Cronulla: Some random thoughts

At the risk of offending those who don't care for the songs and work of John Lennon, I'm going to lead this post with another of his quotes, and this is about the third time I've done it in a week, so please excuse me.

It comes from the 1970 song, 'Working Class Hero', which was a big international hit on one of his best albums and his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band.

"Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
Till you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

Clearly, the ideas in that song are as relevant today as they were 35 years ago, and just as neglected by society at large. They inform, in a way, the comments I will make here. These are some completely random thoughts following this week's riots at Cronulla, a southern Sydney suburb.

* Drunken, tribal violence in Sydney is as old as the city itself. A hundred years ago, it was the "push" gangs of "larrikins", such as the Glebe Push, the Bantry Bay Devils, the Stars, the Golden Dragons, the Rocks Push, the Livers, the Forty Thieves, and so on. There were also many "razor gangs". In the 1960s there were frequent violent confrontations between the "bodgies" (equivalent to "rockers" in the UK) and "surfies". I believe that Cronulla was a venue for such riots. In my youth, the gang to fear was the "sharpies", and there were clashes between all sorts of rival gangs of thugs. Then there have always been rival "bikie" gangs: Sydney in 1984 was the scene of the Fathers' Day Massacre in which seven people were killed and more than 20 wounded in a shootout between rival gangs.

* We have already noted the cowardly ethnic bullying against weaker, disadvantaged groups such as the Chinese in the Gold Rush days. It has always been the strong against the weak, as the Australian psyche has a strong element of cowardly bullying. Many Australians do not wish to acknowledge that, but it is a demonstrable fact.

* Being a culture that in the main has a traditional nodding acquaintance with inter-group strife, Australia has as many words for "thug" as Eskimoes have for "snow", such as: "yobbo", "hoon", "hooligan", "larrikin", "ratbag". A bully by any other name ...

* A view of Muslims as religious extremists has been created in Australia by cynical, powerful people for personal and political gain. In fact, most Muslims in Australia attend mosque as infrequently as or less often than Christians attend church (in a nation where church attendance by self-described Christians is very low). I would hazard a guess that, proportionally, the Muslims of Australia have fewer extremists in their congregations than Christians do. Most Muslims are nominal Muslims, as most Christians are nominal Christians in our secular society. I have had a lot to do with Muslims in Australia and have no doubt about this.

* Research shows that most Australians spend many, many hours a week watching television. Television erodes the following: consciousness (particularly the imagination); interpersonal interaction; attention span; connection between social groups; connection to Nature; reading and self-education; awareness of corporate manipulation; and self-esteem (by the constant presentation of unattainable ideals of humanity). Until the TV problem is tackled head-on, little or no headway will be made in combatting Australia's urban and rural malaise. Very few social commentators are themselves free of the TV virus, and the virulence of the illness is scarcely known in this country. Television is watching other people have lives. Turn off your TV and live!

* The violent confrontations on Sydney's southern beaches were whipped up by certain talk-back radio presenters, and by a culture of fear and xenophobia fostered by the Australian Liberal and Labor Parties. Unfortunately, for all its laudable features, the Australian legal system is inadequate to the task of punishing wrong-doers and enemies of the citizens.

* Sydney is blessed with a long string of beaches on its Pacific shores. I don't know how many, but there must be at least 40, end-on-end, and ours is very much a beach culture despite the fact that most have been ruined ecologically. Cronulla is the only one of Sydney's many beaches that is accessible by rail transport. (The residents of Bondi Beach, probably the most spoiled and unattractive, and certainly the most architectually ruined beach of Sydney, used spurious "environmental considerations" to block a railway station; it was to keep out the riff-raff.) As a consequence, Cronulla is the easiest beach for poor and working-class Sydneysiders to access. The problems at Cronulla have a class dimension at least as important as a racial one.

* Most beaches of Sydney, in fact most places in Australia, have a pub and club culture which is proudly xenophobic, aggressive, boorish, dehumanisingly ugly and determinedly narrow-minded. The gambling and alcohol industries, until recently decentralised and fairly local, have become dominated by a very few mega-corporations, some of them transnational. To ignore the corporate factor of Australia's cultural disintegration and its consequences as exemplified by Cronulla, is a short-sighted view.

* A complaint against "people of Middle Eastern appearance" in these beach suburbs has been that "Aussie" women have been insulted and two lifesavers were bashed. As callers to Australia Talks Back, one of Australia's few relatively intelligent talk-back radio programs, have noted this week, lifesaver-bashing and sexual harrassment of women on beaches are as traditionally Australian as kangaroos.

* Sections of the media (especially Sydney's Daily Telegraph and Radio 2GB) have acted disgracefully this week. Most of the youth violence in Sydney is perpetrated by "Aussie" (read "Anglo-Saxon-Celtic") men, often egged-on by "Aussie" women. Outside Sydney, too, Australians all know that to be in the vicinity of any pub at closing time is to risk assault. The perpetrator is most likely going to be an "Aussie" -- I have a broken jaw and broken teeth as a grim reminder of good old Tamworth, NSW and its white lads. I also remember Wagga, NSW, and the police refusing to act after my car was trashed at night by about 15 white young men, because the culprits were the local football team. The white cops left me and my mate, who was crippled with Multiple Sclerosis, all night in the dark forest with the drunken young thugs and took my car battery, probably hoping that we would be beaten to a pulp. So let's hear no more about immigrants and their "unAustralian values", before I puke.

* Australia values literacy, up to a point, but derides learning -- and governments since the Whitlam era (when tertiary education was free) have overseen a progressive diminution of educational opportunity. (More than half of our 13- and 14-year-olds cannot find our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, on a map!) Cronulla's violence might be a foretaste of things to come if this is not addressed. (Of course, people will not read and grow if they are watching mindless soap operas and other crap on TV.)

* In Australia as in many Western countries, children from a very early age are taught to form into small groups to oppose other human beings, rather than to cooperate with them. Usually, tribal associations are formed among the children, by adults, according to nothing more than the locality in which the kids live. This legal form of child abuse goes by the euphemism of "sport". Until competitive sport is replaced by healthy forms of recreation -- which seems very unlikely in our lifetimes -- this kind of behaviour can be expected. The next pro-sport shockjock or journalist who complains about tribal violence should get his (or, increasingly, her) head out of his or her arse.

* There are indeed a number of "youths of Middle Eastern appearance" who are bullies. Not to acknowledge this would be folly. As the focus this week has been on Lebanese youths, we forget at our peril that they or their parents have come from Lebanon, which was ravaged by Israel's occupation, and its own antique tribal wars. A little understanding is called for, but so is the admonition that bullying, aggressive behaviour and revenge have no part in third-millennium Australia.

Finally: was Cronulla an expression of a silent minority? No, it was the lily-livered bleatings of a noisy but large minority. Australia is deeply racist, deeply tribal, deeply bullying and deeply aggressive. The overwhelming larger part of its hagiography is about competition against one's fellow human being, whether we take into account the ANZAC tradition, the culture of the workplace, or the national obsession with any physical activity -- just as long as it's competitive. It is a world-view that's completely obsolete, and we can only hope that teachers and thinkers will strip it bare and throw it in the garbage where it belongs. This is the 21st Century and the world's people are all one species. Time to grow up and be modern, Aussies.

Tagged: cronulla, violence, sydney+riots, corporations, sport, competition, sydney, australia