The Australian way
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ben Cubby
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Ben Cubby's biography and other articles by this writer
The morning after the Cronulla riot dawned cool, calm and clear. Early light caught surfers lolling on the small swell and picked out twinkles of mica in the footpaths along the esplanade. The sand had already been raked clean and a soothing breeze rolled in off the sea.
The previous day, on the same patch of shore, had been a twisted Guernica of struggling bodies: hit with fists, feet and heads, spat at, chased, scratched with fingernails, slashed with fangs of broken glass, clubbed with bats and cement blocks and one man stabbed and left on the ground, a snapped knife jutting from his back.
The contrast was eerie. It was as though something dark had boiled up on to land, ignited a mad frenzy, then slipped back overnight into the water. The only clues left in its wake were a few bloodstains on the concrete and a tattered flag caught fluttering in a pine tree.
But the illusion of a community violated by a malevolent, outside force quickly faded. That force came from within. The morning after the riot of Sunday, December 11, few on the beach were surprised or ashamed. "It's been coming for years; at least we got our beach back," said one cocky, bleach-haired kid.
It seemed as apt as most of the bland justifications that had to pass for comment in the days after the riot. Most of those directly involved were uneasy with words, as though they would be trapped and ridiculed if they spoke. The meaning slipped through the cracks of language, but locals had their own code of understanding. As an outsider, I didn't find it easy to read.
Over the following months, I conducted a series of interviews with some of those involved in the riots and revenge attacks, to better understand their actions. Gaining access to those involved was sometimes difficult, and a few would only speak on condition of anonymity. I wanted to understand why ordinary people would hurl bricks at cops and jeer at an ambulance, or line up in a convoy of cars, baseball bats across their knees, staring at the road and heading east.
AHMED IS TWENTY-FOUR. A BRICKLAYER BY TRADE, he spends much of his spare time at his mosque or working on his muscles at his gym. He lives with his mother and sister. Ahmed's broad face looks tough; his thick shoulders confirm it. He has been jailed in the past for inflicting lasting damage in a street fight. He didn't want to say exactly what he had done. In some situations, people find his physical presence overbearing, even frightening. Ahmed agreed to meet and talk about what happened the day following the riot, when he heard that a bomb had been planted at the Lakemba mosque.
He was playing Rugby League in a park near his Liverpool home when a carload of men drove past. "A car pulls up, they were Christians. They said there was a fight, the Australians were coming. They said they were attacking the mosque. They took off. I thought: ‘Here's some Christians in a car backing up my religion.' I jumped in my ute and took off to the mosque."
News rippled quickly through the community by text and word of mouth. Very soon, about a thousand people were milling beneath the mosque's minarets. It was a hot evening. All day, radio had been fizzing with talk of the beach violence. Outside the mosque, dozens of public conversations were going on at once, a hail of angry words in Arabic and English. Some shouted to calm the crowd, but anger about the previous day's riots was still raw. The attack on a young woman, whose headscarf had been torn off – a souvenir – by the mob as she scrambled down a sand dune to escape, inflamed them. False rumours circulated by text suggesting a woman had been killed. "When I got there I seen a big crowd full of all sorts of people, and no one was listening to no one," Ahmed said.
Michael drove to the mosque from his home in Chester Hill with his friend Ayhan, both twenty-one. Like Ahmed, they are Lebanese-Australians, Michael was born here; Ayhan came to Australia as a child.
Ayhan is short and broad and wears a cap as if it were permanently attached to his head. Michael likes saying he can do "two fifty or three [hundred]". Push-ups, that is, squeezed out on to the thin carpet of his bedroom floor. His dark eyes are thoughtful and intelligent.
"We didn't know what lengths they (non-Muslims) would go to, what they were capable of. I seen what they done on TV, at Cronulla. There was thousands of them. Everyone wanted to get together, to protect themselves. Because we knew the cops wouldn't."
"We wanted to go to the mosque, just in case," Ayhan chipped in. Neither saw the men with Glock pistols who were rumoured to be patrolling the crowd. Police cruised at a distance, and warned journalists that it was too dangerous to go near the mosque. There were reports of shots being fired, but no one seemed to know what for, or by whom. A police car parked in Wangee Road was smashed by elements in the crowd.
ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING THEMES TO EMERGE from the interviews was the widespread, almost paranoid willingness to believe that others meant them harm. Despite watching police swinging batons at rioters and shepherding victims away from the mob on the news, many knew that the police were happy to see them bashed. This was ingrained; some had experience of unhappy contact with police, of being pushed to the ground and searched. It was assumed you could only trust those with a similar background.
Writer Taghred Chandab told me months after the riot that the sense of alienation had been thriving and growing for several years. "When we were growing up, we were just dealing with people calling us wogs," she said. "Now young Muslims have to deal with getting called terrorists and rapists. The point is that it has got much worse than a few years ago." The overwhelming impression was of a group of young men, drawn up back to back, facing a society that they believed mocked them and loathed them.
The term "people of Middle Eastern appearance", adopted by much of the media because it was the wording used in police communications, catches a broad group, and inflames those it describes. Most of the people I spoke to were the sons and daughters of the immigrants who arrived in the 1980s; a few came here as children. Lebanese-Australians represented a significant slice, though probably not the majority, of those involved in revenge attacks after the riot. According to some accounts, they were a mixed group: men with Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi, Palestinian and Serb backgrounds, including some gang members well known to police.
Place was also vital. Those I interviewed live in the wedge of working-class suburbs that stretch away from central Sydney to the city's south-west: Lakemba, Bankstown, Chester Hill, Wiley Park, Belmore, Punchbowl, Auburn and Fairfield were threaded as compass points through the conversations. Territory – ordinary enough streets lined with red brick and fibro homes and newer blocks of flats – was important. Family, extending to second cousins and relatives by marriage, also counted for a lot. The group meant everything, defining how you were expected to behave and, to an extent, who you were.
"You've got to be tough, growing up in Auburn, you've got to show you can fight," Ahmed said. "Everyone is like that. If you are not from there, maybe you don't know what it's like. You've got to learn to survive. I was always fighting, just with cousins or whatever. Just going out with them and getting in a few fights."
Ali, another young man of Lebanese descent who was part of the crowd at Lakemba mosque on December 12, said he felt "loaded" because: "You know the Anglos are against you. It is the little stuff. Try getting a fuckin' cab if you're a Leb and you are with your mate." Why? "I don't know. Maybe they're afraid of us. Like, the way they look at you ... They think maybe you are going to bash them or rape them. What can you do about this?"
Michael said: "It's like, you can be pushed so far, then you have to think of ways to get back. I think we are second– or third-class citizens here. I was born here." He looked at his palms and said: "Cronulla or whatever, it doesn't matter mate. We are pushed so far and then we will just have to snap back. That's basically what happened – we snapped back."