We pull up to the front of the mosque in Nek Su’s golf cart. Through the open window I see him join thirty men in bright robes and embroidered Taqiyah head coverings as they kneel to face the Kaaba cube in Mecca. The soft call to prayer fills the street. Everything else is silent. Two girls in hijabs walk past as a young, robed man pulls up to the mosque and shuffles inside, late.

“Hayya ala Salahhhhh,” drifts from the speakers.

The call to prayer is normally something Australians associate with travelling and the exotic: being in a rooftop cafe in Marrakesh sipping mint tea, in a hotel in Agra looking at the Taj Mahal before sunrise, or walking the shores of the Bosphorus during an Istanbul winter. It is always something I have experienced as an outsider.

I look across the lagoon, past the school and the jetty to the twinkling lights on the water and I’m reminded that I haven’t travelled far at all. This is still Australia; it’s just a part that many people don’t get to see. I am a guest of Nek Su, the builder, fisherman, grandfather, imam and elder of Home Island, the only Muslim island in Australia.

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are an iridescent tropical atoll 2,000km from the West Australian coast, yet they are still part of Australia as one of the Indian Ocean Territories (along with Christmas Island). Interestingly the Muslim population here outnumbers the other inhabitants four to one.

The islands have a strange relationship with Islam. They were discovered by Captain William Keeling of the East India Company in 1609 and weren’t properly settled until Scottish trader John Clunies-Ross and merchant Alexander Hare both arrived in the early 19th century. Clunies-Ross was an empire builder and brought in Malay, Chinese, Papuan and Indian workers to harvest copra – they were the first Muslims on the islands. Hare wasn’t quite as pragmatic. He was accompanied by slaves and a harem of 23 women from the East Indies, New Guinea and Mozambique to populate his desert island fantasy.

Nek Su on Turtle Beach. The island’s imam grew up collecting coconuts for fo husking for the Clunies-Ross family. Photograph: Ben Stubbs/The Guardian

Hare’s harem didn’t work out, so he left and Clunies-Ross assumed control as the self-appointed “king” of the islands. The islands operated as the family’s fiefdom until they were passed over to Australian control in 1955 and the people voted for proper integration in 1984. As the colonialist leanings of the Clunies-Ross clan loosened, the former indentured population, who were nearly exclusively Sunni Muslims, settled on Home Island and the predominantly expat population set up on West Island across the water.

I take the ferry across the aqua lagoon to Home Island. Waiting for me on the jetty is a tall man wearing a brown fedora. He has an open and friendly face; he looks fit and slim for a 73-year-old man. “Call me Nek Su,” he smiles in reply. It means grandpa, and it is what all the Home Islanders know him as.

We drive from the jetty towards his house. The paved lanes are populated by bikes and golf carts sitting under coconut palms. There is an identical layout to the houses, with big breezy rooms and outdoor kitchens. They are all connected by narrow laneways that wouldn’t look out of place in Kuala Lumpur or Java. The afternoon air smells of spices and samosas.

Nek Su points to the elevated cyclone shelter as we drive: “I built that.”

We continue along the narrow lanes and he points to the luminescent yellow school: “That too.”

Nek Su isn’t much of a conversationalist, at least not in English. His first language, like most of the Home Islanders, is Malay. Their language is unique and has evolved since it came across the water with the first indentured workers.

Nek Su on Home Island. ‘I met Queen Elizabeth; I didn’t say anything though. I was too shy,’ he says. Photograph: Ben Stubbs/The Guardian

We pull in at the enormous mosque. Its dome is silver and its floorboards are still unpainted. It will house the entire Home Island population of 400 eventually, a step up from the modest fibro buildings used previously. “Everyone who lives on the island is Muslim,” Nek Su tells me.

He also tells me that many of the young children are actively part of Islam here on the island – something he never saw on the mainland. Nek Su lived in Western Australia in the 1970s and he regularly goes back to Perth, Port Hedland and Jurien Bay. The link with their faith is a central part of life on Home Island, for young and old. On Wednesday afternoons Nek Su and other elder statesmen teach the boys on the island the ways of their Cocos Malay culture, sailing, dancing and building Jukong traditional boats to maintain a link with their past. Nek Su also tells me that 85% of Home Islanders have been to Mecca.

We continue driving around the go-kart like tracks of the island. At the edge of the lapping water Nek Su greets a group of young men with their children playing in the shallows. Later we pull in at one of the houses to meet Nek Su’s family. Nek Su’s brother Omar and his wife, who wears a bright orange hijab, are sitting out the back as she fries some afternoon snacks in the wok. “Salam” is offered as a greeting when we enter the outdoor kitchen. When Omar sees that I’m an outsider, he smiles and says, “How ya going mate? Take a seat.” The clove smell of kretek cigarettes wafts through the air, mixing with the frying spices spitting from the wok, highlighting the mash of cultures here.

Our path home takes us along the edges of Oceania House, the former colonial mansion of the Clunies-Ross family. It is a big, white two-storey place overlooking the water. Vines push through the crumbled windows; salt has blown a film of rust across it all, yet it remains as a decaying reminder of Home Island’s past.

Later that evening Nek Su and I eat dinner together in his modest kitchen – a meal of sweet lip fish, samosas and vegetables. Looking at the snow peas and carrots on my plate I mention that I didn’t see much planted on Home Island. “It’s difficult to grow anything because of the soil – mostly it’s just sand,” says Nek Su. There isn’t much here other than bananas, sugar cane and tubers. They all rely on the six-weekly shipments from the mainland to supplement what they can grow and catch. While we eat, Nek Su tells me stories of meeting the Queen in 1955 when she visited the islands, “I met Queen Elizabeth; I didn’t say anything though. I was too shy,” he says with a smile.

Nek Su is the image of a self-sufficient man. He can’t read or write but he can build a house, a boat, weld, fish and his faith is at the centre of it all. As we pack up the meal he hurries us along as the nighttime prayer is coming, just one of the five prayer times all recognise on the island.

We head out in Nek Su’s boat early the next morning with his nephew Ossie to experience something of this self-sufficiency. Fishing, quite understandably, is an activity that binds the two communities on the Cocos Islands and helps them all survive. Within minutes I notice black floating shapes the size of dinner tables below us.

“Turtles!” exclaims Ossie. There are hundreds of sea turtles in the lagoon, along with an abundance of fish, sharks, rays and dugongs.

There are hundreds of sea turtles in the lagoon, along with an abundance of fish, sharks, rays and dugongs. Photograph: Norbert Probst/Alamy Stock Photo

Nek Su stretches his stiff knees ever so slightly as we ride the swells in the deeper water. When he was growing up he would work, along with the other Malay speakers, on South Island collecting coconuts for the Clunies-Ross family to be husked and sold to the mainland.

“I’d collect 100 in a bag. We’d carry 5,000 coconuts on our shoulders every week.”

The sun is directly above us and our Esky is full of fish to be shared between the families on Home Island, so Ossie and Nek Su cross the lagoon to drop me at West Island to meet the rest of the locals. Many Home Islanders work on West Island, in the visitors’ centre, the school, medical centre and the cafes. There are also West Islanders on the ferry every morning going to work for the day at Home Island.

Afternoons are for golf across the international runway, evenings are for tennis or a quiet drink at the pub, and there seems to be a community event every second day. To me, it seems religion is at the centre of things on Home Island and on West Island the community is the driving force. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is organising a new mosque or a raffle for the golf club, these places exist together because of their sense of community.

Home Island school. Photograph: Ben Stubbs/The Guardian

At the visitors’ centre, Jules, the marketing manager, tells me that the interaction on the islands is something they embrace, “Our girls all look forward to Hari Raya when we all go to Home Island to celebrate together.”

Hari Raya is the celebration and reflection at the end of Ramadan. The two communities get together to enjoy the breaking of the fast and the associated rituals as they anticipate the new year. Homes are strung with fairy lights, people eat together in open houses and those who have passed away are remembered. Even if the two communities aren’t as close as they were twenty years ago, as long time resident Terry Washer suggests, “because of the influence of the mainland,” there is something hopeful about this place.

Its isolation has shielded the community, somewhat, from the rhetoric of Ray Hadley and Pauline Hanson and the rest. If more people observed the history and coexistence of the Home islanders and the West islanders without the outside noise and media peer pressure, it might give them hope.

LaTrobe University anthropologist Nicholas Herriman calls the Cocos Malay, “Australia’s oldest continuously Islamic and South Asian community” and on the islands this is a position greeted with respect.

The next day I wait at the Cocos Malay cafe at the airport on West Island as a batch of samosas are fried by the lady in a headscarf for the electricians who are finishing up a shift on the islands. I reflect on my initial thought that the isolation here might have bred fear and mistrust. This “fishbowl” existence has, if anything, allowed them to preserve a sense of community and coexist in a way that many Australians don’t experience anymore.