The Cronulla riots of 2005 produced famously ugly images of what can happen when a crowd turns bad.
Photographs of young Middle Eastern men cowering, hands over their heads, as dozens of angry white men beat them mercilously were burnt into the consciousness of an unsuspecting Australia.
But of all the moments that emerged from the Cronulla riots, one stands out very clearly in the mind of SBS's Domestic Editor David King.
"There was a group outside chanting 'Kill the Leb' and climbing on to the kiosk - it was really frightening stuff"
"The thing I found most confronting was a big group of people chasing a young woman in a hijab and they were trying to rip her hijab off," he said.
"It was just horrific. She ran into a kiosk and the police helped her out. But there was a group outside chanting 'Kill the Leb' and climbing on to the kiosk - it was really frightening stuff."
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For King, who was then working for The Australian newspaper, the events of December 11, 2005 are still fresh in his memory.
"There was a lot of tension in the weeks before the riot, and my boss at the time told me 'Take your boardies and a towel, nothing’s going to happen', he said.
"I got there and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were just thousands of people on the streets.
"Immediately what hit me was the number of people, the weather - it was extremely hot - and how drunk everyone was getting. In the early part of the day it was not violent at all but the crowd was always a bit ugly, just because of the racial nature of what was going on.
"It was quite confronting to see all those Aussie flags draped over people, draped over houses, and this statement of nationalism that we would normally kind of respect, but when its in that forum or on display so evidently it makes you step back a bit.
"And it wasn’t just the national pride it was this strident anti-Islamic message that was attached to everything."
"It was horrendous seeing anyone who was of colour down there and how totally petrified they looked."
What started off as a loud, boozy gathering quickly turned violent and the crowds set upon anyone who looked like they could have been Lebanese or Middle Eastern, King said.
"Within about an hour it was chaos because you were running from where someone had been bashed – 'there’s a Leb, let’s bash him', you’d hear that – and then a car had driven past with people who kind of looked Lebanese, but they turned out not to be, and they got attacked," he said.
"It was horrendous seeing anyone who was of colour down there and how totally petrified they looked.
"There were some very young kids, in their late teens, [and] a lot of them thought it was Australia Day, but it wasn’t. It had the same feel as Australia Day in a lot of respects, particularly at the beginning – barbecues, flags – but it went quickly to a different place and it always had the menacing element of race at its heart."
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People were swept up in the mob mentality, King said.
"The mob mentality took over, no doubt about it, and people who wouldn’t normally do things, like get in fights and kick and hit people, were doing it because once a mob starts it’s an incredibly hard thing to stop," he said.
"I think a lot of people went there not knowing what was going to happen. There was a view they were standing up for Cronulla; standing up for the surfie culture, protecting their culture from what they saw as a threat from Middle Eastern people."
In the aftermath, King saw many of the rioters go through the court system, and saw how scared they were to face the consequences of their actions without the mob mentality that had driven them to violence in Cronulla.
"I took me a long time to get over the anger of what I’d seen," he said.
"I think the treatment of the girl sort of summed it up for me: that you could chase a girl, try to rip her hijab off...that was pretty horrific.
"It seemed so desperately unfair – people were there by themselves, or with one mate, and [there were] hundreds of people around them and dozens physically trying to hurt them - it was very confronting to watch."
Source: The Australian
