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).