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The Times December 17, 2005

Fighting on the beaches exposes ugly side of life

With police warning Australians to stay away from the seafronts and the city bracing itself for another weekend of violence, our correspondent explains the pressures behind the cultural hostility
AS A mob of 5,000 “proud Aussies” fought “wogs and Lebs” at Cronulla Beach in Sydney on Sunday, one of their ringleaders — Glen Steele, a lifelong resident and former rugby player — angrily explained why Lebanese immigrants have become unwelcome on this strip of suburban surf beach.

Pointing to the old saltwater pool at the end of the beach, Mr Steele said: “I’ve got a four-year-old girl and a boy who’s 11, and they see these b******s come here and stand around the sea baths ’cos their women have got to swim in clothes and stuff, or they see them saying filthy things to our girls. That’s not Australian!”

In its own garbled way, that perfectly encapsulated why the beach was where longstanding tensions between Anglo and Muslim Australia boiled over into violence this week. The beach was once a great equaliser, the place where everyone stripped down to a state that embodied Australia’s egalitarian image of itself, but today it is a place where cultural differences are glaringly magnified. To Anglo-Australians such as Mr Steele, that means the sight of Muslim women swimming fully clothed; to excitable Lebanese teenagers raised strictly under Islam, it is the sight of semi-naked women lounging carelessly on the sand.

It is no coincidence that Sydney, which has absorbed most Middle Eastern and Muslim immigration to Australia in the past decade, was the scene of the country’s worst race riots in decades. These new immigrants have congregated 20km to 30km inland in western suburbs such as Lakemba, Bankstown and Liverpool. Their closest ocean beach is Cronulla, just south of the entrance to Botany Bay in Sutherland Shire, which happens to be one of the whitest residential areas in the country. Cut off from most of the city by two bridges, it is known colloquially as “the insular peninsula”. It is one of the largest metropolitan districts in the country but does not have a single mosque.

At weekends hundreds of souped-up compact cars packed tight with “young men of Middle Eastern appearance”, to use police terminology, drive from the western surburbs into Cronulla and the beach suburbs to its north — Brighton-Le-Sands, Coogee, Bondi.

“Westie” youngsters have driven to the beach for decades, but their successors are struggling to adapt to the social conventions of Aussie beach culture. Unlike the sunbleached Cronulla locals, these swarthy youths do not surf, and they come from homes in which female flesh is rarely glimpsed. Even their cars — four-cylinder Japanese “pocket rockets” that throb to the bass-heavy beats of hip-hop — contrast with the big V8 Holdens and Fords traditionally favoured by Australians.

Clashes inevitably occur, like the one that sparked this week’s riots: two Cronulla lifesavers told a pair of “Lebanese” youths to stop playing soccer in the sand, ball games being banned on most liability-conscious Sydney beaches, and within minutes the lifesavers had been assaulted. What followed, however, was beyond expectation.

More than 5,000 people were summoned by text message and phone-in radio to a “Leb- and wog-bashing day” at Cronulla on Sunday, and by nightfall several Lebanese-Australian youths had been beaten almost to death, 16 people had been arrested and carloads of Arabic men were retaliating by storming the beachside suburbs armed with guns, baseball bats and metal bars.

Several hundred men gathered at the largest mosque in western Sydney on Monday night, some wielding Glock pistols, in response to a text-message rumour that surf gangs were about to attack the mosque. Over in Maroubra, locals had stashed petrol bombs on roofs overlooking the oceanfront main parade in anticipation of a second wave of attacks. It took a virtual police blockade of highways between the western suburbs and the ocean to suppress the rioting.

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