On the beach
Why the recent riots in Australia should surprise no one
FOR THOSE whose image of Australia involves alabaster-skinned actresses, braying reptile-handlers, and sun-soaked hedonism, recent news from the Antipodes has been profoundly jarring.
After two Anglo-Australian lifeguards were assaulted by a group of Lebanese-Australian men on Sydney's Cronulla Beach earlier this month, some 5,000 young Anglo-Australians descended on the sands, attacking anybody who looked Middle Eastern. Revenge followed: Convoys of Lebanese men rampaged through Cronulla with baseball bats, smashing windshields and storefronts. Lebanese-looking men were set upon in other Australian cities. Politicians shut down the beaches and enacted a series of strict laws to quell the unrest. Amazingly, no one was killed, but police were still seizing weapons caches this week.
When most Americans think of Australia, this is not the kind of thing that leaps to mind. But to those of us who grew up there, and grew up Lebanese, the dynamic was depressingly familiar. The riots were but the latest, and most violent, manifestation of tensions between ''Aussies" and ''Lebs" that have simmered for years.
Part of the animus can be explained by familiar factors. Sept. 11 and the terrorist attacks in Bali and London have bred anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment. And as in France, young Muslim men in Sydney's heavily Lebanese west and southwest, with disproportionately high unemployment and poverty rates, are disaffected. Additionally, Lebanese gangs have committed several violent, high-profile crimes in recent years, including a series of horrific rapes, feeding stereotypes and ill will.
But another part of the tension is peculiarly Australian. Despite its reputation for welcoming immigrants-30 percent of Sydney's current population is foreign-born-Australia can be a difficult place to be one. Especially if you're Lebanese. And especially lately. Over the past 10 years, Prime Minister John Howard's Liberal-National coalition government has taken a harder official line against immigrants in a quest for more conservative votes. Further widening the divisions between Lebanese and Anglo-Australians, many Lebanese youth live in more insular communities than the generations that preceded them. They are also less willing to behave like guests in somebody else's country.
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Growing up in working-class Sydney in the '70s, being Lebanese was the second-worst thing imaginable. Only Aborigines ranked lower. ''Wogs," the Anglos called us, and often ''dirty wogs." We heard it everywhere: shouted from passing cars, on the playground, at shopping malls.
They could spot us a mile away. In the United States, assimilation comes relatively easily for many Lebanese immigrants, particularly for those who are Christian, like my family. When I arrived in Boston 12 years ago, I was struck by how quickly I went from being a member of an easily identifiable, oft-maligned minority to being simply white.
There are now about 250,000 Lebanese in Australia, about 80,000 of them born in Lebanon, according to Michael Humphrey, chair of the sociology department at the University of New South Wales and an expert on Lebanese immigrants. Arabic is the second most commonly-spoken language in Sydney, after English. About 40 percent of the Lebanese population is made up of Muslim immigrants, who arrived after Lebanon's civil war began in 1975, and their children.
In the ninth grade, we Lebanese-Australians learned about our country's long history of inauspicious ethnic relations, allowing us to put our own travails into perspective. White settlers had virtually annihilated Aborigines in the 18th and 19th centuries. British immigrant miners had rioted in gold fields in 1861, killing and injuring immigrant Chinese, razing their settlements. The White Australia policy restricting ''Asiatics" and ''coloured" immigrants wasn't officially lifted until 1973.
My mother tried hard to blend us in. We were not taught Arabic, and we did not take Lebanese food to school for lunches, like some of the other kids did.
Back then, when we went to the beach it was always to Coogee, a few miles north of Cronulla. The Lebanese kept to the north side of Coogee beach, gathering on a grassy embankment we dubbed ''Kibbe Hill," after the Lebanese dish. After some years, we ventured south onto the sand, but the Lebanese I knew steered clear of Cronulla, jewel of the Sutherland Shire, the whitest part of Sydney. We knew our place.
But we couldn't hide the way we looked. My mother arrived in Australia in 1947, and spoke English with a broad Aussie accent, but she still had the olive skin, the prominent nose, and the dark eyes that marked all of us as unmistakably Lebanese. She was still a wog, a fact of which she was reminded with some regularity as she pulled beer or sliced corned-beef for customers.
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Muslim Lebanese immigrants, more different-looking, and from poorer backgrounds on average, always had it much harder than we Christians did. The manufacturing jobs our parents and grandparents had when they first settled in Australia were far less plentiful by the time they arrived. Today, the Muslim Lebanese population has unemployment rates four or five times the national average of 5 percent.
The climate for immigrants in general has grown less welcoming over the last 10 years, said Scott Poynting, associate professor at the Center for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney and coauthor of ''Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other." In 1996, Pauline Hanson, owner of a fish and chip shop, was elected to Parliament from nowhere on an anti-immigrant platform. Hanson, who at one point claimed that Aborigines ate their own infants, called for an immediate end to all Asian immigration.
By 2001, Hanson had disappeared, largely because Prime Minister John Howard's Liberal party had incorporated her hard line on immigration into mainstream politics. A few months after Sept. 11, his refusal to change his policy of mandatory detention for mostly Muslim asylum-seekers, despite a huge outcry from human rights advocates, cemented his credibility among conservative constituents.
Galvanized by the anti-Muslim sentiment, more socially isolated than preceding generations of Lebanese immigrants, and more closely connected to the old country through technology, Muslim Lebanese today have retained more of their ethnic identity.
''The old sense of migration was that if your parents came at the turn of the century or just after World War II, you lost your links with the past, and your old country," Humphrey said. ''But now you never have to leave the village. You have the Internet. You retain the language. The ties are live."
And the younger generation of Lebanese is less willing to suffer the slurs quietly as most of us did. They are more assertive. ''There's less of the attitude of being a guest in someone else's home and more of a sense of having the entitlement that's your birthright as a citizen," Poynting said. ''And of resenting it when you have that entitlement denied."
The new assertiveness, however, makes them more obvious targets. Word that several Lebanese men had assaulted two surf lifesavers-hallowed icons of Aussie culture-was enough to muster thousands of Anglo-Australians to Cronulla on Dec. 11.
In the weeks since the riots, there has been plenty of national hand-wringing, as Australians, shocked by the scale of the unrest, have debated attitudes toward Muslim youth and the wisdom of recent immigration policy. In some quarters, however, the events on the beach were apparently no cause for deeper reflection. ''I do not accept there is any underlying racism in this country," Howard told reporters the day after the riots.
Most Australians disagree with him. In a Sydney Morning Herald poll published this week, an astonishing 75 percent of respondents rejected the prime minister's rosy view of Australian race relations. Some are also fretting about the nation's image: In the Herald poll, 59 percent said the riots had damaged Australia's reputation.
''We should take this as a warning, that the sort of opportunistic manipulation of xenophobia for political advantage has very dangerous consequences," Poynting said. ''I hope the warning is heeded."
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe staff reporter. E-mail abraham@globe.com. 