Our Story

Island Dreams Cafe is a family-run cafe in Lakemba. Four generations of our Cocos Malay family run this business over 28 years now in Sydney since 1996. Lakemba is our home, and our first cafe. We ran two CBD cafes for 8 years in 2000 before we decided to sell and focus on Lakemba.

We offer fusion Malay cuisine with Cocos Keeling Island influence. We cook our family recipes handed down from generations, originally from the Malay empire as they left their villages in the 19th Century. So we have kue-kue, nasi lemak, rendang, lontong, ketupat, mee rebus, satay and many other dishes that you know as Malaysian food today, but are recipes from the 19th Century.

For many who don’t know, Cocos Keeling Island, or Pulu Kokos, is an Australian territory off the coast of Western Australia. From the island’s 600 population, 80% are Malay who practice Sunni Islam, and are Australian citizens.

The first Malays were believed to have settled in the Islands in 1826 when Englishman, Alexander Hare, brought his Malay harem and slaves over. Then the Scottish merchant John Clunies-Ross took over the Island and worked the Malays as slaves in his copra plantation.

The Cocos Malay race are ethnic Malays who assimilated on the Island originally from Malacca, Penang, Bali, Timor and parts of Indonesia. Essentially, we are Malays from the Malay kingdom long before Malaysia was founded in 1957. So to say we are not Malaysians by name is right. But we are Malay.

The Clunies-Ross family ruled the island as a private fiefdom for almost 150 years. The British formally annexed the islands in 1857, and the territory was transferred to Australia in 1955. All the settlers were then awarded Australian citizenship.

During this time, some Cocos settlers decided to “return” to Malaysia, where there are about 4,000 now living in Tawau, Sabah - and subsequently awarded bumiputra status. We have relatives all over Malaysia.

The Malay we speak is Basa Pulu Kokos, which some people have described as a “rough and unsophisticated” version of modern Bahasa Malaysia, and a creole of Betawi Malay with Scottish English.

So we hope you visit us. We warmly welcome you to our home with our home-cooked Cocos Malay food.

Kak Alimah Bilda & Pak Aman
& family