Home & Away. posted by Richard Seymour

Maybe my suspicions were right: perhaps the reason why Australian soaps like Neighbours and Home & Away in the UK were so successful was because the folks back home wanted to know that just one colony had finally come aright. Well, as John Pilger has repeatedly demonstrated, it hasn't certainly hasn't been the case for Aborigines (who, some Australian acquaintances have tried to assure me, are actually really, really lazy and spend all their government money on booze and gambling etc), or for the working class as a whole. Lately, there has been an hysterical media campaign of hatred against Muslims. And here's one beach resort you want to avoid this summer:

The few remnants that remained from yesterday's race-motivated unrest included some broken bottles and an Australian flag perched atop a pine tree.
A series of apparent revenge attacks – including two stabbings – occurred overnight following the unrest at Cronulla, where more than 5000 people gathered yesterday.

Drunken mobs within the crowd yelled racist chants and chased down and bashed people of Middle Eastern appearance at the beach in an extended show of violence.

Police and an ambulance crew were also assaulted as racial tensions peaked.

A total of 25 people, including two ambulance officers, were injured and about 40 cars were vandalised at Maroubra as the unrest spread to other beachside communities.

Police said 16 people had been arrested and charged with 42 offences.

Locals said today they were in shock and many refused to be named, too scared of retribution for their comments.

Is it really possible that 5,000 resentful, whining racist scumbags found each other for the day? Apparently so. mark has some good commentary on these events. To wit:

This is your problem all over: a bunch of whites want to get together and be racially supremacist, what slogan do they choose? "Aussie aussie aussie! Oi oi oi!" And what banner do they fly? The Australian flag.

The Australian flag of course features the British union flag in the canton, a flag which signifies, intrinsically, the union of the English, Irish and Scottish nations. Such a union has in fact been effected most completely in Australia - it's fractured over the twentieth century in the British Isles. In fact there was precious little unity even within England to begin with.

What this all means is that the concept of Australia, and more so Australianness, is one with Anglo-Celtic culture. I think this is descriptively accurate. The term 'Australia' was coined by the British to refer to this new Anglo-Celtic nation seeded on this ancient continent. It has always excluded everyone else.

Oh, but - as a drunk guy once yelled at me on the train for giving money to a beggar - Who won the fucking war, eh?

"I've got a four-year-old girl and a boy who's 11, and they see these bastards come here and stand around the sea baths 'cos their women have got to swim in clothes and stuff, or they see them saying filthy things to our girls," he said. "That's not Australian. My granddad fought the Japs to see Australia safe from this sort of shit, and that's what I'm doing today."

The Second World War has always had a curious function as a corroborative reference for racist fuckwits. How odd, too. I have heard of liberals and neoconservatives wanting to re-fight the Cold War. But racists staging a beach party pogrom under the rubric of the "war against fascism"?