Nazi, Nazi, Nazi — oi, oi, oi!
This country makes me want to cry:
And:
Fucking burn it down, all of it. The whole fucking country.
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I’ve detested beach culture all my life, mostly because of various issues of racial embodiment. Or more accurately, I’m afraid of the beach. Beaches are the place I’ve felt least welcome in this country, on a palpable, visceral level, and it’s something that white people in Australia will never understand. I grew up seeing the troubled relation of Racial Others to The Beach used as an explicit, rhetorical tool of white privilege, and also in ways that got under my skin, in the Fanonian sense — we took it for granted that we were inferior on the beach.
But things have changed. Patterns of migration and settlement in Sydney, as well as the oppressive divisions wrought by the management of this city’s social flows, have brought an ambivalent quality to large, contemporary migrant communities: ignorance of “their place in society”. Of course, people aren’t stupid — anyone can read the signs, and be fucking angry about them, which is what’s going to increasingly happen, and with good reason. But for various reasons, many contemporary migrant kids have not grown up as a cowering, grateful and atomised minority that acknowledges its own inferiority in the racial scheme of things. Thus, I think they usefully lack the sense of unentitlement that Australian beach culture (amongst other things) has insistently attempted to encode for them. They’ve dodged the interpellation, and will keep crossing boundaries into spaces where they’re not welcome. This isn’t heroic so much as socially constitutive, but I admire it. Nobody’s going off into the night. Not after this.
+ + +
On a more wistful and contradictory note, my hatred and fear of beach culture has always offset by a lifelong love of surf music, from the Pixies to the Beach Boys, and which can be traced back to my uncle’s old Atlantics album. (The reason I had that album at all is another story from which race, I suspect, is never far.) Of course, the Atlantics — those Australian surf icons — were a bunch of wog boys (international readers: note that in Australia, the word “wog” has been partially reclaimed by Mediterranean immigrants), and the musical culture of surf instrumentals always had a Mediterranean influence.
Funnily enough, look at the wave on the cover of these wog boys’ debut album: of course, it’s Cronulla.
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ADDED — The Australian nation-state can now consider itself on notice from the big black cat:
Coming to eat you. So fuckin’ angry and shit.
[ tags: australia, beach, beach-culture, cronulla, race, racism, riot, riots, violence ]
this is some pretty fucked up shit. i am sick of the retarded conservatives saying they need more police… wtf are more police going to do when there are allegedly 5000 people? lol!
i was just reading Morris’s “on the beach” where she says that most people don’t go to the beach and it isn’t a very good representation of ‘australian’ or something like that.
beyond the racist/alterity stuff, which I don’t feel like I can say much about, i want to see the media absolutely hammered for the part they played in this on two levels.
on the level of the street/beach/body, right there, on the day. the second photo above is telling. how many audio mikes or tv cameras do you need in someone’s face for them to really scream that they hate wogs/lebs/whatever?
And secondly, it is a classic case of what the old moral panic theory concept of ‘deviancy amplification’. here it is still ‘of the body’ but the affects of racist hatred (or ‘nationalism’) are distributed through ‘social body’ by the transmission of various other (non)events, such as the previous fights up to the narrative framing or representation of westie-Other as constant threat.
That is the panic inducer; not that there are actual fights/violence (yeah, so what, happens everywhere), but that it is felt as a constant threat. The constancy of the threat weighs heavy on the present temporality as a disruptive potentiality. This potentiality is isolated as being herald by a particular wog/leb/whatever demographic of sydney/australia/where ever. It is not so much that youth do actually act like fuck sticks and start fights, but that wogs/lebs/whatever might come ‘down here’ and start something. Is this just another expression of the ‘terror’ refrain? or is that reading too much into it????
in the end it is fuckin shameful.
ps fat bastards don’t go to the beach either ;) ‘beach body’ is not just racialised!
many people have trouble belonging on beaches. the localism of surfing is one example of this. people are threatened if they are gay, not from around here, too fat, for being a girl, etc. Anyone who doesn’t work towards belonging to a white hetero masculine ideal. I am one of those blokes. change can only come from within, any outright confrontation plays right into their (our) hands. (i do not agree with these blokes, but it is possible for me to belong, hence the term ‘our hands’)
the street next to mine was trashed last night. blood, glass everywhere. people are screaming for more blood and payback. its been simmering for years.lots of skirmishes in the past. the blokes i surf with defend their ‘belonging’ at the beach with violence.
to contest this space with violence or confrontation suits these blokes ‘just fine’. this is the problem. eg. the maroubra boys want this, this is what they know, and how they operate. as they were screaming yesterday, ‘bring it fucking on!’
no winners here. just innocent people getting hurt.
i fear maroubra and cronulla beaches are now going to become whiter than ever.
its a very sad day.
I like the beach more than I dislike it. This may be a wog thing. and I wonder why people with white skin in this country invite melanomas so tenaciously - which is a whole other discussion.
But, I don’t think this stuff is reducible to beaches, even if the beach functions in a particularly iconic way in AU. And while it’s nice for people to try and map it onto the theme of feeling comfortable on the beach in the body that you have, this seems to me to trivialise what’s going, if not a kind of ‘me-too-ism’. There were a lot of, say, fat white blokes in the crowd at Cronulla, and I’m pretty sure they felt like they belonged there.
Thank the gods for jebni: an Australian hero. As for indcoup: go back to the beach and bury your head in the sand, you sad Nazi fuck.
Darn, I thought Jebni was a Zimbabwean hero. Silly me.
Anyway, I have no idea how to backtrack a post.
There’s a little “Trackback” link on the permalinked page for this post. Does it not work? Anyway, I’ve responded on your blog.