‘Shrinking Worlds’: Cronulla, Anti‐Lebanese Racism and Return Visits in the Sydney Hadchiti Lebanese Community

Abstract

By drawing on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork in western Sydney with immigrants who are Maronite Catholics from Hadchit, North Lebanon, I demonstrate the pervasiveness of anti‐Lebanese racism in Australia and the way it cuts across class, gender and religion within the Lebanese community. My fieldwork was conducted around the time of two pivotal events: the 2005 Cronulla Riots in Sydney and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. By focusing on the experience of racism within the Hadchiti community, I show that the problems the Lebanese face in Australia cannot be attributed only to their economic disadvantage, low education and religious difference. On the contrary, the Hadchiti experience shows that Australia has a ‘glass ceiling’ and that there are distinct limits to the ability of successful Lebanese to translate their success into national belonging in Australian society. This has been particularly acute for the second generation of Hadchitis in Australia and has contributed to their search for transnational belonging back in Lebanon. During return visits to Hadchit, members of the second generation strive to find a place in the society their parents left behind, only to discover that they are considered to be ‘Australian’ rather than ‘Lebanese’. Thus, they are trapped in a migration process that renders them out of place in both Australia and Lebanon.

Keywords:

• Cronulla Riots
• Racism
• Lebanese
• Maronites
• Return Visits

Notes

1. Acknowledgments: I thank all the kind people in the Hadchiti community in Sydney who supported my research, especially the Loulach and Rizk families. I also thank my academic support from The Australian National University, The University of Western Sydney and the University of Sydney, in particular my supervisor, Dr Ashley Carruthers, for all his guidance, and my advisors, Professor Ghassan Hage and Dr Greg Noble, for the roles they played in supporting my research. I also thank my father, Dr David Hyndman, for reading many drafts of this paper, and my mother, Mary Rizik Hyndman, for raising me with an appreciation of our Lebanese roots. Last, but not least, I thank my husband, Kai Wallenius, who was the supporting spouse during my field research and looked after our three children, which was not always easy. A version of this paper was presented to the Everyday Multiculturalism Conference at Macquarie University, 28–29 September, 2006. While it has had suggestions and input from many people, in the end its faults and limitations are my own.

2. ‘The 2005 Cronulla riots were a series of ethnically motivated mob confrontations which originated in and around Cronulla, a beachfront suburb of Sydney … Soon after … violent incidents occurred in several other Sydney suburbs. On Sunday, 11 December 2005, approximately 5000 people had gathered to protest in response to some recently reported incidents of assaults and intimidatory behaviour by groups of non‐locals, some of whom were identified in earlier media reports as Middle Eastern youths from the suburbs of Western Sydney. The crowd had assembled following a series of earlier confrontations, and an assault on three off‐duty lifesavers which had taken place the previous weekend … violence broke out after a large segment of the mostly white crowd chased a man of Middle Eastern appearance into a hotel and other youths of Middle Eastern appearance were assaulted on a train. The following nights saw several retaliatory violent assaults in the communities near Cronulla and Maroubra, large gatherings of protesters around western Sydney, and an unprecedented police lock‐down of Sydney beaches and surrounding areas, between Wollongong and Newcastle.’ (Wikipedia. Accessed 14 November 2007)

3. The 2006 Lebanon War, known in Lebanon as the July War … was a 34‐day military conflict in Lebanon and northern Israel. The principal parties were Hezbollah paramilitary forces and the Israeli military. The conflict started on 12 July 2006, and continued until a United Nations‐brokered ceasefire went into effect on 14 August 2006, though it formally ended on 8 September 2006 when Israel lifted its naval blockade of Lebanon.’ (Wikipedia. Accessed 14 November 2007)

4. http://www.lebweb.com/site/lebanon‐hadchit‐8m‐22318

5. Australia has seen a revision in its attitudes and policies in relation to multiculturalism over the last decade, owing to a resurgence in anti‐immigrant sentiment, which Hage (1998) first detailed in White nation. This trend started with the emergence of Pauline Hanson as a Member of Parliament in the late 1990s, and became entrenched over the last decade under the leadership of Prime Minister John Howard and his conservative Coalition Government. The Cronulla Riots might be seen as a peak phase in Australia's multicultural crisis. Recently, we have seen the government shift its policies in relationship to migrants back towards assimilation and integration, with the symbolic gesture of changing the name of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to The Department of Immigration and Citizenship. For a full account of Australia's crisis in multiculturalism, see Hage (1998, 2003); Poynting et al. (2004).

6. HSC refers to the end‐of‐year exams sat by Year 12 students in New South Wales in order to gain their Senior High School Certificate and university entrance score.

7. 1. Cook, Terry. 6 March 2006. ‘Australian Treasurer Peter Costello joins anti‐Muslim bandwagon’. In World Socialist Web Site, pp. 1–4. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/cost‐m06.shtml

7. 2. This link quotes an Opinion piece by the Prime Minister, John Howard, published in the Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2006, with reference to immigrants and women's equality. http://catchthefire.com.au/blog/2006/09/05/pm‐john‐howard‐and‐peter‐costello‐speak‐out‐on‐muslim‐integration/

7. 3. Steketee, Mike. 20 September 2007. ‘Muslim integration still a simmering discontent’. The Australian. Following the Cronulla riots in Sydney in 2005, John Howard rejected the idea that there was underlying racism in Australia. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22447255‐25072,00.html | similar pages

7. 4. Franklin, Mathew. 1 January 2007. ‘Fraser warned on Lebanese migrants’. The Australian. … warned the Fraser government in 1976 it was accepting too many Lebanese Muslim refugees without ‘the required qualities’ for successful integration. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20996448‐601,00.html

8. A 500‐household survey of the Sydney Hadchit community shows 80 percent of Hadchit immigrant households in Sydney receive LBC Satellite TV transmitted from Lebanon.

9. The household survey of the Hadchit community also found that one or more members of 61 percent of households have returned to Hadchit in the last five years and, of those, 30 percent report they have returned frequently.

10. 28 percent of returnees specifically state that they return for the St. Raymond's Day Festival in Hadchit.