Racist graffiti has been smeared on the front of two Asian-operated restaurants and a Hindu temple in Melbourne’s east.
A Chinese restaurant, a Thai restaurant and the Shree Swaminarayan temple, all in the outer suburb of Boronia, were discovered defaced with hateful slurs on Monday morning.
Graham Tran, owner of Kingsland Chinese restaurant.Credit: Jason South
The restaurants were vandalised in red paint with the words “go home”, along with offensive language.
Police say racist graffiti was also spray-painted on the front of a healing centre on the Mountain Highway that night. They believe the four incidents are linked.
“An investigation into the incident is under way,” police said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place at all in our society for hate-based and racist behaviour.”
The graffiti on Kingsland’s Boronia premises.
Graham and Elly Tran own Chinese restaurant Kingsland, which has been a fixture on Boronia Road since 1991. Graham grew up in the restaurant, which his parents started and he later took over. He said he had never before seen racist vandalism during his time in Boronia.
“Getting it plastered onto the wall of my business hurts a lot,” he said. “I grew up [spending] more time in the restaurant than I did at home.”
He discovered the graffiti on Monday when his six-year-old son was in the car with him.
“I just pulled up in front [of the restaurant] and my heart just dropped. I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it’s actually happened.’ My son goes with me to the restaurant all the time, so knows that’s not to be there ... he has just started reading, so he can read ‘home’ and ‘yellow’, but he didn’t understand what that last word was.
The same words were graffitied on nearby Charles King dumpling restaurant.
“That was probably the hardest thing for me, having to explain it to him … I just told him it was dirty graffiti. That’s all I could say to him.”
Graham said his nine-year-old daughter had been picking up what had happened by being online.
He has since cleaned off the paint and shared images of the vandalism on social media. He said he had been overwhelmed by the support from the community.
“It’s actually been great, the amount of customers, family and friends that have been messaging us. I’ve never really made a big deal out of this in the past. They have been encouraging us to continue with our head high.”
Elly said: “We’ve had a lot of solidarity from the community.
“People are now saying, ‘I will come to support your restaurant’ and ‘now we’ve got our dinner sorted for Saturday’ … We had someone who drove over an hour to come and eat.”
Police are also investigating vandalism that took place earlier this month when stencils were used to spray-paint offensive images at several restaurants and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick, and on pillars at an intersection in Caulfield East.
On the same weekend, homophobic graffiti was spray-painted at venues in Abbotsford.
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