Cronulla Riots Research Articles

The Imagined Immunities of Defense Nationalism

This article examines the narratives, imaginaries, and subjectivities that underpin the far‐right, ethnic nationalist “defense leagues” that have emerged in Australia (and across Europe) in the past decade. Referencing three, interrelated nationalist events in Australia—the Cronulla Riots, Cronulla Memorial Day, and the “race‐riot” that occurred in Melbourne on January 5, 2019—I argue that defense leagues resist conceptualization through existing theories of nationalism and community, including those articulated by Anderson, Hage, and Esposito. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I argue that unlike other nationalists, defense nationalists are not primarily concerned with realizing their avowed political projects (such as fortifying national borders, halting immigration, and preserving so‐called national values). Instead, they are focused on constructing and enjoying themselves as the privileged national subjects who get to do the nation's defending. As I elaborate, the enjoyment they derive from defending the nation—which is approximate to the Lacanian concept of jouissance—means that paradoxically, that which threatens the nation legitimizes and fortifies the nationalist, because the more the nation is threatened, the more the nationalist's perceived role within it is secured. Ultimately, I argue this jouissance salvages a symbolic life within the nation that is always‐already dead.

From victims to suspects: Muslim women since 9/11

Shakira Hussein's From victims to suspects explores how, since the ‘war on terror’, Muslim women find themselves trapped between their perceived roles of helpless and docile beings on the one hand, and dangerous terrorists on the other. Drawing on relevant events such as the ‘burkini’ ban in France, the ‘ban the burka’ campaign in Australia and the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Hussein's book is a necessary academic intervention on an often misunderstood contemporary issue. The preface to the book opens with a description of Oprah Winfrey's recitation of ‘Under the burqa’, a monologue written by the author of The vagina monologues, Eve Ensler. This recitation was followed by a powerful performance in which Oprah slowly lifted the burka off a young member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This event happened only a few months before the 11 September attacks and, in Hussein's view, rendered Muslim women into ‘icons of victimhood’—thus providing a pretext for the ‘American rescue mission’ in Afghanistan.

Belonging and Social Identity Among Young People in Western Sydney, Australia

This article explores young people’s everyday life in multiethnic Australian communities. The focus is on interethnic social identity and belonging to the Australian society. The research gives an insight into social relationships, social networks and attitudes to the Australian culture among young people living in multiethnic neighbourhoods. Conceptually, the research is framed around Bourdieu’s habitus discourse and the influence of social and cultural capital on young people’s perceptions and attitudes. A survey of 339 young people residing in Western and South Western Sydney, Australia, was undertaken in 2007. Ninety-five percent of the young people were from minority migrant backgrounds, and two thirds were born in Australia. The majority of them feel good about living in Australia, while only a small percentage rarely or never share this feeling. The findings demonstrate a more positive atmosphere and contradict evidence highlighted by pessimistic predictions of anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalism critics. For many people of minority ethnic backgrounds, the Australian multicultural society works in a cohesive and inclusive way most of the time. The findings, even when sometimes contradictory, emphasise that the Australian multicultural society was working well in 2007. The young people in the research acknowledged to be influenced by the Cronulla riots, but it had a minor influence on their perception of social identity, social networks or feeling connected to Australia.

Bold Walks in the Inner North: Melbourne Women’s Memoir after Jill Meagher

Bold Walks in the Inner North: Melbourne Women’s Memoir after Jill Meagher

Riot and revenge

Abe Forsythe's Down Under (2016) is the first narrative feature film about the Cronulla riots, the infamous event on 11 December 2005 where over 5000 white Australians, responding to a minor local incident, descended on Cronulla Beach in Sydney and proceeded to harass, chase and bash anybody who they perceived to be of Middle Eastern appearance. In the following nights, a series of violent retaliatory attacks took place, as community leaders called for calm. Suvendrini Perera identifies how a symmetrical narrative had emerged in the wake of the riot and its aftermath, whereby Cronulla Beach "comes to stand for a paired sequence of events, the riot and the revenge, in a fable of equivalence in which two misguided groups . . . mirror each other's ignorance and prejudices". This article considers how Down Under reinforces the distortive implications of this "riot and revenge" narrative by maintaining a structural equilibrium, through the rigorous balancing of its narrative and characters, and formally, via its soundtrack, cinematography and editing patterns. In so doing, and despite its antiracist sentiments, the film ultimately dilutes the issue of race and obscures the power imbalances that informed the riot, and which continue to this day

Media Representations of Racism and Spatial Mobility: Young Muslim (Un)belonging in a Post-Cronulla Riot Sutherland

ABSTRACTYoung Australian Muslims living in Sydney have been influenced by the Cronulla riot. Online surveys (n: 76) and interviews (n: 10) reveal the impact on their engagement with the Sutherland region around Cronulla, detectable a decade after this event. The exclusionary intent of the rioters and their sympathisers was a racist form of spatial management that had both specific and general aims. The Australian news media contribute to the ethnic purification that was originally intended by the Cronulla riots. This reduces mobility among an ‘ethnic other’ in accessing spaces that have been portrayed as ‘racist’ – or, in the case of young Muslims, ‘Islamophobic’. Findings demonstrate the ongoing consequences of a wide-scale racist attack, like the Cronulla riot, on urban citizenship. Representations of the Cronulla riot are a repertoire of learning for young Sydney Muslims that rehearse what has been conceptualised as pedagogies of (un)belonging by Noble and Poynting [(2010). White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31, 489–505]. We have extended the application of this concept to a specific space and point to the means by which constructions of unbelonging are reinforced and made material. Processes of repetition and accumulations identified by Butler and Essed highlight how this enduring pedagogy of spatial unbelonging is maintained by media representations of places as Islamophobic.

‘We’re Not Multicultural, but … ’

ABSTRACTThis article reconsiders the 2005 Cronulla riots after ten years. We begin by examining three examples of events misread ten years ago, to illustrate some key changes that have since shaped Australian racism. The first two, concern the rallying call to ‘Leb and wog bashing day’ at Cronulla in December 2005, and the attack there on two Bangladeshi students. These are shown to be indicative in a shift in the focus of racist Othering in Australia, from the ‘Arab Other’ to the ‘Muslim Other’, as Islamophobia becomes increasingly mainstreamed in Australian culture following the trend throughout the global West. Second, the incongruous chivalry-cum-feminism of the beachgoers who participated in the riot and were interviewed in the 2006 Four Corners television documentary, Riot and Revenge, illustrates some key features of Islamophobia as it has developed and become entrenched: such as accusing Muslims of hyperpatriarchy, and purporting to ‘rescue’ Muslim women while targeting them for racist vilification. We trace these and related ideological elements of Islamophobia inherent in the Cronulla riots, and show how these have unfolded in the Australian mainstream in the ten years since, becoming further enfolded into the commonsense as part of the ‘new normal’.

Flagging White Nationalism ‘After Cronulla’: From the Beach to the Net

ABSTRACTIn this article, I use a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots. Social media affordances present a set of conditions that were absent during the 2005 riot, and yet, are today mobilising distinct variants of white nationalism online. Rather than these expressions being locally situated, social media allows these performances to be connected up virtually, extending the white nationalists’ capacity to occupy and terrorise a range of networked public and intimate spaces and influence mainstream political culture. Nonetheless social media affordances, which situate these movements in a virtual ‘ecology of subcultures’ also contributes to their instability and ambivalence, with the uncivil ‘trolling’ practices of online movements undermining broader social goals and contributing to even more extreme and unstable expressions online.

Young People and Intercultural Sociality after Cronulla

ABSTRACTThis paper considers how the Cronulla riots have shaped some popular directions in theory and practice regarding young people’s intercultural relations that are primarily focused on social cohesion, harmony and cultural understanding. Drawing on research we have undertaken post-Cronulla with young people in some of Australia’s most diverse (and disadvantaged) neighbourhoods, we suggest that this approach to improving youth interculturality does not adequately account for the complex forms of sociality that exist in multicultural youth cultures. We illustrate how routine and intimate intercultural engagements are interwoven with forms of discord, some of it racialised and racist, but not always destructive of simultaneous positive fellow-feeling. We argue for greater attention to the multiple lines along which youth affiliate, connect and also differentiate themselves that inform their practices of inclusion and exclusion beyond lack of cultural understanding.

Wounded Detachments: Cronulla, Social Memory and the Injuries of Racism

ABSTRACTMore than a decade since the Cronulla Riots, it could be argued that we are none the wiser about what they meant. Frequently evoked in public discourse, ‘Cronulla’ has become a benchmark for the worst of Australian society (whether that is seen as racism or multiculturalism). This paper reflects upon the representation of the Riots to explore three key ideas. First, we need to think about Cronulla through an exploration of the situated processes of social memory. There is no single ‘meaning’ of the Riots. In fact, the symbolic place of ‘Cronulla’ in public discourse is a contested space in which competing interests, processes and perspectives are at stake. Second, social memory is a complex and dispersed architecture of remembering and forgetting, but analysis typically focuses on the institutional and collective dimensions of social memory at the expense of other domains. Third, and drawing on some of the theoretical literature, we explore a different kind of memory that is forgotten in political and media representations of Cronulla – the embodied memory resulting from the injuries of racism experienced by those of Middle Eastern background. We see Cronulla entailing a violent and existential threat which detaches them from full belonging in Australia.

The Long Reach of the Riots: Denying Racism, Forgetting Cronulla

ABSTRACT1Sydney’s 2005 Cronulla Riots marked a watershed moment in race relations between White and Arabic-speaking Australians. In this essay, I reflect on how the riots now sit in the public imagination and explore how certain narratives on the riots have produced a series of problematic silences, disownings, and forgettings. I elaborate six modes of denial and disavowal – modes of sidestepping and disowning the racism that underpinned the riot and more contemporary attitudes towards Muslim Australians. The paper is framed around six ‘modes’ of silence: (1) Always Elsewheres, Always Someone Else; (2) The Spectacular; (3) The Narrative of ‘Past-ness’; (4) Twisted Tolerance; (5) Slippery Humour; (6) Interpolation of Non-Arab Subjects into the White Project. Some claim that the Cronulla Riots were an aberration and many in the ‘Shire’ wish that attention would move on. After all, the riots were a decade ago and the ‘kids’ who participated have all grown up. There has been no trouble on the beach since. I suggest, however, that the riots have a much longer reach – culturally, geographically, and temporally – than is generally understood.

After Nulla: Through the Lens of Aboriginal Art

ABSTRACTAfter the riots at Cronulla, I wrote about the separation of that event as a one-off in popular imaginings, while others were riotous flashpoints. The tricky manoeuvres of whiteness include its capacity to produce cultures of racialisation that demonise some, while exonerating the riotous behaviours of others. Aboriginal commentaries on the events at Cronulla were scarce, at that time. Since then, Aboriginal artists have provided commentary on the Cronulla riot as part of a wider critique of whiteness and racialisation in Australia. Fiona Foley’s series of photographs titled ‘Nulla 4 Eva’ infuse Aboriginal, Middle Eastern and Asian ethnicities onto the canvas of Cronulla’s whiteness. Vernon Ah Kee’s Cantchant series also provides commentary on the riots. These Aboriginal artists recall that racialised extremism is not a recent or one-off phenomenon in neocolonial Australia, while Sandra Hill’s Homemaker #6: Surfs Up asks who owns the beach? These artworks provide a reminder of the uneasy relationships between the identifications of Aboriginality and the groups that have arrived since invasion. Cronulla ‘ten years on’ was a time to reflect by including some of the understandings and commentaries of those with the longest memories of racialisation and processual whiteness, in Australia.

Visualising risk in Pat Grant’s Blue: xenophobia and graphic narrative

ABSTRACTPublished in 2012, Pat Grant’s debut graphic novel, Blue, depicts life in Bolton, a fictional Australian town that receives migrants who look noticeably different from the local community. Risk shapes Blue with regard to its aesthetic and formal concerns: the racism in Bolton places the foreigners at risk; Christian’s uneasy nostalgia depicts a community vulnerable to the ravages of time; and the work itself was self-published by Grant as a graphic novel. The genesis of the work arose from Grant’s accidental presence at the 2005 Cronulla riots in Sydney, a clash between Anglo and Middle Eastern Australians that brought to the fore questions about racism and community in Australian society. I argue that comics are highly suited to exploring ‘risky’ narratives because of the medium’s history as well as its formal properties. Comics have thus become popular vehicles for social criticism, frequently in the form of autobiography and memoir. As a highly mediated form, comics map time as space and in this article I argue that the form productively depicts the return of the past in the present – especially for pasts whose remembrance is inherently compromised or prohibited through other form of record in the visual archive.

Stereotyping the Shire: Assigning White Privilege to Place and Identity

ABSTRACTThrough a focus on the media’s role in constructing and maintaining stereotypes of white privilege and racism, this paper investigates the stereotyping of the Sutherland Shire, Sydney, Australia, and its residents. Print media plays a significant role in constructing social identities, shaping public opinion and typecasting public perception. Using a media content analysis and surveys with residents and non-residents of the Sutherland Shire we (de)construct the area’s positioning in media discourse as white, insular and privileged. Pivotal to this investigation was the 2005 Cronulla riots and their influence on assertions of white privilege and racism, in the media and by non-Sutherland Shire residents. While not vindicating some resident’s roles in the riots, we reason that such typecasting provides an avenue for the predominately white media, and white Sydney to deflect responsibility for their own whiteness by attributing and spatializing racist sentiment to elsewhere in Sydney.

Faces sailing by: ‘Junk Theory’ and racialized bodies in the Sutherland Shire

Abstract This article explores how the arts-for-social change company, Big hART, responded to the Cronulla riots in Western Sydney, Australia. The riots were instigated on 4 December 2005 following an altercation between three Anglo-Australian lifeguards and a group of men identified as being of Lebanese background. Big hART’s creative response, ‘Junk Theory’, involved the collaboration of youth from diverse cultural groups in the Sutherland Shire and resulted in a moving-media installation that projected digital stories onto the sails of a junk boat. With its message, ‘It’s harder to hurt someone when you know their story’, the work raises important questions regarding diversity, social cohesion and the corporeal force of community-based art. My critique of this work is the starting point for my interest in the material – and often subtle – ways that racialized bodies come to be produced through multiculturalism discourse. I want to add to the contemporary scholarship account of a tension between theoretical/political multiculturalism and its everyday engagements, by utilizing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to examine the multicultural body in both public and creative space. The article uses performativity to consider how it is that certain bodies came to be seen as beyond the limits of not only the Cronulla beach, but humanness itself. It then considers how the same theory makes way for slippages, which, if harnessed, may be used to deconstruct the racialized body in everyday art forms.

The Cronulla riots: Muslims’ place in the white imaginary spatiality

On 11 December 2005 at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach about 5000 Australians, mostly young men from Sutherland Shire, wrapped themselves in Australian flags and asserted that Cronulla Beach belonged to them through abusive language against Lebanese Australians. Subsequently, on 12 December 2005 a group of Australians of Lebanese heritage launched an attack in reprisal. The former group exhibited their “Australianness” through an urban model based on exclusion, implying they were the West so, of course, they were better than the rest. The latter fought back, exhibiting that they also represented the West. They demonstrated their territorial rights as they asserted that the beach also belonged to them. The rather aggressive posturing of both parties raises the question of whether Muslim Australians have a place in the white imaginary spatiality.

Australian Idol versus Cronulla: Whither the Postcolonising Nation?

Australian Idol versus Cronulla: Whither the Postcolonising Nation?

The Politics and Poetics of Listening: Attending Headphone Verbatim Theatre in Post-Cronulla Australia

This article analysesStories of Love & Hate, a headphone verbatim play produced in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Australia. While verbatim theatre typically invites audiences to listen therapeutically,Stories of Love & Hateenacts and enables two alternative forms of listening. First, it enacts the paradoxical mode of ‘ethical eavesdropping’; second, it enables the metatheatrical mode of ‘mediatized listening’. In doing so, the play asks spectators to reconsider whom they listen to and how. It also asks scholars to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre gives voice to those who go unheard by the media. Instead, the article argues that in the case ofStories of Love & Hate, headphone verbatim theatre enables the audience to listen to how the media listen.

Multicultural Citizenship and Religiosity: Young Australian Muslims Forging a Sense of Belonging after 9/11

This article investigates the role religiosity plays in the ways young Australian Muslims enact themselves as citizens in a context in which their right to belong to the political community is often seriously questioned. Australian responses to 9/11, 7/7 and the Cronulla Riots have relied on an understanding of Muslim youth identity that sees young Muslims' religiosity primarily as a barrier to the development of good citizenship practices. Against this backdrop, this article explores the ways in which religiosity informs the everyday acts of citizenship through which young Muslims challenge dominant narratives of citizenship. Drawing on an ethnographic study of two Melbourne-based Shia youth groups, I look at the subjective accounts of multicultural citizenship that youth group members shared in the course of the groups' weekly activities. In doing so, I draw particular attention to the role religion plays in the imaginative ways young Australian Muslims fashion themselves into citizens.

Balancing Trust and Anxiety in a Culture of Fear

To date, there is no empirical research on the risk perceptions of Sydneysiders following the Cronulla riots nor are there any connections made between risk perceptions and ontological security in the mobile communication literature. This article addresses this gap by exploring the risk perceptions of individuals in the wake of these riots, specifically, their reactions to the new surveillance measures and policing of text messaging. This qualitative study uses empirical data collected from 30 one-on-one interviews conducted 12 to 16 months after the riots. To provide a theoretical framework for these risk perceptions Anthony Giddens’ notion of ontological security, the inner balance between trust and anxiety is used. The data analysis shows that while individuals risk perceptions are complex and contradictory, they use a range of methods to create a balance between trust and anxiety. This article argues that to manage fear in a present or perceived threat, individuals are disposed to mediate any actual or perceived risks by bracketing out anxieties to manage their everyday lives.