After Cronulla: ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are We Now?’

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• Islamophobia
• race riots
• whiteness
• multiculturalism
• interculturalism

In December 2005, in the predominantly Anglo surf community of Cronulla, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, a skirmish between two lifesavers and young men of Lebanese cultural heritage precipitated events that produced some of the worst scenes of race rioting Australia has seen in recent times. In response to the skirmish, which would have passed unnoticed perhaps at other times – but which powerfully intersected with post September 11 moral panics regarding a vaguely defined ‘Muslim’ terrorist threat – locals organised a ‘protest’ publicised through SMS messages, which called on ‘Aussies’ to ‘support Leb and wog bashing day’: ‘Bring your mates and let’s show them that this is our beach and they are never welcome’. In response, an estimated 5000 people turned up to ‘reclaim the beach’. Many young members of the crowd were draped in Australian flags and displayed racist slogans such as ‘we grew here, you flew here’ and ‘ethnic cleansing unit’ on t-shirts and bodies. After a morning of drinking and chanting the crowd began to seek a target for their anger, resulting in a handful of youth of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ being violently assaulted by a riotous mob. Angered by the violence, the following evening small numbers of young men of Lebanese heritage drove to Cronulla to retaliate. Arrests were made on both sides, leaving media, politicians, social institutions and the public to sift through the remains of the ‘riot’, to make sense of what had occurred and particularly what it meant for Australia’s self-perception as a ‘laid back’ and harmonious multicultural society (Johns 2015).

Academics responded by examining the causes of the riots, with some of those responses collected in the volume Lines in the Sand (Noble 2009), which traced the political and social context of a multicultural backlash and rise of right-wing populism in the Australian political landscape, as well as the connections between this and the scenes of racialised violence on the iconic space of the Australian beach. Institutional responses were also telling of how the event was framed and managed by political elites and social institutions. A review of the police response, Strike Force Neil, for example, was undertaken to investigate the role of the police, and make recommendations towards the prevention of another Cronulla. The report gave a number of explanations for the riot, which included, but played down, the role of racism; while emphasising links between alcohol consumption and the media manipulation of impressionable youth as key factors. The report also predictably laid blame on Middle Eastern ‘gangs’ (Hazzard 2006). The then Prime Minister John Howard reluctantly weighed in to declare the riots a ‘law and order issue’, tellingly dismissing suggestions that the event was symptomatic of a deeper malaise by famously declaring ‘I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country’. Implicit in these reactions was a desire to bracket off the event as an anomaly and to move on quickly.

And yet, more than 10 years after the event, Cronulla has not gone away. It continues to be represented in media accounts and the popular imaginary as a disturbance of official narratives of multicultural harmony, and it’s scenes of angry young men holding the flag as they assault Australians of Middle Eastern appearance continue to inflame discussions about racism and multiculturalism in Australia. The 10-year anniversary of the Cronulla riots, in particular, triggered fresh commentary on the event’s significance and impact: Personal recollections of those affected by the racism were voiced and the linkages between the riots and new far-right nationalist and anti-Islamic movements were considered. In an article published on the eve of the 10-year anniversary, Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane wrote that ‘echoes’ of the violence in Cronulla are still being felt. He criticised the failure of the political leadership at the time to address the problem of racism, however also continued the approach of bracketing-off the new violence as an exception to the rule, arguing that the ‘overall state of multiculturalism remains strong’ and that the voices of far-right nationalists ‘aren’t the voices of mainstream Australia’ (Soutphossamane 2015). The current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has echoed John Howard’s denialist lines in his support for a weakening of the Racial Discrimination Act on the basis that ‘all Australians are absolutely opposed to racism’ anyway (Parliament Question Time 21 March 2017). The media and official response to the 10-year anniversary of the riots, and subsequent debates about racism in Australia, while at times recognising the ongoing significance and effects of the riot, do not challenge the frames used to explain the violence when it occurred, even where some of these may have too neatly constructed the violence as an aberration.

Addressing these challenges, in December 2015 Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation and Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society convened a conference which invited scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of multicultural and race relations in Australia (and internationally) to reflect on what the riots meant – then and now – and whether, in a world preoccupied with the War on Terror, the riots remain a useful reference point for discussions of racism, intercultural relations, and multiculturalism in Australia. The conference highlighted themes not deeply engaged with in mainstream discourse, prompting ongoing reflection, negotiation, and entanglement with the question that framed the point of departure in Lines in the Sand: ‘where the bloody hell are we?’. Echoing this question, this issue asks what do we make of the relationship between the violence in 2005 and what is happening a decade on in national and global contexts? Islamophobia, for example, is becoming a core feature of a far-right and nationalist resurgence globally, and debates on whether free speech should be granted a higher status in law than the prosecution of racial discrimination have triggered fresh reflections on how to enhance multiculturalism in an Australian context where it remains threatened.

The scholarship brought together in this special issue coheres around a number of broad concerns. While the complexity and ‘messiness’ of the riots has been a significant finding of research and reflection in the intervening years, some of the drivers of the racism and violence have also become clarified. One of those is the core role of Islamophobia in discussions that fuel hate speech and racial violence; in everyday situations, as well as the more spectacular examples of far-right nationalist movements. The issue highlights the normalisation of Islamophobia in the decade that has elapsed since the riot. It also incorporates critical reflection on scholarship that may have been too quick to ‘learn lessons’ from the event; paying particular attention to the frames used to examine the event more than a decade ago now, which may have been too hasty in asserting meanings, or to take Cronulla as illustrative of Australian society generally. In this issue, the frames applied to understand the original event are examined, as are processes of time and memory taken up in mainstream commemorations or more critical scholarly reflections. Space and place also emerge as a significant theme, with the riots continuing to shape the geographies and freedom of movement of those racialised by the violence, while social and digital media spaces are analysed as new sites where nationalist violence and hate speech is mobilised.

The papers in this special issue address three interrelated themes: First, the constructions of race, processes of racialisation and manifestations of racism that Cronulla brought to light, and the ways that these manifest more than a decade after the event and the debate about difference and inclusion that ensued. Second, meanings of nationalism, the Australian national imaginary and the role of the state and citizen participation in addressing racism and managing multiculturalism. Third, everyday intercultural relations in diverse communities in Australia today, with a particular focus on young people who have become the locus of hopes and fears for a cohesive society.

In addressing these interrelated themes, Amanda Wise opens this issue with a consideration of six modes by which the racism expressed at Cronulla has been disowned by contemporary commentators. She argues that the fundamental racism by White Australians towards ‘Arabs’ that drove the riots and now underpins attitudes towards Muslims has been subject to processes of erasure and disavowal. She argues that while there may not be another Cronulla, to inquire about it is to fall prey to aberrationist thinking. Instead it is more relevant to consider its legacy as the deep-rooted culture of casual Islamophobia that ‘permeates the mundane spaces of everyday middle-Australia’. When the racism that produced those events is denied or side-stepped, this is what flourishes.

Greg Noble and Paul Tabar’s paper also considers how different modes of remembering (and forgetting) the riots highlight the different stakes and interests involved. Using theories of social memory, the authors argue that the significance of the riots remains difficult to pin down because social memory is inevitably unevenly distributed, situated, and contested. They argue that representational modes of analysis have, in the intervening years, simplified and reduced the event, overstating institutional and collective aspects of social memory that foreclose on other less dominant modes of remembering the riots. Addressing this, the authors make space for a mode of social memory often forgotten in official discourse, the embodied memory resulting from injuries of racism experienced by many of Middle Eastern backgrounds during and after the riots, which the authors claim have had had the most profound and lasting consequences.

In their contribution, Anita Harris and Melinda Herron suggest that the riots have disproportionately shaped public understandings and governmental management of intercultural relations among young people in a period preoccupied with ‘social cohesion’. Drawing on research with young people in culturally diverse areas, they argue that an approach to youth sociality which construes intercultural relations as a problem does not take account of the mix of conviviality and discord that prevail in youth interactions. They demonstrate how diverse social bonds develop via an array of routine and affective encounters, but that these bonds are not removed from experiences of conflict. Convivial forms of intercultural relations are entwined with ‘everyday racism’, but these do not negate the development of an ‘ethos of fellow-feeling’. Racialised forms of humour, for example, have a complex role in intimate relations. Without romanticising youth, they make a case for examining the dynamic ‘entanglements of ethno-racial difference’ and multiple lines along which youth affiliate and differentiate themselves.

Wendy Shaw’s paper unpacks the silencing of Aboriginal voices in debates about racialisation and racism, and how this manifested in what appeared to be an Aboriginal silence about the riots. She demonstrates how those with the longest memories of racialisation in Australia in fact produced some of the most powerful and critical commentaries on the events in artistic works, often drawing on humour and playfulness to provoke and unsettle the viewer. She suggests that these visual works ultimately have greater impact and reach than the immediate and reflective scholarship or media commentary that attempted to explain Cronulla through written and verbal analysis.

Rhonda Itaoui and Kevin Dunn’s paper continues on themes of embodied memory and unbelonging, highlighting the spatial dimensions of these phenomena as experienced by young Sydney residents of Muslim faith, 10 years after the riots. The authors draw from survey and interview data collected with young Muslims in Sydney in 2014 to ask what impact media representations of the Cronulla riot has had on young people’s spatial negotiations of Cronulla and other neighbouring suburbs. Framing the analysis is an understanding that media representations produce racialised spatial imaginaries. The paper argues that the Cronulla riot’s lasting legacy has been to teach young Muslims that they are prohibited from Cronulla and other predominantly white spaces. The authors argue that this rehearses what Noble and Poynting (2010) refer to as ‘pedagogies of unbelonging’ whereby certain areas, believed to be Islamophobic, are avoided. These negotiations have the effect of limiting the spatial mobility of young Muslims, impacting their sense of belonging to the city and nation.

Scott Poynting and Shakira Hussein’s paper compares representations of the Cronulla riots at the time, to those of contemporary far-right nationalist groups today to see how the passage of time has shaped mainstream public reactions to these formations. The authors argue that since that time two developments have emerged. First, the far-right nationalism and racism that shocked the Australian public in the Cronulla riots has now become a normalised and accepted feature of public debate. Second, the target of the racism and violence exhibited in the riots has become clearer, with the authors arguing that, though it was not acknowledged at the time, the anti-Arab and anti-Lebanese racism displayed in the riots had clear Islamophobic elements, which have become more confidently asserted in contemporary movements. Finally the authors suggest that the Islamophobia examined, rather than being specific to the Australian context, is now a recognisable feature of similar movements throughout the global West.

Amelia Johns’ paper revisits data from her earlier book (2015) – which demonstrated complicated intersections of whiteness, racism, gender, religion, and place – to examine current expressions of white nationalism. Central to her earlier argument was the recognition – against simplistic debates around whether Australia was racist or not – of the ambivalent and contested symbolism of the flag and nation in the riots; despite their centrality to the nationalist display. Contemporary social media entails conditions that were not present during the riot but, Johns claims, allow for the current mobilisation of digitally mediated expressions of nationalism, shifting emphasis from locality to networked publics. Examining the Australian Defence League and Reclaim Australia's online representations, she argues that performances of white nationalism in the riots have migrated online, with ‘virtual shires’ providing new spaces for the mobilisation of extreme attempts to ‘reclaim’ Australia. In a context of a deepening rejection of the liberal democratic consensus, these performances find mainstream audiences that move beyond the nation to global contexts. This reach has not, however, eliminated the ambivalence at the heart of these movements, so they remain powerful but unstable alliances, subject to internal fragmentation.

Finally, despite the centrality of panics around terrorism in the West over the last decade or so, David Kelly and Michele Lobo remind us that race relations in this country have an older and more complex history. They also remind us, in contrast to the White ethno-nationalism which has gripped the populist politics of urban centres, of the need to turn our attention to intercultural relations in places outside the major cities. They focus on the protest against forced community closures in Broome and a ‘celebration walk’ through Darwin during National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Week to reflect on the possibilities of an emancipatory politics that embraces difference. They offer an ‘optics from the Top End’ and argue that these events exhibit an affirming moment of ‘being-in-common’ in a post-Cronulla Australia. These quite different forms of politics reclaim public space and, mobilising a conceptualisation of commoning as a relational process that unfolds in cooperative and collective action, they offer a more hopeful possibility of ‘reclaiming Australia’.

As is often the case with special issue collections based on a conference, we have not been able to publish all of the very insightful papers presented. We would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the conference the ‘Muslim Question: Citizenship and Racism in Australia’, held at the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI) on the 14–15 December 2015. We would particularly like to thank co-convenors of the overall conference Professor Fethi Mansouri (director of ADI), and Dr Michele Lobo. As it was the participation of those who presented on day two of the conference, subtitled ‘After Cronulla’, which frames the collection brought together here, however, we would like to reserve special thanks for participants who contributed to the conversations, debates, and ideas that emerged on that day. In particular we would like to thank keynote speakers: Anoop Nayak, Ghassan Hage, and Amanda Wise (whose paper is published in this issue). We would also like to thank the generous funding support for the conference from the Institute for Culture and Society, and also the School of Social Science and Psychology at Western Sydney University, in addition to Alfred Deakin Institute for citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. We would very much like to thank those who took time out of their busy schedules to offer blind reviews of the papers submitted to the issue. We particularly thank the Journal of Intercultural Studies editors (Vince Marotta and Paula Muraca) for their support and patience through the editorial process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Amelia Johns is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. Her work spans the fields of digital media studies, cultural studies, and youth studies and examines issues of: whiteness and youth identity; Muslim, migrant, and diaspora youth negotiations of racism and citizenship in digitally networked publics. Her current research project examines Malaysian-Chinese youth digital practices, and the role ‘the digital’ plays in negotiations of political participation, citizenship, and belonging. She is the author of Battle for the Flag (MUP 2015), an empirical investigation of youth performances of racism, nationalism and whiteness in the Cronulla riots of 2005. She is also a co-editor of recently published book Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest, Culture (with Anthony McCosker and Sonja Vivienne, Rowman & Littlefield 2016).

Greg Noble is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Greg has conducted research in multiculturalism for 30 years, with particular interests in: Lebanese communities; racism; youth, ethnicity, and gender; Bourdieusian analysis; cultural pedagogies and education. His books include Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct (2015, Routledge), Disposed to Learn (with Megan Watkins 2013, Bloomsbury), Bin Laden in the Suburbs (with Scott Poynting, Paul Tabar, and Jock Collins 2004, Sydney Institute of Criminology) and, of course, Lines in the Sand: The Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism and National Belonging (2009, Sydney Institute of Criminology).

Anita Harris is a Research Professor in the Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. She researches in the area of youth citizenship, youth cultures, and participatory practice in changing times. She is completing an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship investigating intercultural relations amongst youth in multicultural cities in Australia and around the world (‘Young People and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City’) and has recently undertaken a major project on ‘The Civic Life of Young Muslim Australians’. She is the author of several books in youth studies, most recently Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (2013, Routledge, New York).