Eight years ago today the Cronulla riot dramatically illustrated how the ethnic tensions beneath our supposedly egalitarian society could erupt into racial violence of the type we’d naively convinced ourselves Australia would never experience.
Then, after the inquiries and once the dust had settled, everyone said Cronulla was a wake-up call.
But really we’ve just gone back to the beach without addressing anything much at all.
The triggers for the violence that broke out between young Anglo-Australian and Middle Eastern-Australian men in the Sutherland Shire that Sunday have been endlessly pored over.
Inflammatory media coverage, spearheaded by the broadcaster Alan Jones, has been partially blamed for igniting the tinderbox atmospherics around the monocultural surf scene at Cronulla. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) found Jones’s program had breached the radio code of practice by broadcasting material “likely to encourage violence or brutality” and “likely to vilify people of Lebanese background and people of Middle-Eastern background” in the days before the riot.
Of course the omnipotent fear of the “other” in Australia, exacerbated by anti-Muslim sentiment post-September 11 and the political capitalisation of asylum seeker boat arrivals, added complex racial texture to the local stressors. But given that successive federal governments have now volunteered their fears about young Australian Arab men fighting in Syria and amid continued hyperbole about the boats, little has really changed.
The immediate tensions of December 2005 at Cronulla began with the alleged harassment by Lebanese Australian men and boys of local girls and the subsequent assault of two volunteer lifesavers.
After the incident involving the lifesavers, likened by some in the media to “heroes and Anzacs”, an SMS message urged militancy.
“This Sunday every Fucking Aussie in the Shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day . . . let’s show them this is our beach and they’re never welcome back.”
The rest is well-documented history: that Sunday 11 December, more than 5000 people gathered at North Cronulla; men of Arabic appearance were assaulted; large groups of Lebanese Australians from south-west Sydney mounted big reprisal attacks; police and rioters clashed; dozens of people were seriously injured and 104 charged.
So many lessons – or so we’ve been assured by police, politicians and community leaders – have now been heeded about tolerance, crowd control, and the toxic cocktail of alcohol, social media and racial hatred.
The violence has not, thankfully, revisited the shire. But perhaps the tensions are just in abeyance.
An equally burning question, almost a decade on, is whether the poisonous dynamics of Cronulla were, as many insist, truly local – or whether the shire just staged an event that could easily be replayed elsewhere in Australia?
The fact that many came from outside the shire to participate suggests so.
The defining cultural symbols at Cronulla were an Australian beach, the Australian flag and, most curiously, Anzac.
Mythically, at least, the Australian beach is the great social leveller. But in the Sutherland Shire it became the great divide.
The flag, meanwhile, is supposed to encompass all who live under its Southern Cross. But in December 2005 it was appropriated as the “Cronulla Cape” to be worn while attacking the Lebanese. It became a symbol of aggressive territorial claim and exclusion, a hideous distillation of Anglo-Australian racism.
But the biggest offence was, it seems, consigned to a 17-year-old boy of Lebanese extraction who climbed the flagpole outside Brighton Le Sands RSL Club, stole the Australian flag and burnt it.
For this stupid and deliberately provocative act the boy was later convicted of malicious damage and excoriated in the media.
Even after “repenting” and having apparently “reformed” by walking the Kokoda Track (so he might better understand, apparently, the connection between Australian military “sacrifice” and the blue ensign, especially when flown outside an RSL) he was gratuitously reminded by the Daily Telegraph that he’d “committed the ultimate insult” and been “public enemy No 1”.
Anzac and Gallipoli (which Australian troops, as part of the Australian Imperial Force, invaded on 25 April 1915) were repeatedly summoned up at Cronulla on 11 December 2005.
Like this: “You're standing on the soil that has been fought for by Australian Anzac diggers.”
And like this: “This is what our grandfathers fought for, to protect this, so we can enjoy it, and we don't need these Lebanese or wogs to take it away from us.”
Did the invocation of Anzac precede, as it followed, this boy’s act? Probably. But it doesn’t really matter. What does is that some who wore the Cronulla cape called themselves Anzacs that day.
Interviewed on the BBC, the New South Wales RSL president, Don Rowe, later explained: “We were absolutely disgusted. That is the last thing that Anzac is interpreted as being. The Anzac spirit is mateship, looking after one another . . . you certainly don’t go around waving flags and call yourself an Anzac and go around belting people up. That’s totally the opposite to what Anzac is.”
(Rowe, incidentally, wanted the “flag burner” to carry the Australian flag during a subsequent Anzac day parade as a sign of reconciliation. He agreed. The plan was scrapped after Rowe was threatened and so the boy walked Kokoda instead.)
Next year Australia will embark on what critics are already referring to as a Festival of Anzac, around the centenary of the first world war.
Two cultural touchstones that were misappropriated at Cronulla eight years ago – the Australian flag and the name Anzac – will also be the potent motifs of our national commemorations next year and more so in April 2015 for the Gallipoli centenary.
Let us ensure that they don’t become emblematic of racism and exclusion during those commemorations/celebrations.
There’s long been the danger of that on Australia Day, 26 January, too, when flags for the car come free with our slabs of VB and when insisting that passers-by kiss the flag seems like a bit of a lark while on the piss – no more, no less, than getting a new tatt reading “You Flew Here We Grew Here”. It’s not a bad day to stay in, really.
I understand why Anzac resonates for young people, especially when they visit that beach at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. It is hard to be unmoved by the rows upon rows of white stones bearing the names of the 8700 dead. Or by the impact of their deaths on the infant Federation of Australia. Or by how the survivors, having fought under the British flag in an ultimately pointless imperial military operation, endured decades of subsequent psychological and physical pain.
And that’s how the flag, a beach and Anzac should really resonate for all Australians.
No – the Anzacs never fought for Cronulla.
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