I was a young journalism student when I watched news footage of hundreds of young white men storming Sydney’s Cronulla beach. Boys armed with flags and weapons, incited by exhortations from the likes of talkback broadcaster Alan Jones and by text messages asking “every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day”.
Geographically, the Arab lads of Bankstown and Shire boys of Cronulla were neighbours, but culturally the consequences of infringing West Side Story-beach lines were clear. The 2005 beach riots made international headlines. Southern Cross-tattooed patriots marked their territory, scrawling “100% Aussie pride” in the sand and popularising the slogan: “You flew here, we grew here.”
For a young feminist Muslim woman from western Sydney who had just adopted hijab after moving out of home, it highlighted every political nerve I balanced on like a high-wire artist.
I lived in a student dorm in Sydney’s inner west, trying to leave behind a difficult home life and forge a place in a post 9/11, completely white media industry where diversity was not even a corporate buzzword yet. A world where the daily screeching racist headlines about oppressed women, jihadis, Islam, surveillance, Asio, the war on terror and stereotypes of Arab male predators actively abetted violence against “people like us” both at home and abroad.
It was a place where Muslim spokespeople were both consumed and reduced to their identities in a reactive and dehumanising news cycle controlled by white executive producers, experts and thinktanks dedicated to nutting out the Muslim “problem”.
The riots cemented to me that the beach – painted by pop culture as the iconic Australiana of leisure and pleasure – was not for people like me.
Far from being a “glitch”, racism around the water was a historic part of Australian culture, with segregation aimed at Indigenous swimmers enforced in pools until the 70s. Non-whites weren’t locked out from the wealthy water belt of Sydney any more – at least not officially – but we were impeded in more subtle ways.
Metaphorically, it highlighted the cultural and racial demarcations not only of Sydney’s postcodes; it was also something that played out in newsrooms, workplaces and public spaces, where black and brown deference to whiteness was not just expected but enforced through the limits of voice, ascension, freedom and movement.
They look shocked when my Aussie-accented voice barks back at them
It was against this backdrop of racial machismo and testosterone-fuelled violence in Cronulla that my own tentative foray into beach life began. I learned to swim as an adult and have even competed in ocean races. I have visited almost every beach and lived in every district of Sydney. I have created a career in media.
But it has not been without difficulty. Twenty years on, I still have never been to Cronulla beach. Even today it evokes a spectre of fear.
My position in “white” areas and industries continues to be contested by racism, creating an anxiety I still feel like a drum in my chest. The long walks and swims suggested by my therapist to recover and relax are often marked by traumatic incidents.
Recently, at a golf course, four middle-aged white men demanded my sister and I freeze so they could putt. One of them yelled “currymuncher” and “cunt” when we refused to, threatening to hit us with a golf ball. I felt my heart race. But the model minority in me who usually defers and de-escalates went mute: for the first time in my life, I yelled back. I swore. I told him the path we were on was for walkers, and they should stop, not us. They looked shocked when my Aussie-accented voice barked back at them. I was shocked, too – and surprised at the audacity of my anger, usually internalised, desiccated into depression and curdling into bitterness. The poison exited my system. I felt clean, energised by adrenaline, secretly elated at how bad and mad I was – it was – and how good it felt to fight back.
There’s the go-back-to-your country call yelled at the elderly hijabi woman at my local shopping centre. There’s the time my family is racially abused at a Lakemba park, turning a day out into quiet shame. There’s the lady at a shop who hovers over me, asking pointedly “Is your dog allowed here?” when I have rung three times to secure permission.
White entitlement and racism are such a part of our cultural waters that refusal and confidence in public life by non-white sport stars, politicians and media figures still feels transgressive. I am shedding the grateful immigrant posture as a survival mechanism, the preening towards whiteness and power, the buying-in to the myths of the colonists who settled here just over 200 years ago who tell me they “own” this place and set the terms of my conditional belonging.
It is a myth I am increasingly resisting. It’s reframing Sydney’s “white” areas in my mind as stolen black land upon which I am also a settler. It’s recognising the spiritual power I feel in the water and this stupendously beautiful land as the magic of Country. It’s re-orienting my deference towards this continent’s Blak custodians, the true owners of this land, its waterways, songs, stories and histories for millennia. And when I will visit Cronulla beach for the first time, it will be Dharawal land I’ll be paying my respects to.
Sarah Malik is a journalist and author of Desi Girl: On Feminism, Race, Faith and Belonging and Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation
