On the beach

Australia - On the beach | Asia | The Economist

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SPRAWLING along Sydney's southern Pacific shore, Cronulla beach has long symbolised Australia's laid-back way of life, a place where the sand and surf make everyone equal. That image was washed away on December 11th when a mob of about 5,000 mainly young, white Australians attacked a group of ethnic Lebanese, chasing, punching and pelting them with beer bottles. Police said they saved two of the victims from being killed. Next night, hundreds of Lebanese descended on Cronulla and nearby beach suburbs in revenge, firing guns and smashing cars with crowbars. Australia's worst racial violence in living memory shocked the country, leaving politicians perplexed about what it means and how to handle it.

The riot followed an attack the previous week by a group of young Lebanese men on two lifeguards who reportedly asked them to stop playing football on the beach. Lebanese youths visiting from outside Cronulla had already provoked the locals by sexually harassing young women. Now, an attack on lifeguards, the ultimate symbol of Australia's macho beach culture, was apparently too much to bear. Cronulla's mainly Anglo-Celtic population has not been submerged in Sydney's broader multicultural character. Its blond young men have waged territorial beach wars before, but never one with such a blatant racial character. This time, text messages called on “Aussies” to “reclaim our beach”. Fuelled by alcohol, chanting “No more Lebs” and waving seas of Australian flags, the rioters produced scenes that one Sydney newspaper judged “would not have been out of place in 1930s Munich”.

Their targets were hardly non-“Aussies”. The 19th-century merchants who comprised Australia's first Lebanese immigrants were followed by a larger group of refugees from the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. Keysar Trad, a Lebanese spokesman for Sydney's Islamic community, estimates that Sydney has about 500,000 people of Lebanese background among its population of 4m, most living in crowded suburbs north of Cronulla. Many children from the second wave of immigration identify strongly with their parents' homeland. But they suffer from high unemployment. Since Australia joined the war in Iraq, some young Lebanese have felt themselves to be targets of prejudice. They say the federal conservative coalition government's recent draconian anti-terrorism laws are really directed against them.

That may be far-fetched. But his opponents have been quick to link the Cronulla riot to a suspicion of Muslims that has existed ever since John Howard, the prime minister, won an election four years ago in part by exploiting hostility to boat people from the Middle East. At first, Mr Howard stayed silent about the riot. Eventually, he condemned it as “unacceptable” but denied that Australia was guilty of “underlying racism”. Cronulla lies at the centre of a suburban belt where Mr Howard has built a formidable political base that has kept him in power for almost ten years.

Morris Iemma, the Labor state premier of New South Wales, more bluntly described the riot as the “ugly face of racism in Australia”. He recalled the state parliament from holiday to give police stronger anti-riot powers. The way things are shaping, it will take more than that to bring peace back to the beach. And two attacks, on Lebanese families in Perth and Adelaide, may presage a yet wider problem. 

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On the beach

Race riots in paradise

Asia December 17th 2005

From the December 17th 2005 edition

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