In a small, sun-drenched shopfront on Harding Street, Coburg, in Melbourne, the smell of cinnamon, black tea lingers in the air.
A clock has become stuck in time.
Shelves have been cradling a living and growing archive of Arab literature and artefacts.
An old nut bar has been adorned in fabric and embroidery.
What was once Hasoon’s, a beloved Middle Eastern grocery store, has become a cultural refuge.
Now called Dukkana, a play on word from the Arabic word for shop, an ode to its past as Hasoon’s, revealing a linguistic inheritance, its soul, a quiet act of rebellion.
It is the hand-painted banner near the entrance that draws the eyes first, draped against cracked marble-patterned tiles where the words of Chelsea Kwakye are scrawled boldly:
“As a minority in a predominantly white space, to take up space is itself an act of resistance.”
These words are not simply a slogan, but a living ethos where occupying space becomes both an inheritance and an act of resistance.
Sisters Fatima and Safa El Samad, who inherited the bones of their father’s beloved grocery store and turned it into an intimate cultural sanctuary where Arab Australian identity can stretch, settle and defy the tidy boxes it has long been squeezed into.
“This space literally looks like a living room,” Safa El Samad said.
“We’re always giving things out and offering the space for as little as possible, often for free.”
Their creative space is about reclaiming and reshaping narratives, about rejecting media caricatures and internalised shame.
But also, an invitation to a deeper, more expansive conversation about identity and belonging.
“Growing up post-9/11, what it meant to be Arab was so often dictated by media representations," Safa El Samad said.
"As a young Arab in Australia, it was hard not to internalise how Arabs were portrayed,"
"This shop is a testament to embracing who I am wanting to not only show it, but to invite people in and say, this is who we are.”
The sisters don’t claim to represent every Arab experience. Instead, they hold space for others to experiment with memory, tradition, and presence.
“Belonging is something you cultivate with community," Fatima El Samad said.
Dr Sherene Idriss, a sociologist at Western Sydney University, said these kinds of places as “third spaces”, are in-between spaces where diaspora identity becomes dynamic.
“Arab Australian artists have become more entrepreneurial, creating their own practices and explicitly anti-colonial and anti-racist spaces,” she said.
These spaces are not merely artistic platforms. They are acts of redefinition.
Across Melbourne, in borrowed rooms and modest corners, a quiet revolution has unfolded. Young Arabs in Australia, often first or second-generation immigrants, are building cultural infrastructure outside of mainstream institutions.
At Capers in Thornbury, a backgammon board unfolds, its wooden surface worn smooth by generations of play, dice click against wood like prayer beads that elderly Arab men roll between their fingers in cafés back home.
Here, across all corners of the café, the game has become more than a pastime, it’s a ritual of memory, a thread tying present-day lives to ancestral ones.
Tawle, the Arabic name for backgammon was founded by Charby Ibrahim.
It was born from yearning and a need to gather without performance.
“After October 7, 2023, it felt like time to reconnect,” Ibrahim said of the period since the Hamas-led attacks.
“To be close, to support one another, to come together for community love and resistance.”
After the grief became too loud for solitude, Ibrahim began to gather his people again, not for a rally, not for a panel, but for play.
In the face of grief, gathering to play becomes a quiet act of survival, a way to hold one another up when words fail.
“The actual backgammon board is just a symbol of nostalgia brings a smile to my face," Ibrahim said.
"Seeing people, whether from our community or outside enjoy this traditional game that has a lot of history.”
“A lot of tears have been shed, a lot of stories have been told, a lot of music has been listened to when you play.""I think a lot of people get a nostalgia out of it at the same time when they turn up, it is something new," he said.
"They are young people in this place wanting to reconnect with their community in a gentle way.”
“In our generation, a lot of Lebanese families had two Arab parents- that's changing,” Ibrahim said.
“Those sort of thirties and twenties, a lot of them have single Arab speaking parents and it slips away faster so, this is just a way for us to keep it alive and just have a laugh.”
These are acts of cultural intimacy. After every protest, every march, people find their way back to the game. They play, they smoke, they laugh.
"It's not about proving ourselves to anybody else, it's about us coming together, enjoying each other's company… rejecting the concept of the grateful migrant,” Ibrahim said.
In another corner of the city, Noor Hoblos, founder of Tatli, waves memory into sweetness.
"Tatli is a celebration of cuteness," she said.
Hoblos has screened Arab films, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes romantic, and paired them with Arab desserts.
The act is almost devotional. A film about a crumbling pink house that divided a community was served with pink Sahlab.
The floral aroma of the creamy milky drink added a sensory layer to the experience, blurring the line between screen and audience, between memory and taste.
Tatli is a love letter wrapped in cellophane. A refusal to let art belong only to the fluent or the trendy.
A playful approach to cultural programming creates accessibility while honouring tradition.
Everything here is meant to be touched, tasted, taken home. And this shift reflects a generational change
"The older generation see ethnicity, identity, culture, and religion as private matters,” Dr Idriss said.
“Younger generation is the sense that they were raised on multiculturalism and they were told to celebrate their diversity,"
"And so now as adults, as young adults are wrestling with, okay, what does it mean to celebrate my diversity?”
In this new context, spaces like Dukkana, Tawle, Haki Bhaki, and Tatli become acts of resistance. Identity here is expressed freely, not in whispers, but in bold, unashamed declarations.
For many, it means refusing to perform palatability.
"I was embarrassed or I wanted to prove to white people that we're not all bad," Ibrahim said.
"I'm not here to change anyone's mind- all I'm here to do is create a couple of spaces that we feel safe in for us, by us, unapologetically.”
Arab identity in Melbourne is not a fixed thing. It is not a passport or a perfect accent. It is a garden, sometimes overgrown, sometimes carefully tended.
It grows in conversation, in the stories inherited and reshaped, in making space for each other.
Through mispronounced Arabic, through games once played in Damascus courtyards and Beirut streets, through stitched embroidery and spilled tea, they remember. Not in spite of history, but because of it.
"You are always welcome here," Safa El Samad.
"Even if it's not the physical space there's people around you who care about you."
And that may be the most radical act of all, not to wait for acceptance, but to live, tenderly and unapologetically, as if you already belong.
In a country still learning how to listen, perhaps the most powerful form of resistance is to whisper, we are still here.
Not because they allowed you, but because you always belonged.
The tea is warm. The dice are ready. The door is open.
Back on Harding Street, the clock in Dukkana has remained frozen, not marking time, but presence.
