Two decades have passed, but the Cronulla Riots of 11 December 2005 are not to be forgotten.

Five thousand people descended on North Cronulla on a sticky summer’s day. Most were white Australians. Scores were draped in Australian flags, and some donned body paint and t-shirts bearing phrases like “Ethnic Cleansing Unit” and “Wogs out of Nulla”. They assembled to “reclaim the beach”, having been encouraged by shock jocks and widely-circulated text messages that advertised a “Leb and wog bashing day”. Chants of “fuck off Lebs” rang out, and members of the mob assaulted hapless people “of Middle Eastern appearance” in the vicinity.

And why? A fight had occurred between lifeguards and young men of Middle Eastern descent the previous week. Diasporic Middle Eastern communities from Sydney’s south-west were also accused of engaging in misogynistic and anti-social behaviour on Cronulla’s beaches.

Yet some commentators remain unconvinced that the Riots were racist or especially violent. Noteworthy amongst them are Carl Scully and Mark Goodwin, who recently penned a revisionist history titled The Cronulla Riots: The Inside Story. Scully was once the New South Wales police minister, while Goodwin is a former assistant commissioner of police. Their book seeks to rehabilitate their reputation: having experienced “sudden” and “unplanned” ends to their careers following the Riots, the pair set out to challenge scholarly, journalistic, and official police explanations. It may therefore be reasonable to question whether engaging with Scully and Goodwin’s book lends it undue credibility. But the authors advance three key claims that must be addressed head-on.

Equivocating or lowering the bar on what counts as anti-Arab racism or xenophobia is unacceptable, especially in our current political conjuncture. These claims are addressed in turn.

1. The mob behaviour at Cronulla was not a riot

In Scully and Goodwin’s words, the events at Cronulla should be characterised as a “disturbance” or “breach of the peace” because

[s]omething more is needed, in our view, than a few people turning up, yelling offensive slogans, shaking a car or two, breaking a window and entertaining a fistfight … any reasonable notion of a riot is usually a large gathering which is significantly violent and tumultuously confrontational.

In fact, the mob behaviour at Cronulla was entirely commensurate with the latter conditions. More than fifty people were charged with offences. Beer bottles were hurled at police officers and an ambulance deployed to treat people who were assaulted for looking Lebanese. A paramedic was struck in the back of the head by one such bottle. Transit officers likely saved the lives of two men of Middle Eastern descent, fighting off a horde who set upon them after hearing they had arrived by train.

2. The Riots were not driven by racism

Scully and Goodwin contend that the Riots were a matter of “tribalism”. The use of this descriptor suggests that the violence at Cronulla was regressive and at odds with accepted standards of behaviour in Australian civil society. But the reprisal attacks staged by Middle Eastern men on subsequent evenings are not similarly framed as aberrational behaviour. Throughout the book, Middle Eastern communities are racialised as extraordinarily violent and “terrorising”, and are claimed to originate from “regions whose economy depended on industrial crime, the wholesale drug trade, violence and vendetta”. Readers are given the impression that tribalism is endemic, not extraneous, to these communities. More to the point, the term “tribal” is a classic component of racism’s lingua franca.

Scully and Goodwin also maintain that the Riots pivoted on “difference-ism” rather than racism. “Difference-ism” describes how “most individuals have a predisposition to being intolerant to difference and react when that difference appears to threaten the group notion of how things should work”. The differences in question are said to have been contradictory understandings of appropriate beachside behaviour.

In both formulations, Scully and Goodwin reject racism as an explanation for the Riots because they fail to grapple with its power relations and divorce it from Australian history and politics. Racism is not primarily an individual psychological disposition, nor is it aberrant to our society. As a technology of power, racism has been the driving force of colonial governance and remains key to settler colonial structures such as those in Australia. It involves the embedding of racial categorisations in social relations, social organisation, and institutional practices, with the effect of inferiorising and excluding groups of people — potentially with lethal outcomes.

It was their positioning in this power relation which licensed a mob of 5000 white people to converge on Cronulla. They did so to expel Middle Eastern communities from “their” beach (despite it never having been ceded by the Dharawal people).

3. The reprisals have been unfairly overlooked

It is true that scholars and journalists have paid more attention to the Riots than the reprisals. However, the reprisals still had significant consequences. In direct response, the NSW Police established a Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad, despite conceding that most men involved in the retributive violence had “little or no criminal records”. A force within a force, the Squad comprised over 100 police employees including detectives, intelligence analysts, Arabic translators, uniformed general duties officers, and its own highway patrol wing. The police have since confirmed that it is not possible to determine what proportion of the suspects arrested by the Squad were actually Middle Eastern.

But the Squad set its sights squarely on Middle Eastern communities. Its officers surveilled, stopped, and searched members and associates of particular Middle Eastern families, even when police had not formed legally articulable suspicion of substantive wrongdoing. It also devoted considerable resources to traffic-related offences and anti-social behaviour in western Sydney. Data obtained via Freedom of Information request reveals that one-third (33.75 percent) of all charges laid during the Squad’s eleven-year tenure (2006-2017) were traffic-related. Using low-level powers like these granted police licence to proactively intervene against people “of Middle Eastern appearance”. This is not to say that the Squad did not deal with any serious or organised crime, but prominent police discourses provided partial pictures of its work. All the while, the Squad affected people’s movements through western Sydney and racialised the region as an enclave of crime and violence, often captured in the descriptor “Gangland”.

Rather than writing revisionist histories of the Cronulla Riots, we need to contend with the racism and xenophobia the riots were founded upon. The mob ultimately achieved its aim, with Middle Eastern and Muslim communities avoiding Cronulla. Meanwhile, police work re-constituted the notion that these communities are inherently violent and “terrorising”, corralling them into western Sydney. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that anti-Arab sentiment and xenophobia are not confined to the past, or to Cronulla. Anti-immigration protests across the country in recent weeks remind us as much. So, too, did the crowd that converged on Bondi Beach in September, brandishing both Australian and Israeli flags, confronting a gathering in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla. In clear resonance with the exclusionary, territorial claims staked at Cronulla twenty years ago, a member of the crowd demanded: “this is our land, we don’t come to Lakemba, don’t come to Bondi”.

Image: Still from the 2013 Cronulla Riots documentary