Town & Country / Butchers
Sun Herald
Sunday August 1, 1999
Town: Gulan Ahmad Khan, 54, has owned Enmore's Golden Horn Halal Meat Butcher for 18 years.
Halal is Arabic for legal or permitted. We slaughter our animals according to law. We recite a prayer according to our holy Koran. We say "Bismillah Allahu-Akbar", meaning in the name of God, God is the greatest. If we don't ask permission from God, it's very rude. We face Mecca when we kill the animals. We stun the animal and cut its throat with a slaughter knife.
It's very sharp and long but we don't cut the spinal cord. If the spinal cord is cut, it's instant death and the animal is not pumping blood any more. If it's intact, there's still contact from brain to heart. We hang them up by the legs and they bleed very quickly and the quicker the animal bleeds, the quicker it dies. It takes a maximum of five minutes. The most important thing is the blood. Blood is illegal or "haraam" and we don't handle pork.
When I was seven, I started working in my grandfather's butcher shop in Fiji. Both my father and grandfather were butchers and they taught me. My father sent me to Auckland to do my apprenticeship when I was 19 because there was no butcher school in Fiji. My son was working for me but when he married I put him out of the shop and out of the house so he could earn his own bread and butter so he knows how life should be.
I came to Australia from Fiji in 1979. Butchers were one of the trades the Australian embassy was looking for. I work from 7am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 6am to 6pm on Saturday. Two people work for me and my wife, Kariman, looks after the banking and the accounts. Cleaning the shop is the first thing we do in the morning then we cut the meat, which arrives overnight. We get the shop window ready and we open the shop at 7am. Cutting the meat and preparing sausage meat goes on all day. I'm a slaughterman, too, and I work at an abattoir in Wilberforce two days a week. In one day, we might do 100 cows, 250 to 300 lambs and 50 goats.
We pray five times a day and go to mosque every evening. We pray in the shop out the back. You can pray anywhere as long as no one disturbs you. You put your mat on the floor and pray - it takes about five to 10 minutes. Prayer is more important than anything. God created us for one purpose: to worship. I've been to Mecca, it was amazing.
About 50 per cent of our customers are non-Muslims. Halal meat is 25 cents to 50 cents a kilo dearer. We're the only halal shop near the city and a lot of Muslim people work near here. Butchering is a very good trade but it's hard work. The best part of my job is meeting people. Some of my regulars are good professional people, both Muslim and non-Muslim.
Country: Luke Robinson, 17, is a first-year butcher's apprentice at Barrington Beef, Gloucester.
I did work experience with Barrington Beef when I was 16 so it wasn't too hard to find an apprenticeship. I started in January and before that I was in year 11 at Gloucester High. My father's the head agriculture teacher. They've got cattle, chooks, pigs and sheep. School taught us about cattle judging and farming. I'd had experience with cattle judging and judging carcasses - assessing them for fat and muscle - at hoof and hook shows. Hoof is when they're alive and hook's for when they're dead.
I work about 60 hours a week. We start early because there's jobs to be done - the shop window alone takes a couple of hours in the morning. I work five and a half days a week and I'm doing a two-year TAFE course part-time. Then I'll work two years on the job so I should finish about 2003. I go to Hamilton TAFE every Tuesday. We leave home about 6am. It takes two hours to drive there. My mother drives and does a day's shopping in Newcastle.
There's 12 in the class, all guys. The teacher brings meat out onto the blocks and shows us how to cut it and then we'll get some lamb out of the cool room and have a go.
Gloucester has a population of about 3000 and there's three butchers. It's all locally grown beef. It's sent over to Scone abattoir, about two hours away, to be killed then it's brought back here. Our most popular meat is boneless sirloin and T-bone rumps. We also prepare Friday night raffle trays for the bowling club and the RSL.
During the day, we do pickling for the corn beef and we break the beef. We use a handsaw and break the beef carcasses into primal cuts: T-bone, sirloin. I also do the sausages and mince every second or third day. We run all the offcuts through the mincer, mixing it with sausage meal, which binds the meat together, and run it through the sausage machine. It's a bit annoying at times because I have to make so many sausages. About 250kg a week. It's put me off them a bit. I don't eat sausages any more. At the end of the day, we clean up - take the window display out, clean the bandsaw, the floor and wash up the trays. It's not hard to get the smell of meat off when I get home. I soak my clothes in Napisan every night.
Speaking backwards, a butcher tradition, still goes on a bit. We don't really talk much of it here, it's just a bit of fun: butcher is "rechtub", mince is "ecnim". I'm paid $220 a week base then 20 hours a week overtime - normally a little over $300. When you're a butcher, you've got to have a clean shop or it puts customers off and you've got to have good people skills. You find out a bit about what's going on around the town. There's always a bit of gossip.
© 1999 Sun Herald