Ravi, you’ve been operating in Newtown for a while now – how did Parliament on King come about? What’s its origin story?
The café, co-founded and operated by myself and my wife Della, was always gonna be a love project. I like spaces where people come together and they sit and they talk and they hang out. It's something I've always dreamed about doing. It also happened at a time in my life where I wasn't finding my professional career very fulfilling. I really felt like I had been part of the problem for a very long time.
At Parliament on King the big things we do, aside from just running a café, are that we train asylum seekers and refugees with basic hospitality skills. It’s all real work for real pay for everyone in the kitchen, no matter how inexperienced they are or how strong their English confidence and competency is. Everyone gets paid from the very first hour they walk in the door. A prime motivation was to get them some local work experience and references so they can take the first step on that ladder to getting a job in Australia. It also addresses a really important factor for a lot of people arriving in Australia – isolation and loneliness are a huge thing. They carry great burdens of heartache out of the experience of leaving friends and family. So the outcomes we reach are not just vocational: what we really address is how to start making a new life. We provide a place where people are welcome, where they are treated as equals and regarded as friends, and where they can make a new start.
"We train asylum seekers and refugees with basic hospitality skills. It’s all real work for real pay"
Could you speak a bit more about the social enterprise catering aspect, how that happened and how that works?
Well, we produce food from the asylum seekers' and refugees’ countries of origin, and we only make it in the way they make it at home. The idea is to not get someone working like a commercial cook but to upscale what they do naturally. Because when you can produce that quality of food at that scale you learn a lot of really valuable work skills and how to manage a process. No one's just there grating carrots and boiling potatoes. Everyone is learning. Everyone works and solves problems collaboratively, and different people take the role of lead chef depending on what the food is.
A lot of the people you meet don't want to talk about their experience. There are women here that don't even want to tell you where they're from. They feel that there is a stigma that they carry by being a refugee in Australia, and if you look at the the way refugees are discussed broadly in the press you can understand why there's a sense of not being welcomed and not being wanted. Being a part of the social enterprise catering lets them know that it's possible to build a future here.
Has Newtown contributed a lot to this?
Oh hell yeah! People have asked me if this would have worked somewhere else and I'm just not sure. I really think it's because of this local community. The openness, the acceptance, and the tolerance here – Newtown just seems to be a ground zero for love.
Parliament on King is such a socially innovative business, and provides immeasurable value for customers, staff, and the wider community. Who are some like-minded innovators you admire in Newtown?
Well, there is a few, I mean there's Lentil as Anything which I think is fabulous. There's the Social Outfit up the road; they train people to make and sell clothes. They've worked with asylum seekers and refugees; some of our team have got work and training there as well. There's a lot of small social enterprises in the Newtown area. Another I like is Weft Shop. They don't have a shopfront, but they work with refugees from the Thai Burma border. They design clothes based on traditional designs and materials, they're fantastic!
I like some of the larger businesses too. I think Young Henrys do great work. They could spend their money on making ads, but they invest it back into the local community and the local music scene.
Who in Newtown do you think is doing something future-looking and a bit different?
I think in the future, all businesses will be social businesses. This is the way things need to be now. I think what Sam does at Commune is really good – he creates events that bring communities and people together. It achieves genuine social good, and for me that's the future.
"I think in the future, all businesses will be social businesses. This is the way things need to be now"
Newtown as a community has a great care for sustainable practices. Are there any local businesses you admire for their environmental awareness? Any local green spaces you're into?
Half the cafés are doing Keep Cups now and no single-use plastics. We do the same thing and we have a mug exchange. I think the local bicycle culture is really important. I go to the Sydney Park Cyclery. If I need something done to my bike, they rebuild and repair using upcycled, recycled, secondhand and salvaged bike parts. I really like that. Sydney Park in general is an excellent local green space.
Parliament on King regularly holds night-time events and is open later than most. What's a great place for a non-drinker to check out at night time in Newtown?There's this one place that's opened down the road called the Garden Lounge (open until 8pm most nights). It's a quirky little shop with three different levels of art, clothes, furniture, and randomness. It's gorgeous, the chai's great, the place is weird as, and I love it. Cottonmouth is a record shop that's also got it going on. And there's Parliament on King! The City of Sydney have been really supportive, we recently received a Nighttime Diversification Grant so we have lots going on after dark. Every Sunday night we’ve got the Newtown and Erskineville Occult Society, a discussion group holding talks about Satanism, UFOs, cults, et cetera. It's hosted by a guy called Robert Maxwell, who's a witch doing his PhD in archaeology. He's just the most erudite, entertaining and charming young human being. We've also got life-drawing classes on a Tuesday night and we have songwriters' nights every second Wednesday. Then we have random things like the 'Tight Five', a comedy group focussed on queer people of colour that do their workshops here. So the answer is, here!
What's a great place for a party animal to check out in Newtown?
I like Earl's Juke Joint, up the road right, or I’ll go next door to the Mosh Pit, they've brought old school rock'n'roll and dive bars into the south end of King. It’s great, and it just feels like it's been there forever. The Imperial Hotel has always been a favourite, but it’s mainly about pubs for me: I’ll go to the Botany View Hotel or I'll go to the Union Hotel. Within walking distance of here you also have nearly 200 restaurants, I like Bloodwood, it’s close, and Rising Sun Workshop just off King are doing motorcycles and food – I do like what they do.
Imagine you have to make a science fiction film about Newtown in 2050. What does it look like?
I think you dig up the whole damn road and you turn it into a canal! My vision for Newtown is that it'll be like the Venice of the south. You'd attract more tourists and it would be a lot more cost effective than the WestConnex. I think Newtown would be a collection of commons and collaborative spaces. Everyone would be connected. No one would be lonely and no one would be left alone, so you would have a more vibrant street culture. There would be no cars and no private vehicles, it would be all bicycles, shared vehicles and electric cars. There would be no waste collections, because every house would be managing its own waste. At the end of the week you take out something the size of a brick and that would be it.
But seriously, you need businesses that are thinking about community, businesses that are thinking about sustainability, and businesses that are thinking about the human cost of everything they do.
