I’m pleased to see that the police are treating the recent arson attacks on the Jesuit Refugee Service and the lawyer Katrine Camilleri as acts of terrorism. The Police Commissioner is correct in saying that this is terrorism because the perpetrators are seeking to silence others by terrorising them with violent acts. We’ve been there before, in the years 1979 to 1987, when trying to silence those who did not agree with you, through bombs, burnings, police raids, shootings and other horrible methods, was the order of the day. It’s all so familiar.

The curious thing is that many Maltese are suffering from the irrational fear that the detainees in the camps might include “Muslim terrorists”. Their fear is irrational because no terrorist is going to take a death passage out of North Africa, when the organisation that funds him can get false passports and plane tickets and fly him straight to London or Paris. Malta is not a target for this kind of terrorism in any case; it is too insignificant and unimportant. Why bomb Valletta when you can bomb London or run a couple of planes through the World Trade Centre towers? Yet they are so busy worrying about this that they cannot see the terrorism in our midst. I don’t think it ever occurred to the fear-mongers that the terrorism would be home-grown, and that the terrorists would be Maltese racists and xenophobes, committing acts of violence on other Maltese who do not share their sympathies. Even now, despite the warnings given by the Police Commissioner and several others, people are blanking out reality, protecting themselves against the awful truth through self-delusion. Put bluntly, we are in denial. I have even heard some people suggest that the arson attacks were committed by immigrants who are living in open centres, so that Maltese racists would get the blame. As if. Let’s not be so crazily pathetic in our reasoning, like those women who think up all kinds of desperate excuses for the fact that they have found condoms in their husband’s wallet, when they are on the pill (“He was keeping them for a friend” – yes, like the teenager caught with a packet of Marlboros).

The newspapers and people in authority have attributed greater significance to the attempts at silencing the Jesuits and the refugee service lawyer by fire, than they have to the breaking of the crucifix in Ta’ Giezu church by a mentally disturbed Briton “of dark complexion” (what would they have said if he had been a freckled red-head?). This is correct. Yet down in the streets, it’s very different. People have given more importance to the toppling of that crucifix than they have to the arson attacks perpetrated by Maltese people against other Maltese people, who include the young mother of small children and a group of Catholic priests. I might choose to describe these people, and their lack of reasoning, in a derogatory fashion – but that is not the point. The point is that they exist, in large numbers, and this is how they think. This makes them a problem, rather than a fascinating quirk of Maltese society.

The cross that was toppled and broken by a madman is a piece of decorated wood, a mere symbol of Christianity. If we attribute more significance to it than that, then we are guilty of idolatry. While we know that the Maltese are very keen on venerating idols, perhaps we shouldn’t boast about it so much if we wish to be considered Christians rather than pagans who worship statues and symbols. While we are all aflutter because this decorated wooden symbol has been broken, we have let our minds shy away from the terrible reality of violence committed – by Maltese – against Christian priests, human representatives of Christianity, rather than two strips of wood laid across each other and decorated by a monk a couple of centuries ago. “Ah, but the Ta’ Giezu cross was a precious piece of old art,” I was told by somebody. Well, let’s get this straight, shall we? Are we upset because it was a valuable piece of art, or because it was a symbol of Christianity? Or can’t we make up our minds? Call me a peasant or a cretin if you will, but like most of those who have spoken in public about this matter – pity it was mainly in the form of written statements to the press, though – I think we should be seriously worried about attacks on people, and not worried at all about the one-off toppling of a decorated cross in a church, by somebody who needs psychiatric treatment. We should be upset that the cross was broken, yes, because it was a work of art – but that’s about it.

The hatred against these people, who arrive on our shores by accident rather than by design, is not because their status here is illegal, as the more cerebral among us would have it. It is because they are coming in, full stop, and more precisely, because they are blacks or Arab Muslims. Over the past few years, we have had hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Albanians and people from the former Yugoslav states living and working in Malta – and many of these, incidentally, are Muslim not Christian. We take their presence for granted and don’t object to it. They don’t stand out physically as being different. We welcome them. We are not afraid of them. Every time we have work done on the house, there is a Bulgarian or five among the team sent to do the job. Four years ago, the entire team sent by a contractor to carry out a floor-laying job in our house was Bulgarian. These, too, are immigrants, and probably illegal immigrants, but they don’t provoke the same kind of reaction among us. But then, irrationality is one of our great specialisations.

It is convenient for us to forget, too, how much hardship Maltese immigrants to the new world endured, and how many of them lived in conditions of abysmal poverty to escape the Third-World conditions in Malta after the war. We never read about these stories here in Malta. We show no interest at all, because we never wish to hear about anything that reflects badly on Malta, or that presents Maltese emigrants as anything other than heroes who conquer the economy to which they migrate. We prefer to be fed fairy stories that shelter us from the nastiness of brutal reality, like large children. Through sheer serendipity, I came across the migration heritage website of the government of New South Wales, and in the section dedicated to the Belongings project set up by the Migration Heritage Centre and the City of Botany Bay Council, I found this interview with Paula Maria Peadon nee Criminale. Her parents went to Australia from Malta in the early 1950s, with five daughters under eight years old, a spiritiera, a bath-tub taz-zinku, a cooking-pot, some clothes, and nothing else. During the long sea journey there, they survived on a diet of bread and water. And even in the midst of all this misery, their mother took the trouble to tell them to stay away from the African porters during the stop-over in Sudan, because they would be ridden with qamel (lice). For years they lived in a two-room shack in a shanty-town slum, with no electricity, no running water, and no plumbing. Paula thought they were squatters in that shack, and she was probably right. Their excrement and household waste was buried, as was everyone else’s, in the ground around the shacks. There was just one public tap to service the entire slum community. They lived among the Aborigines and poor Anglo-Australians dismissed as ‘white trash’, and suffered prejudice because they were ‘New Australians’ and from Malta. They tried hard to fit in and the parents lived lives of immense hardship. At one point, Paula’s aunt and uncle came to Australia with their children, and moved into the two-room shack with Paula’s parents and the six children they had by then – and still no water, electricity or lavatory. If that was better than living in Malta, then what must life in Malta have been like for them?

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Here is Paula Maria Peadon, born Paula Criminale in Malta just after the war, interviewed in Australia by Mary Ann Hamilton for the Migration Heritage Centre.

“There was very little left for people in Malta after the Second World War. Work and money were scarce, and the island was physically devastated by bombing during the war. Australia was seen as a country of opportunities. So in 1950, my father bought a ‘ten pound passage’ and travelled to Australia by ship to get a job and find a place for us to live. When he arrived he found a boarding-house in Surry Hills. On 21 April 1951, my mother, my four sisters and I boarded the MS Florintina in the port of Saint Angelo in Malta, and started our journey to Australia. Apart from our clothing, my mother brought a small kerosene spiritiera, a big soup pot, and a big bath with her on the journey. These were all just household items – things from our home in Malta. She was not sure what to expect in Australia and thought she might need these things, and they did prove to be very useful later on. For us children, the trip was a big adventure. I was only three years old at the time but I can remember stopping in Sudan and seeing people carrying bananas on the dock. Mum kept telling us to stay away from them because they were sure to have lice. I can also remember her telling us to stay away from the ship’s porthole. We must have been a handful for her – five girls all under eight years old on a three-month sea journey. I can also remember that the food was pretty horrible – basically, bread and water.”

“We arrived in Sydney at night and I can still hear the sound of people greeting each other. It was very noisy and confusing, and then all of a sudden Dad was there to take us to our new home.

He had found a little shack at Yarra Bay for us to live in, on Hill No. 60 – that was the address. There were a lot of Anglo-Australians and Aboriginal people living there then. These places had been built during the 1930s depression. For many years I thought we had squatted there, but then Dad said they had bought the place. After a while we moved around the corner to a converted boatshed, a two-room shack that we rented. As children we loved living there. It was such fun to be able to swim, fish and picnic as we liked. But it must have been hard for mum. There was no electricity and only one water-tap to service everyone living in that community at Yarra Bay. Mum had to walk quite a way to get water and she had to carry it back to the shack and had to heat it on the kerosene spiritiera, for all our baths, clothes-washing and cooking.”

“By this stage, Dad had his job as a fitter at British Standard Machinery in Mascot – the job he had for the rest of his working life. We didn’t have a car, so he caught public transport and I can remember seeing him arrive home, walking over the hill in the dark and then digging holes to bury our household waste. He used to say that he was running out of space for holes. In about 1953 I started school at the Catholic school in Yarra Bay, where my sisters went. I can remember one day one of the nuns hit my sister who immediately went home to tell mum. Mum marched up to the school, got the five of us, and marched us across the road to the public school. We looked like a mother duck and five little ducklings. My mum was a strong person. She didn’t speak English and must have been lonely, but she still did her time working at the public school canteen.”

“While we lived at Yarra Bay, my little brother was born. In about 1961, towards the end of our time there, we sponsored my aunt and uncle’s family to migrate to Australia from Malta, and they moved in with us. Dad built another room onto the shack, but it wasn’t approved by the council, and they ordered him to take it down. So we five girls slept in one bed. In the end, we were sent to government-organised accommodation, a former army barracks in Warwick Farm in Western Sydney, where we paid rent. Dad travelled to Mascot each day for work. This was a huge distance so mum applied for a Housing Commission house and eventually we got one at Maroubra. It had four bedrooms and indoor plumbing – very exciting! It was here that mum had my youngest sister and I went to high school.”

“When all seven of us kids were at school, mum found cleaning work at Little Bay Hospital at Randwick, and later she found work at Qantas. In 1971, after many years of hard work, mum and dad bought a place at Monterey. While they were moving, mum found the spiritiera that she had used at Yarra Bay. She wanted to throw it out but I could remember her using it in our first house in Australia and couldn’t bring myself to let her, so she gave it to me. It had travelled from Malta and they had kept it right up until then.”

“I left school at 16 and found work as a dressmaker for a business located in the old Tivoli building in the city. We used to sew for the games show personality Dolly Dyer and for the Miss Australia winners – beautiful work for a high society clientele. I met Laurie Peadon when I was 18 and we got married in 1968. Mum and dad didn’t worry that he was an Australian and not from the Maltese community. You see, they kept in contact with the Maltese community but they also wanted to have ‘Aussie’ friends. When I was growing up, there was a bit of a stigma about being a New Australian, so we tried hard to fit in and felt at home.”