Thugs ruled the streets, and the mob sang Waltzing Matilda
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Damien Murphy describes what he saw in the middle of the Cronulla violence.
A BARE-CHESTED youth in Quiksilver boardshorts tore the headscarf off the girl’s head as she slithered down the Cronulla dune seeking safety on the beach from a thousand-strong baying mob.
Up on the road, Marcus “Carcass” Butcher, 28, a builder from Penrith, wearing workboots, war-camouflage shorts and black singlet bearing the words “Mahommid was a camel f—ing faggot” raised both arms to the sky. “F— off, Leb,” he cried victoriously.
It was one last act of cowardly violence on a sad and shameful day that began as a beach party celebrating a kind of perverted nationalism that was gatecrashed by racism.
A crowd of at least 5000 - overwhelmingly under 25 - took over Cronulla’s foreshore and beachside streets. Police were powerless as 200-odd ringleaders, many clutching bottles or cans of beer and smoking marijuana, led assaults on individuals and small groups of Lebanese Australians who risked an appearance during the six-hour protest.
The horde swirled after fleeing individuals, sometimes sweeping past police lines and horses, chasing a quarry who sought safety in restaurants, shops, toilet blocks and ambulances and police vehicles. Some were snatched by police, who stood against the swarm and repelled the most violent with capsicum spray.
After a local man, “Steely”, had led a chant of “F— off, Lebs”, a young man demanded the megaphone and told the crowd it was “racist”. A bottle arced in from the audience and shattered on his forehead. He fled “like a bleeding rabbit”, someone yelled after him.
Sometimes when a victim was cornered, the mob started singing Waltzing Matilda. Advance Australia Fair was similarly employed against obstructing police, and the usually good-natured “Aussie Aussie Aussie” chant in the mouths of the Cronulla crew assumed a menacing tone.
Cronulla was possibly Australia’s biggest racist protest since vigilante miners killed two Chinese at Lambing Flat in 1860.
Yesterday’s violence had been brewing for months. It came to a head last weekend when some Lebanese Australian men attacked members of the North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club after they asked the visitors to stop playing soccer because it was disturbing other beach users.
“Steely” - who did not want to identify himself “for fear the Lebs will come and shoot up my joint during the week” - said his children had been scared by Lebanese Australians coming in from the western suburbs.
“I’ve got a four-year-old girl and a boy who’s 11, and they see these bastards 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,” he said. “That’s not Australian. My granddad fought the Japs to see Australia safe from this sort of shit, and that’s what I’m doing today.”
The word went out last week that the Shire boys would not take it lying down any more. Yesterday was shaping as a giant clash if Lebanese Australians came to run the gauntlet.
Cronulla has been an iconic surf suburb since the early 1960s, when the surfboard craze hit. It has a tribal surf culture shaped by violence and substance abuse.
Its first surfing hero, Bobby Brown, died after being sliced by a beer glass in a hotel in 1967.
Cronulla was the setting for Puberty Blues, the brutal book and film about girls growing up in the surf culture. Many of its surfing heroes have had difficult lives, not the least Mark Occhiluppo, who came back from virtual career oblivion to take the world surfing title in 1999.
Cronulla has long been the scene of battles with outsiders. The early 1960s saw pitched fights between “westies” and “surfies”. Then, the media portrayed them as wars between teenage subcultures, but they always had an economic if not class element to them. It was a time when the White Australia policy still existed and nobody thought it was based on racism.
Things have changed. So yesterday “Da Boys” - the Cronulla locals - turned up early, and by 10am a party atmosphere was already evident.
Two-storey apartments were bedecked in bizarre bunting ranging from Australian and Eureka flags to “Merry Christmas” signs and Bundaberg Rum polar bear cut-outs.
On the streets, Australian flags fluttered on most cars, Cold Chisel and Men At Work boomed out of stereo systems and there were patriotic T-shirts with kangaroos, swear words and puns. Beer soaked everything.
Todd Russell, a concrete pourer from one of the apartments up the road from the riot site, was among the first to arrive and was giving away sausages cooked on a barbecue on the back of his ute, “to get everyone in the mood to be a real Aussie”. He had put up a sign saying “No tabouli”.
He was enthusiastically handing out brochures headed “Immigration out of control” and “Your teachers are lying to you” to passers-by.“Don’t know what this shit is, mate. It’s just stuff. I agree with it, whatever it is,” Russell said. “Look, these Lebs are coming here and giving us shit and we’re not going to take it any more.”
Behind him, John Moffitt of the Australia First Party was smiling to himself. He had been handing out political pamphlets to some of the flag and beer can-bedecked teenagers most of the morning and they were merrily distributing them to the committed, the curious and the repulsed. “This is a great day. Australia is now seeing what the policies of the last 30 years are reaping,” Moffitt said.
Paul Wilson, a local accountant who wants to start a political movement he has called Sons of Anzacs, led the mob with a couple of megaphone chants but said he was disgusted at the abuse of Lebanese immigrants.
He said the protest was really just an extension of the sorts of things Pauline Hanson was warning about when she entered national life in 1996.
“Nobody listened to her really and look what’s happened. Mind you, it’s a shame that it came to this. I don’t agree with the racist stuff. It frightens a lot of people off but it still a true reflection of what being a real and proud Australian is to many of us. You deny that, you’re mad,” he said.
The crowd’s first likely target was sighted just after 11am. He copped a punch from a local before fleeing to the safety of the Northies hotel sports bar, where a police line stopped the hunters in their tracks and he was whisked from the building.
Over the next six hours there were sporadic outbreaks when the mob thought it spied a Lebanese Australian intruder.
Many in the melee took photographs on mobile phones as they contacted people to join the fray or just to check out the fun. “It’s a pisser,” said Michael Bedford, of Sylvania. “Shire forever.”
As police tramped in quick-time from flashpoint to flashpoint, many in the crowd ridiculed their efforts. “Hup, hup, hup. Left, right, left, right. Sound off - that’s right, dudes, go get 'em,” a group yelled in unison, before showering police with beer.
At one point, thousands rushed up the hill to the Cronulla Mall and headed for the railway station, nearly a kilometre away, where two men were taken and beaten. Sated, the crowd returned to the beachfront.
While bedlam ruled, the North Cronulla SLSC did its best to ignore the unlovely spectacle, calmly continuing with the launching ceremony of a new surfboat, the Graham “Cashy” Cachia.
Meanwhile, down the beach, the Lebanese Australian girl’s three male friends were being chased through apartments as her headscarf was being born off as some sort of souvenir. At the boat ceremony, a 13-year-old boy, a nipper with the club, turned from the boat to the noise swelling from the crowd north of the clubhouse.
“Get her!” he yelled. On his bare back were the words in black felt pen: “We crew here. You flew here.”
