Australians All

Article

Australia's Dangerous Fantasy

Eva Sallis

First published in The New York Times, December 2005, updated November 2006

While denying even that racism exists, our leaders have given tacit approval and support for it through policy, whether this is policy on refugees, security or on Indigenous affairs.

I live 3,000 kilometres away from Cronulla Beach, where thousands of drunken white youths attacked anyone they believed was of Arab descent last Summer, but I was not shocked by what I saw on television and in the newspapers. What happened in this suburb of Sydney, Australia’s largest city, was a bubbling up of an undercurrent that is increasingly evident in Australian life.

The SMS call for a “Leb and wog bashing day” was triggered by reports that Australians of Lebanese descent had assaulted two lifeguards, another episode in tensions that have flared in recent years between white Australians and Middle Eastern Australians. “We grew here You flew here,” “Wog free zone,” or “Ethnic cleansing unit,” various t-shirts worn at Cronulla proclaimed.

Newcomers, especially if they have come to Australia in linguistic or ethnically distinct groups, have always had a hard time at first. But past streams of migration gave Australia its reputation as a country of diverse peoples that is all the better for it. Our Greek and Italian communities are the largest groups and are fully integrated. Melbourne is famously claimed to be the largest Greek city outside Greece. Vietnamese Australians experienced intense racism and hostility when they first arrived in the late 70s and early 80s, but time, and the entry of increasing numbers of Vietnamese-Australians into public life, have eroded that prejudice.

However, I would not have liked any Asian, Italian or Greek-looking Australian to have been on Cronulla Beach on that Sunday. The crazy thing about what happened there is how anachronistic it seems: no dark-haired, dark-eyed Australian would have been safe, yet Australia was originally and is now substantially dark-haired and dark-eyed. The expressed hostility toward “Lebs” undoes more than a century of successful migration and settlement from Lebanon and polarizes people afresh.

Several important events in recent Australian political and social life have made this particular eruption of racism and xenophobia different from those of the past. While denying even that racism exists, our leaders have given tacit approval and support for it through policy, whether this is policy on refugees, security or on Aboriginal affairs. The glaring racism that Aboriginal Australians live with has all but faded from public discussion and positive policy making. Our current government has benefited and continues to benefit from fear of Muslims and Arabs, rather than working to educate and lead Australians beyond it.

Like America, we have new anti-terrorism legislation, first passed in 2002, then significantly strengthened last year. It is legislation that inevitably validates broader community mistrust of Arab and Muslim Australians. Australians are often fearful of terrorism and terrorists, and fearful of the threat of invasion from the north, yet the government has done nothing substantive to allay these fears and to increase knowledge and appreciation of Australians of Middle Eastern background. Arabic is the fourth most commonly used language other than English in Australia, and the most commonly used language after English in New South Wales, Sydney's home state, yet it is taught in only a handful of schools and universities.

In the last five years there has also been documented and anecdotal evidence of a massive increase in harassment, vilification and violence towards Australians of Arab appearance. In the media and in popular imagination, ethnicity and crimes such as rape are strongly linked, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In recent years high profile cases of Arab Australian youth being charged with violent crimes generated a media storm and unchecked racial and religious vilification on talkback radio.

Prejudice creates what it fears, because through prejudice young people’s prospects are curtailed. Young Arab Australians in Sydney struggle to get an education and jobs and are increasingly ghettoized in poorer suburbs. Their own families often live defensively and are highly prejudiced about Australians. The increasing hostility of the broader community reinforces this inter-community racism, rather than challenging it. I have Muslim friends who used to feel that they were Australians, but now cannot identify themselves in all the negative space being created for them in our community. I have non-Muslim friends who are furious at being targeted as Muslims and are doing all they can to differentiate themselves from people they too are starting openly to dismiss. It has become fashionable, perhaps, to be racist, although none of us, not even our Prime Minister, are willing to call it what it is.

What happened on Cronulla Beach tells us clearly that Australia’s self-inflicted wounds are festering. A volatile part of our community is living in deep alienation, unable to belong, and another volatile part is living back in the irretrievable past with a fantasy of an all-white Australia. If contemporary Australians are to live at ease with ourselves, we need more education, less fear mongering and, not least, greater honesty about the culture of racism that is so damaging us.