Page 18 - Ronan Oconnell News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

SHARE They explored Australia on camel, building mosques, introducing Islam and helping to grow the country’s agricultural industry. Between 1860 and the 1920s, at least 3,000 Muslim and Sikh men from Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Egypt and Iran were recruited to Australia for their skill in driving camels. They used these hardy animals to transport goods, search for new pastoral lands and chart fresh routes across the massive, dry expanse of inland Australia. Collectively, they were known as cameleers or ghans (short for Afghans). Although their role in building modern Australia has largel...

'Directed isolation' is already in place across Asia, New Zealand and Australia

Indigenous and Asian slaves were the lifeblood of Western Australia’s early pearl industry Men carry baskets of mother-of-pearl onto a beach in Broome, Western Australia. Photo: Getty Images "Aalingoon came into the bay and lives beneath the sea," wrote late Indigenous pearl shell carver Aubrey Tigan Galiwa, quoted in Lustre, a 2018 book about the Australian pearling industry. "He comes out every full moon, when it's a big tide. As he floats on his back, as he drifts, the scales fall off his back, and turn into goowarn (pearl shells) as they drift down to the seabed below. The tides come i...

SHARE Hidden in the remote valleys of southern China are 1,000-year-old villages where time seems to have stood still. These Dong minority communities consist of intricate wooden buildings, host unique festivals, and are home to people who worship nature, don elaborate outfits and favour ancient lifestyles. Stilted homes and time-worn pagodas line the car-free streets of these villages, which are surrounded by fields that produce the wheat, rice and vegetables that feed its residents, and the tea, cotton and rapeseed they sell. Chengyang is a cluster of Dong communities in a far-flung reg...

SHARE As Malaysia battled the pandemic this year, its anxious citizens sought guidance from religious deities, with many generating small plumes of smoke in their homes in honour of these gods. For more than 1,000 years in Buddhist and Taoist cultures, people have lit incense as a means of connecting with higher powers in times of crisis. While the coronavirus ravaged the world, a 93-year-old man continued labouring in his workshop on the Malaysian island of Penang, crafting handmade incense, exactly as he’d done for 70 years. Incense by Lee Beng Chuan. Courtesy Ronan O’Connell Pena...