Place Stigma as Boundary-making from the Outside In: the case of Cronulla

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Paul Mbenna for contributing ideas to this essay, and for allowing me to write so openly about our family; and to Chris Gibson for the invitation to write this piece. My appreciation also goes to Chantel Carr and Ananth Gopal for commenting on a draft of this manuscript, and to Danielle Drozdzewski and Melinda Norquay for giving me access to their ‘under review' manuscript about Cronulla.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am informed, in this essay, by Ghassan Hage's (1998) categories: ‘Good White nationalists’ and ‘White ‘evil’ nationalists’.

2 Gibson (2013, 62) has defined bogan as ‘a term of derision with some parallel to white trash in the US and chav in the UK, used mockingly to describe people of working-class origin, people considered ‘“rough” and uncultured’.

3 Rural geographers have contributed important perspectives on this matter. They have insisted on greater recognition of the multicultural nature of stereotypically ‘white’ places (like rural England and Australia), to avoid marginalising the lives and experiences of ethnic minority people who live there (Askins 2009; Panelli et al. 2009).

4 Captain Cook Bridge is one of two bridges crossing Sydney's Georges River, providing an entryway to the Sutherland Shire. It is a common joke—usually made by people who live outside the Sutherland Shire—that you need a visa and passport to get in (Verghis 2002).

5 I have borrowed here from Hage's (1998, 45) observation that ‘the “ethnic” is … a being which is “caged”, not someone who can easily claim the position of managing the field’.