Immigration on the streets of Mt Roskill

By CATHRIN SCHAER

At about half past two in the afternoon a fight breaks out on Dominion Rd. Three young men of what look to be Middle Eastern descent are yelling at one another. Two of them start swinging furiously, grappling up and down the pavement outside the National Bank while the third attempts to split them up.

The bigger bloke, who has more than a touch of Ali G about him, falls heavily on to the ground and the other goes to kick him. But a small crowd has gathered and an older Pacific Islander and an Indian step in to separate the trio.

"Oh, there's always something going on in Mt Roskill," says Nicole, a thirty-something blonde sporting silvery-grey eye shadow and gold jewellery, with a wry laugh, as the scrappers move away, still cursing.

"It's the most interesting place to work."

For seven years Nicole (who, like most other people around Mt Roskill, prefers not to use her real name when discussing a subject as controversial as immigrants in the area) has manned this desk. Her windows face Dominion Rd and she says she can't help but see everything that's going on.

Around her office, the stores reflect all the cultures present here - a Halal butchery, the $2 shops with plastic leis outside, clothing stores touting tropical shirts and sari fabric, noodle restaurants filled with young Asian students, as well as cafes peddling good old-fashioned "New Ziland" food: sausage rolls, date scones and ham sandwiches.

"There are always fights round here," Nicole says. "There was a domestic in the phone booth just down the road - now, that was pretty funny. And there are definitely some pretty dodgy characters around these days, setting up businesses, shutting them down, shops that keep strange hours. And they do dodgy deals out of the back of cars," she notes, laughing.

Dodgy deals? Like drugs, you mean? "No, no. Crabs. They sell crabs to the Chinese restaurants out of car boots."

"The wife won't actually go to the shops up here any more," says Bill, an amiable bloke in a rugby shirt, who's been working in one of the local stores for the past 18 months. "It's just all the fighting and shouting that goes on up here. And there are always incidents of road rage."

Sure, he agrees, it's just the way different cultures show emotion - where many New Zealanders take after their English forebears and prefer a stiff upper lip or, perhaps, a bit of swearing, some of the new migrants to this area tend to be more passionate and vocal. But, he adds, it's the tone of the place: "One of our customers refuses to come down here any more because one day she walked around the corner and there was a guy urinating against the wall - right outside the TAB!"

Bill and Nicole are not the only ones complaining about some of the changes in the Mt Roskill area. Once a middle-class suburb populated mainly by white New Zealanders, over the past decade it has become a cultural melting pot.

First the Pacific Islanders came, then the Asians and now an influx of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

It was from Mt Roskill that the Herald received a letter this week. "Helen Clark and Lianne Dalziel should come and walks the streets of Mt Roskill before they say another word about immigration. Neither of them has any idea what conditions are like here," wrote B. McCarthy, who added: "If I wanted to live in East Africa, I'd have emigrated there." Helen Clark actually lives just down the road in Mt Eden, so quite possibly she's been here on a number of occasions but we followed the suggestion.

First stop: the Mt Roskill shops at the intersection of Dominion and Mt Albert Rds, where the aforementioned tussle occurred. Plenty of Asians and Pacific Islanders, a fair few Indians and definitely a decent number of white faces too. It feels just like many other Auckland suburbs.

After an hour in the stores around here, only two East Africans have been spotted.

And apart from Nicole's comments I have heard no real complaints either. "I think [the immigrants] add something to an already exciting culture," says Michael, an Englishman who's been in this country since 1984 and works in a nearby store.

"Business is good for me here - it's getting busier," says handsome Carl from Libya, who's trained as an engineer but just opened a barber shop because he needs to save money to do some further education in his chosen field. "Sometimes the people who can't speak English so well are reluctant to go for haircuts to places that look more expensive."

"Immigration is good for a healthy market," says Ann Lee simply - she's been in New Zealand for 15 years, speaks three languages and together with her Vietnamese husband, runs the very New Zealand-style Cafe 971 where beside the sausage rolls the bank workers love, they have a prawn noodle soup special today. "We'll do anything for our customers' special requests," she says.

But it's the East African experience we're really after, so we leave Mt Roskill and head for the Stoddard Rd shops.

Past several blocks of industrial property, past the large Islamic centre and mosque that draw many of the new immigrants here, to find a wedge of stores at the intersection of Richardson and Stoddard, between the suburbs of Owairaka and Wesley. A couple of blocks away is the infamous McGehan Close where earlier this year a young Tongan man, Elikena Inia, was murdered on the street in a street fight with Somali youths.

About 20 years ago this block used to hold two chemists, a bike shop, a jeweller, hardware, men's and womenswear stores, a Post Office and the ASB Bank.

These are long gone. Now most of the properties seem to be takeaways or dairies. And in the midday humidity, the littered pavement and traffic fumes only enhance the atmosphere of neglect and boredom.

One skinny Somali man with unfortunate teeth and a tidy, navy pin-striped suit rests on a wooden bench in the shade before beginning his walk - repeated over and over - up and down the row of shops. He speaks only enough English to bum a cigarette.

Other people move around him, drifting into the various stores. All sorts - Pacific Islanders, Indians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and now a lot more Africans - Somalis, Ethiopians and Sudanese. And yes, far fewer Europeans.

Ayanle, a young Somali in fashionable streetwear, wanders by. "I think there's a lot of Somalis around because when you get here, you ask your friends where they're living," explains the 17-year-old, who's been here for seven years and now attends Mt Roskill Grammar, speaking like a cool New Zealand kid, with just a hint of "yeah, bro" in his accent.

"You also get families bringing the rest of their families over here. Because there's a lot of trouble back in Somalia, there's tribes and they're fighting. For us it's good to be here in a peaceful country like New Zealand. My aunty's still over there," Ayanle says sadly before cruising back to his brother's car and a group of laughing, prosperous, young Somali men.

"From a business point of view it's been disastrous," says John, who's been running his store in this block for over two decades. "This used to be a good area: middle-class working people in state housing. A lot had been here from the word go, that's 30 or 40 years now. In fact, we lost the last of them the other day - she went into a rest-home. And it's a totally new population now."

But it isn't so much the new racial mix that John minds. It's the fact that the population around his shop is less affluent. They simply cannot afford the things that he would like to stock.

"It's a hard one to work out,' he admits, shaking his head. "What's happened to this area is a bit depressing really. But having said that, the Muslims are very good payers. I've never had a bad debt. My only question is how many of them want to be New Zealanders?"

"On the other hand," his workmate counters, "how many New Zealanders have had something to do with an immigrant today? I don't think we're really trying to integrate with them. I mean, I go into these people's houses every day and they've never been anything but good to me."

Down the street it's a different story. One shopkeeper's window shopper is another's happy client.

Two doors down, Makanjee's is seeing an upturn in business. Here the Kumar family, immigrants from Fiji six years ago, are selling glittering, printed and embroidered sari fabrics and other items of Indian-style clothing to all comers.

"It used to be really quiet here," say the proprietors. "Now business is good. There are more Indians around and [the Africans] also come in here as well as the Iranians and Iraqis."

"No," replies Jeeta Kumar nonplussed, when asked whether the area is more dangerous or intimidating these days. "We've not had any problems since we started the business."

But according to another shopkeeper, there is more of a ghetto mentality developing in Owairaka - he suspects that sometimes the Africans, whom he doesn't consider particularly physically violent, come under attack from Pacific Islanders. It's not a racial thing, he insists, it's a social thing where the existing tenants in the area feel threatened or intimidated by something that's new. And he thinks the African children are now forming gangs to protect themselves - which may mean more violence along the lines of the incident in McGehan Close.

"I think that's an exaggeration and an overreaction," says Senior Constable Nick Tuitasi who has been working in the Mt Roskill area for 11 years. He is also the Ethnic Liaison Officer for the Western Auckland area - that includes Mt Roskill, Balmoral, Avondale and Ponsonby.

"We haven't got the complaints or offences coming through to prove anything like that." In fact, Mt Roskill may well have been more dangerous before, he says - there used to be a big gang problem here that seems to have gone now.

"But there's definitely more cultural diversity here now and that can cause some barriers, or misunderstandings, that need to be worked through. But," Tuitasi notes, "when I was a young man and my Mum and Dad came here from the Islands they had to break through all kinds of barriers. Most of the refugees I have spoken to just want to get on with it. So I have no doubt that some of these refugee kids are the next Nick Tuitasis of Mt Roskill.

"It's just going to take some time, that's all."

Time, money and a little bit of understanding - apparently that's what's needed. Without exception, every person that we spoke to in Mt Roskill - be they yellow, brown, black or white, on the street, at school or working with immigrants - thought immigration could be a good thing, that it could be good for business and for the country. But also without exception, they all felt that it needed to be more carefully considered and possibly that more support was required.

"I think they should give it to certain people who can bring income and investment into the country," says Mrs Kumar, who runs the second Indian clothing store, Bombay Bazaar, on Stoddard Road. "Otherwise the people are just a burden on the government."

"It's been a steep learning curve for the local schools," says Nigel Davis, the principal of Wesley Intermediate. "We get a little bit of money and that helps. But I don't think anyone realises how difficult it is to teach 20 kids from Africa who've never been to school before, who have never sat at a desk for six hours before. Or how difficult it is to discipline kids who have had guns stuck to their heads."

"And this is what I always end up saying," says Anthony Backhouse, who runs the Urban Hope project at Wesley Primary School offering after-school and social activities, "it's about unity in diversity.

"We are all different, we all want to keep our different cultures and that's important. But there are things that we do all have in common, places where we cross over, and that's where we need to find some unity."

Herald feature: Immigration