Australian riots, the short version

Here is a really interesting blog post about this week’s riots near Sydney, Australia. Its title is Riots in Cronulla: What’s going on?, and it’s by a blogger called Amir Butler. Amir describes himself thus: “an engineer and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He holds a Masters of Engineering, and is currently completing a PhD in Computer Science…” Hat-tip to Yusuf Smith for that link.
Amir writes:

    There is no doubt that there is a problem with gangs and criminality amongst a small section of Lebanese youth in Sydney. However, it is wrong-headed to believe that any of this owes anything to the religion of their parents.
    Secondly, the riots are not really about race. There is certainly a racist hue to them and the rioters made race the focus of their rage, but there are reasons to doubt this is the root cause. The fact is that riots are nothing new on Australian beaches. We have a long and illustrious history of beachside battles: surfers versus Westies; surfers versus surfers; and so on. In most all previous conflicts, the battle lines were drawn between two distinct groups of white Australians. They were essentially battles between competing subcultures or tribes. And the battles were being fought over ‘turf’.
    The same thing is happening today. The difference is that the ‘Lebs’, a competing subculture vying with the local surfies for control over the beach, are a different race to the mostly Australian surfers. Therefore, they have made this difference the focus of their rage and the focus of their venom — even though, as history shows, they have been equally hostile to other Australians from other parts of Sydney who tried to ‘control’ what they see as their beach. By control, of course, one does not mean that they are fighting for the right to impose parking fees or the responsibility to clean up litter from the shore. It is more a question of which subculture — the ‘lebs’ or ’surfies’ — would be the dominant subculture on that stretch of beach….

He also has what look to me like a very sober analysis of the situation there and some good suggestions on how to address it.
Here is an article in today’s NYT titled, Australia Asks if Racism Was Behind Riots on a Beach.
Thinking about Australia made me think of two other related texts. One is the excellent discussion that Jonathan Edelstein, Shirin, Salah, some other JWN commenters, and I had about the nature of different settler societies, back in the summer. You’ll find that if you read the comments board here. Jonathan even developed a potentially very powerful typology of settler states there… I think that Australia would definitely qualify as a “Type A” settler society in that typology.
(Jonathan, did you ever flesh that work out and publish it someplace? Including on your own blog?)
And the other text I thought about– which I really do need to link to someplace here in JWN, so why not here?– is this one. It’s the PDF version of a June 2004 article by Benjamin Madley of the Yale Univ. History Department, titled “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803-1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia (Journal of Genocide Research 6:2).

7 thoughts on “Australian riots, the short version”

  1. Jonathan, did you ever flesh that work out and publish it someplace? Including on your own blog?
    No, I haven’t yet, although I’ve done some more thinking on the subject. Thanks for reminding me!

  2. many thanks for the pointers to these informative piece…
    but it’s not too clear to me what amir butler means when he writes that “the riots were not really about race”.
    if “rioters made race the focus of their rage”, and specifically targetted folks because of their (perceived) lebanese or arab identity, whether or not race was “the root cause” seems to me a distinction without a difference.
    the root causes of the recent uprising in paris were primarily economic in a certain sense, but in any concrete terms only as economics are filtered through the racial lens of the volks-french government. just like the uprisings in south central l.a., newark, or detroit in the u.s., or the uprisings of mizrakhi and sefardi youth in israel during the israeli black panthers’ heyday.
    similarly, the pogrom at cronulla beach is different from the other turf battles he mentions precisely because it is racialized differently. because of that racialization, it is able to feed off of john howard’s revival of the “white autralia” idea, the government’s fearmongering around muslims (never mind that only christians from lebanon were allowed into australia until recently – christian arabs were “white”, muslim arabs weren’t), and the worldwide upsurge of white supremacist movements visible from le pen to putin to pipes.
    a racialized “competing subculture” in a racially defined society is not the same as a subculture that isn’t, and an attack on it is not the same. mods vs. rockers is not the same as national front skinheads vs. brixton rudeboys. and surfers vs. westies is not the same as “aussies” vs. lebanese.
    i’d say this is a particularly strong dynamic (and especially likely to be explained away as “not really about race”) in settler societies in which european-origin communities have kept state power, and in places like france and england where migration to the imperial center has created what used to be called an “internal colony”.

  3. It’s a little more complex than Amir Butler’s article suggests. There is a problem with a particular cohort who, while Lebanese by descent and Muslim by religion, actually owe as much of their culture to gangsta rap as anything else. Their families mostly came to Australia as refugees from the civil war and family structures have collapsed under the pressure of economic adversity and dislocation from a tight community culture in rural Lebanon to the anonymity of a large city.
    Sneers from those who think they’re above it all

    The sad truth for middle-class moralisers is that most Australians are unhelpfully non-racist. The book ,i>How Australia Compares, by Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins, includes the result of a 1990s survey on the sorts of people who were not desired as neighbours. Some of the respondent percentages were: drug addicts 74, heavy drinkers 60, people with a criminal record 45, emotionally unstable 38, and immigrants and people from a different race 5. Only 5 per cent! And that was the lowest in the list of countries surveyed: Austria and Belgium 20 per cent, Japan 17, France, Italy and Germany 13.
    The usefulness of Cronulla last Sunday, of course, is that at last something bad did happen. But the outrage is as selective as ever. As has been reported elsewhere, Bondi Beach had problems with Lebanese gangs a few years ago, but the police response was serious and effective. After all, we can’t have that sort of thing going on at the beach used by wealthy people who’ve been to university. But the similar complaints by the white trash at underpoliced Cronulla have received less attention. Again, it’s as much to do with class and power as race.

    Just about every random commentator in the country has now hitched Cronulla to their pet idée fixe from the alleged racism of the masses to the ‘threat’ of multiculturalism or the prime minister’s dog whistle politics.

  4. Thanks for the information on this, but it is still not clear to me whether this was just teenage gang activity, an eruption of broader racial tension, or class conflict. I would appreciate more input from people with first-hand knowledge.

  6. My personal read is that there is a problem with teenage gang activity. It’s happened at a couple of different beach suburbs. Most gang members live a long way from the coast and Cronulla, the only beach area with good public transport, has historically been the police where ‘Westies’ (kids from the inland suburbs west of the city centre) and ‘surfies’ encounter each other.
    Some of those encounters turned violent, The police took quick and effective action at Bondi and the problem stopped. The police did very little at Cronulla and the level of violence escalated.
    A stupid mob, fuelled by grog and resentment, then took the law into their own hands at Cronulla and the riot followed. I doubt racism is more entrenched at working-class Cronulla than it is at middle-class Bondi.
    The weekend was quiet and the most notable development of the past week has been joint meetings and appeals by community groups from both sides denouncing both the riot and the revenge attacks which followed. The NSW parliament passed some egregiously invasive laws of the kind that seem to be de rigeur in the GWOT. It’s hard to say whether the community effort or a massive police presence under the new laws is keeping things quiet at the moment.
    The best sources are the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald.

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