White tribe: Echoes of the Anzac myth in Cronulla

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisors, Mark Davis and Fran Martin for their feedback and support. I would also like to thank Greg Noble and Tanja Dreher for sharing their research and offering me encouragement during my field research. In particular, and with great warmth, I would like to thank the people I interviewed in Cronulla. Without your generosity the article could not have been written.

Notes

1. All references in this article to the Federal government and Federal policy directions refer to the Howard government (1996–2007) and do not comment on the policy of the current Federal government.

2. This framework demonstrates how new Australians have access to a ‘passive’ form of belonging to the nation, while white Australians are granted a privileged relationship which bestows a right to practise ‘nationalist practices of exclusion’ (Hage 1998, 36–47).

3. Burke links the meanings of governing security with the formulation of modern state power which is assembled around a ‘central, organising racism’ that identifies the individual and national sovereign: as primally estranged from the Other, the criminal, the socialist, the aboriginal or the ethnic minority. This entrenched a powerful image of sovereign identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference; thus in pursuit of its own survival, that sovereign subject is always entitled to deploy violence. As Hobbes wrote, the Sovereignty (sic) has the right ‘to do whatsoever he think necessary to be done … for the preserving of Peace and Security’ (Burke 2002, 7–11; Hobbes 1985, 233).

4. See George W. Bush's speech following the September 11 attacks.

5. See Poynting et al. (2004).

6. ‘The boys I grew up with in Cronulla disproved the theory of evolution. They were kind of evolving into apes. It would have looked much more natural if they squatted on their haunches and groomed each other, you know. And we girls were just second-class citizens. We lived vicariously through them. We were sort of nothing more than a life-support system to a vagina.’ Kathy Lette, interview with George Negus on ABC radio, 2 October 2003.

7. See Poynting et al. (2004).

8. See Hartley and Green (2006).