The Australian Journey - Muslim communities

The reason why we did this book, Australian Journey - Muslim Communities, was to showcase the diversity of our Muslim communities in Australia and also to showcase their contributions to Australia but also in a really simple but visually powerful manner. My initial thoughts were not to include any people or profile any people in particular on the cover of the publication, but more so, to touch on Islamic art or Islamic culture. It was really important to highlight the photographs in particular and profile those as full-colour photos on the pages and leave them quite clean. What I decided to do was to select a colour from the photograph which would add and complement the profile itself. What we wanted to offer was role models to young people who they can emulate, inspired by as they make their own Australian journey. But in addition, we wanted to sort of demonstrate the long history of Muslim communities in Australia and also their contributions and in doing so, we wanted to, sort of, help build inter-community understanding and harmony. What I would like to get out of the book, is a: for it to inspire lots of young people but also I would like it to build better understanding, I suppose, between Muslim Australians and non-Muslim Australians in terms of recognising the value of the contributions that Muslims Australians make. There's some hard copies we are distributing as widely as we can. We obviously have a limited stock but everybody can access it electronically through the DIAC website which is www.immi.gov.au.