to the live stream video, which I watched part of as my family were hanging up their beach towels outside.

Anyway, the holiday was obviously over pretty quickly.

We cut it all short and I went back to work and I started digging through the shooter's online history.

So, what were some of the first things that you found?

One of the first things I got sent was actually a spreadsheet.

It was like

an archive version of the Facebook page of two of Australia's most active

and hard-right

street groups, really, at that time.

And in the immediate aftermath of the attack,

there was all this commentary around saying that, you know, the shooter had not been radicalised in Australia, that he had no ties to any of the far-right groups here in Australia.

And this spreadsheet, I distinctly remember my hands kind of shaking as we were trying to write this story because we were looking at in this spreadsheet hard evidence that actually he was a member of these extreme racist groups in Australia, that he'd been radicalized at least in part in these really full-on racist online communities that I'd been watching fester, you know, for years in Australia.

Dr.

Mohammed Abdullah says we need to face up to the threat posed by Australia's extremist groups, especially now that they can recruit and radicalize people online.

We can't sit idle and pretend that it's not there.

It is there.

The reports are showing us.

In New Zealand, this attack was

kind of a moment for national reflection.

Do you think we've had that here in Australia?

Never.

That's why we have to keep emphasizing this is a collective effort.

It's a national effort.

There has to be a

sense of collective responsibility.

One of the mistakes I think we made in Perth with the A ⁇ M in the 1980s is the failure to take them seriously, to treat their threats of violence or racial war as a warning.

See, back then, the A ANM used people's fears about Asian migration to drive recruitment and create terror.

But today, I see the same kind of tactic being used by a new generation of neo-Nazis latching on to a new set of issues.

The violent anti-lockdown protests have created a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

Authorities are increasingly dealing with what the police commissioners previously described as an undercurrent of right-wing radicals, especially during the COVID COVID pandemic.

These days, it's not just Asian migration, it's lockdowns, COVID vaccinations and the trans rights debate.

Neo-Nazis marched in formation performing the Hitler salute gathered in support of anti-transgender activists.

A Kil Hitler salute, goose-stepping outside the front of Parliament House, that is offensive.

I think what we can learn from that time is that, one,

extremists and neo-Nazis can use whatever the issue is of the day and use that to recruit and to garner widespread support and to also foment dissent and to encourage others to also take violent action and to foment dissent.

Dr.

Kaz Ross is an independent researcher of extremism and conspiracies.

She says, while it seems police are more attuned to these kind of tactics, in the general public, we've been slow to catch up.

So I think that's one thing that we can learn that sometimes they're not even really hiding.

They're kind of in plain sight and they're making use of what's going on around them.

To me, even today,

it feels like there's still a tendency to look at these people as just these kind of evil oddballs or crazies.

And to me, that's a dangerous miscalculation.

So I think that is the problem, that often these people can be pretty kooky in plain view and be very dismissed and not taken very seriously.

But the issue is that these people are serious and it's not only in the case of someone like Jack Van Tongren, it wasn't just him.

I mean he had a group of people, right?

And I think this is one other issue that we have, which is first of all, they seem to be extreme and cranks and surely they won't do anything.

But they also have people around them and they inspire other people.

And so some people might say, well, you know, look at Australia's neo-Nazi leaders.

They're under a lot of surveillance.

everybody knows who they are, all the security forces know who they are.

They can still inspire others.

Kaz believes we need to accept and deal with the fact that Australia has a past that's littered with racist ideology.

If you look at the history of Australia and Australia's racial violence, we do have a pretty significant history, a serious significant history if you consider the colonisation of Australia.

And we've never really dealt with that, I think, as a society.

Oh, it seems like you're driving quite carefully.

Yeah, I just don't want to get too close.

I'm going to just pull up over here.

I'm just kind of thinking as we're driving, really.

Alex warned me when we started this podcast that it might feel different to get up close to people who are active members of today's most hardcore neo-Nazi groups.

But I'm keen to get a closer look at the kind of things they talk about and share with each other.

I hope that you'll get to see, at least in some way, how this ideology has kind of reinvented itself.

We're in Melbourne for some other interviews and research.

There's been an uptick in racist extremism here in the last few years.

So while we're here, we decide to take a look around.

And the first place we check out is a gym.

It's this gym where a bunch of Melbourne's neo-Nazis have been known to gather.

I saw somebody kind of walking out looking like they were doing a job of some kind.

Yeah, whatever the case it is, it is really hard to get a decent view in.

On this day, the street is really quiet and our hire car sticks out like a sore thumb.

Our team back in the office suggests we move on.

You can't go in there, then you can't slow down.

There's no

safe way of doing that, but

Instead, we head past the house of one of the main players in this scene to see where he lives.

Jack's place was fortified with sandbags, a weird military-looking styling in suburbia, but in this case, it's an incredibly normal-looking, unremarkable house on Melbourne's fringe.

The guy who lives there plays a key role in one of the main online chat groups that's used as a kind of radicalisation and recruiting ground for one of Australia's most active neo-Nazi groups.

We pull up not far from the place and scroll through some of the recent posts.

This guy's channel is a real distribution point for a lot of the propaganda that the group produces.

It's just this heinous stream of racist content directed at Jews, Aboriginal people, Asians in general, but specifically Chinese.

No Chinese.

It's the Eureka flag

saying no Chinese.

Just a sec.

Alex shows me these people sharing Jack Van Tongren's writings and trying to get in contact with him.

One of the group's leaders even talks him up in a podcast from just a few years ago.

And he like put up personally like tens of thousands of like anti-Chinese posters and if we could lead a legal campaign that literally intimidates non-whites from not coming into Australia then that's what one of our main goals needs to be

it's weird to hear people talking about Jack Van Tongren in such an admiring way so recently but that's not even the most disturbing thing about these group chats the worst part is the coded references to past violent attacks.

Some of the more active guys in this scene have number 51 as part of their usernames.

That's the same

number of Muslims who were killed in the Christchurch attack on the two mosques back in 2019.

It's like they'll wear that number as a kind of badge of pride.

One of the group's senior members even tells his followers to enjoy the footage of it.

He has repeatedly

used that event as a kind of a joke and a reference point for the content that he makes.

That's pretty sick and morbid to do that.

Have you seen this kind of stuff before out of curiosity?

No, I haven't.

Most of the materials I've seen are things that I've seen on

perhaps just by chance on comments

in some news post or

the stuff that the AM put out.

I haven't seen anything of this new wave.

Then, as we keep driving around the city, occasionally Alex will point out a house or a place where neo-Nazis gather.

And he continues to discuss all the warning signs there are today, reading stuff from the neo-Nazis Telegram chats.

Some of the slogans aren't so different from the ones used way back in Australia's Gold Rush era.

Just this morning, we'd seen similar racist flyers in Melbourne's Museum of Chinese Australian Australian History.

But as I look out the window, I get thinking about that whole history of violent racism from way back in the Gold Rush era right through to the horrific stories from Christ Church that Muhammad told us just a few days earlier.

I wanted to do this.

to get an unfiltered view of Australia's past and present racist extremism.

But

all of a sudden, as Alex keeps talking I'm just caught off guard by something he says

it's a little bit too close to home mate

just the things he's saying

I've got

I don't want to say what I've got but

it's home it's too close to home

Do you want me to turn it off?

Maybe, yeah.

Okay.

Alex switches off the microphone.

And in that moment, I think my fatigue, the depressing familiarity of the hatred,

the journey that I've been on, the whole lot of it, it just all kind of caught up with me.

And I kind of cracked.

After a while, Alex and I turned back on the microphone.

I just hit um

um

I know I think I crossed the threshold

sorry, it's okay

sometimes it just feels feels like

it's never ending and

you know I uh

but we're still around

we're still fucking around and we're still here we're fucking

still living our lives fuck it doesn't mean that we don't fucking hurt when we hear this shit

But we're still fucking you know we you know tomorrow I'm just I'll be fine

Fine because in the end it doesn't matter what the fuck they say

I get on with it.

You always get on with it

Fuck them seriously sometimes fuck seriously

Sometimes

these guys like to

make themselves out to be

bigger than they are don't forget that it's not

a big group.

Those attitudes are not widespread.

I'm not crying because I'm fucking scared.

I'm frying because I'm crying because it's fucking just stupid and I'm tired of it.

Would you like to get out of here?

Yeah, let's get out of here.

One thing I've struggled with the whole way through making this podcast is this kind of simple question.

How should we remember Jack Van Tongren?

I mean, it's clear now that the current day neo-Nazis, they want to remember him as a hero, but how should my community remember him?

It took one final conversation with another restaurant kid to sort of start unlocking this problem for me.

As far back as I can remember, I can always remember my parents having some involvement with a Chinese restaurant.

Edward is this softly spoken guy who's led this kind of parallel life to me.

I remember his parents owning a carbon copy of my family's restaurant with the exact same pagoda style roof except it was on the other side of Perth.

But I've never met him until now.

I always felt very special that thinking this is my parents' place.

You know, I can do anything I want.

I can go into the kitchen and have a look.

I can see what's going on.

I can wander around.

I always felt

like this is...

It felt very homely.

When the restaurant was closed, I'd sleep in the bench where the customers would sit waiting for the takeaways in the foyer area.

You know, the foyer area

when you go into the entrance.

And I remember sleeping on the rice bag sacks in the pantry because there was always be, you know, six, eight,

lots of rice bags, yeah.

And I'd kind of lie on top of that and kind of put an old tablecloth over me and just kind of nap there under some aprons.

Just like my family's restaurant for Man Lin, Edward's family restaurant for Lingnan was attacked by Jack Van Tongren and the A ⁇ M.

Just like me, Edward wasn't told much about the attack by his parents.

So he's surprised by something we found in our research.

It's Jack Van Tongeren's detailed written version of the attack on Edward's family restaurant.

Do you mind?

Can I read you something?

Okay, it's just a few paragraphs, so sorry if it takes a little while.

He says, The Lingnan restaurant in Mirabuka was to be the target.

This had been selected and checked out some time ago by the special surveillance team.

The operation operation would begin at 9:30 p.m.

This time, the team had two buckets and two jerry cans full of petrol.

As well as this, there was the Molotov cocktail.

Then they drove to the Chinese restaurant.

They drove past it and around the area.

The coast was clear, so they parked the car and grabbed the petrol and the Molotov cocktail, then walked to the restaurant.

They thoroughly doused the whole place in petrol.

Once again, the stillness of the warm night air was broken by the sound of radical politics in action.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoop.

The whole whole building erupted into a brilliant wall of roaring flame and lit up the general area.

It says, The Mirabooker Shopping Centre is a very prominent place.

The blazing Chinese restaurant there attracted a lot of interest.

The media reaction was also dramatic.

This was particularly the case as it followed a week after the burning of the Ko Sing Chinese restaurant, the beginning of the 1989 poster campaign, and Premier Dowding's comments the day before.

Not only that, but now the AM election campaign in the seat of Helena was in full swing.

This was stirring up even more controversy.

That's the first I've ever heard that.

Very multitude of thoughts.

It's chilling to hear how calculated

that was.

It's chilling to hear the level of intent.

It's also

incorrect from the point of view that he says the whole restaurant is ablaze.

That is so wrong and such an overstatement of what they achieved.

The restaurant was damaged, but in the scheme of things, it was pretty quickly repaired and reopened.

And actually, from what we can find, there wasn't much media coverage at that point either.

I think it makes me not angry.

I try not to be angry about stuff, but I think it's a lie.

They didn't achieve their aims.

They didn't damage us.

It's a story.

I can see

why he wants to tell that story.

I think if he tells the story that they had planned this, but it was entirely ineffectual,

entirely without impact, I think it would highlight, you know, again, very mixed feelings, and perhaps it's wrong to say this, but on this instance, at least, it was comical and farcical.

I use those words advisedly because obviously they did do damage, and they did have, you know, malice and intent.

But I think it's a fabrication to say that they actually achieved something with that.

I think my response would be very different if I heard that 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

In what sense?

I would have been a lot more angry.

At no point did the ANM consider my parents' story and the story of every other restaurant that they firebombed.

My parents came to Australia, they cut their umbilical cord to Hong Kong and they tried to put roots down in Australia.

And they were running a business, employing local people,

supporting local businesses.

They were providing cuisine to people who were hungry to have a different experience, and they were trying their best.

And at no point did the ANM consider that there were other humans, people worthy of being listened to, people whose story was worthy of entertaining.

At no point did they consider that.

That still makes me

angry, a little bit sad.

Edward is getting at something here that has bothered me my whole life.

I've grown up with two versions of this story coexisting side by side.

On the one hand, No one in the restaurants was harmed.

We bounced back.

It was just a little hiccup.

A few goons.

The community rejected them.

Ignore it.

Forget about it and move on.

In some ways, that's even what my own community believed.

On the other hand, our community was under siege.

It was terrifying.

We couldn't feel safe.

There was an edge to the town I was born in, and it didn't stop because one gang was in jail.

Both of these stories are true.

We survived and thrived.

They returned to obscurity.

Jack and his ridiculous band of followers wield no power now and even the power they did wield, it was momentary.

A brief explosion, a flickering candle.

There was nothing enduring about it.

But if we think we can just pretend it never happened, we're wrong.

As a community, as a city, as a country, we need to know this story.

Not because Jack was an influential figure who had an impact on history, he didn't.

He barely moved the needle in immigration.

He caused damage but achieved nothing.

No,

we need to know this story because we need to watch out for the next damaged, small-minded man with a wounded pride, delusions of grandeur, and a commitment to white supremacy.

And we need to stamp out the blindness and tolerance to racism that affords them a breeding ground, incubates them, and allows them to grow.

And that's on our politicians, our justice system, the police.

But more so, it's on all of us.

Racism is pointless, but it's not harmless.

Ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

It diminishes us to just walk past it, just as it diminishes us as a nation to forget the horrific racism of this country's past.

There's this video I keep coming back to.

It's that home video of me as a kid back in Rockingham.

The fresh ocean breeze getting in the way of our cricket game.

It was kind of before I experienced racism.

And at one point I'm singing the songs from the TV that I knew from the cricket.

Well

I'm living and working in Singapore now and there have been times in my life mainly when I was younger where I've wondered whether there's a place for me in Australia but now in Perth you really just have to walk outside to see just how our community has grown in strength.

The whole street's been closed off.

There's hundreds, thousands of people actually.

There are probably a good few thousand people here walking up and down, eating,

taking photos.

It's Chinese New Year and Alex and I are walking around in the Perth suburb of Northbridge.

I just saw, heard a group of boys walk past and this kid who's clearly not Chinese was saying, you know, giving some fun facts about Chinese culture that he googled and I really loved that.

He was trying to educate his friends about something.

I'm not too sure, but that was really nice to hear.

While we were there, we met up with Teresa Kwok.

She works with the Chunghua Association, the association that was a lifeline for the Chinese community back when the firebombing was happening.

And she remembers that time well.

At that time, you know, everyone, it is quite

the mood and all that, it is quite solemn in a way.

But as we watch the lion dancing, she points out how clearly things have changed even in the decade or so that this festival has been running.

At the beginning,

you will seldom see Australian, Caucasian join in the learning lion dance, Kung Fu and all that.

It always will be Asian, Chinese and all that.

But you can see even with the lion dance,

they're all multicultural.

This is just so happy about you.

Can see that this is some of the things which is the difference throughout the years changing.

This is, I would say it's very

good to see that that is multicultural

society at work.

So do you think in any way then that whatever the A ⁇ M and what Jack Mantong was trying to achieve, I mean, how do you think, you know, what do you think has been the result of those activities, do you think?

I do not think

they have much effect.

Equality, access, the sense of

justice, I think it is much, much stronger in general.

My parents also invited Alex and I out for a Chinese New Year yam cha at this restaurant across the road.

Your parents already inside?

They already have.

They need to get a good seat right away.

My parents love coming here because everyone knows them.

The owner knows them.

They get a little discount, they get a bit of free tea.

So that's why they come in.

Everyone knows them by name and

that's what it is.

They seem relaxed.

After spending their whole lives working in restaurants, it's nice for them to just sit in one.

Now I can just sit here and enjoy my food.

And then we are more relaxed now.

Yeah.

Mum and dad give Alex some red packets to feed the lions for good luck.

So we usually give red packets.

And the one who gives is lucky you can give, right?

So it's better to give than to accept.

I started this project wanting to dig up everything I could about what happened during and after the fire bombings.

But in the end, maybe the best part of all of this has been reconnecting with my own community to share experiences amongst ourselves and to finally talk about everything that happened.

And most importantly, there's my family.

Finally, we're able to talk about all this stuff together.

And now that my parents no longer work long days and nights, I get to just enjoy spending time with them too.

Chris Bian, when was the last time that you actually spent Chinese New Year with your parents?

The last time I spent Chinese New Year with my parents was probably about 15 years ago.

And I mean, they were running the restaurant at the time, so I would have been working with them during that time in China's New Year at the restaurant.

I mean, we've never really celebrated it, you know, as most families would do on Chinese New Year.

So this time around, coming back to actually spend it with them at home with family and to have a meal together, it's nice to have the finally have my parents out here, you know, retired, relaxed, and they're probably thinking back on all their accomplishments and all they've done in the last 30, 40, 50 years I've been here in Australia.

It's really been great to come back and to hear those stories.

Thanks for listening to Firebomb.

That's our last episode for now.

Look out for a bonus episode in the coming weeks.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review or recommend it to your friends.

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This series is hosted and reported by me, Crispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Garaguland and Wutjagnuma Land.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolta.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Brennan and our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

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