In retrospect, I think that what I was observing in '98 and '99 was part of a sustained challenge to the idea of Australia as predicated on privileges attached to (white) race, (middle) class, (middle) age, (male) gender and (hetero) sexuality; an idea which, as Davis pointed out in '97, was starting to get some traction in public debate for a brief moment in the early 80's. At any rate, the cultural agendas foreshadowed in Gangland leads a zine writing friend of mine (also aged seventeen in 1997) to refer to our peer group as the ‘Post-Gangland Generation’.
]]> In this period some enormously significant decisions have been made by the Australian Government with majority backing by Australian electors (all of course influenced by the sense of accelerated global instability). The excisions from the national migration zone, the drowning of passengers aboard the SIEV-X, the continuing invasion and war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, the triumph of Howard’s ‘white blindfold’ view of history, the 'Children Overboard' affair, the expansion of immigration detention ‘facilities’, David Hicks’ incarceration without trial in Guantánamo Bay, the increasing punitiveness and decreasing size of the welfare state and the attacks on ‘sedition’ are all situated among the (radical) political moves that have been made by the (conservative) Government.Davis himself recently looked back over the ten years since Gangland was published, citing a ‘new conservatism’ in Australian cultural production over this period. ‘The old gang’ of boomer-commentators is ‘still in town’ and setting the cultural agenda (item: this last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald had a spread on ’40 Years since Sargeant Peppers’), but it must now contend with the innovations in public debate occurring via internet based organizations like GetUp, Vibewire, and Online Opinion; as well as books by younger writers such as Adult Themes, and Please Just F**k Off It’s Our Turn Now.
Importantly, much of the debate about cultural production continues to be, as Davis puts it in 2007, “the stuff of an in-house conversation among whites” (the ol' Invisible Knapsack). I think this assertion in itself is a reference to the kinds of ideas that Davis was talking about in 1997; ideas that he wanted to see aired more fully in Australian 'public debate' and that get shut down by hegemonic generationalism and conservatism. To suggest that Australian public culture amounts to this "in-house conversation"; a statement made by many other writers and thinkers in various ways over the past thirty years in Australia, in itself re-makes the idea of ‘Australia’ in a way that is rarely uttered publicly under the Howard regime. This is an idea of Australia as a nation founded on the continuing dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples and the subsequent maintenance of a national politic organised around the white Anglo-Saxon heterosexual gentleman. This Australia, and the questions it raises, will continue to haunt public conversations like those marked by Davis; sometimes beginning them, sometimes shutting them down, often unspoken, but always present.*
*Until such time, perhaps, as former Federal Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson realises her nightmare of "Australia in 2050, where the capital is called Vuo Wah and the country is presided over by a lesbian president named Poona Li Hung" (Gangland, p. 107).
]]>One disconcerting aspect of this constant rehearsal of the same position, has been the instant assocation of the ban with 'political correctness', and it's imagined agents - the intelligentsia. The quintessential statement of this argument appears in Gerard Henderson's column in the Sydney Morning Herald today (23rd January). So not only is this 'event' of the ban being read, perhaps with a tinge of hysteria, as an occasion to affirm the legitimacy of 'flag-waving' - in whatever form it may happen to take, even the provocative - but it is also being seen as part of a political agenda whose proper home is with a dour constituency of intellectuals. This in spite of the fact that the ban is being asserted by the private operators of a large and profitable festival, presumably looking to make their customers more comfortable. While undoubtedly political, since the flag is always a provocative symbol in a national context, those who issued the statement were making a commercial decision.
We humanities academics (or maybe just the insecure wannabes amongst us, such as myself) are thus interpellated (the calling into being of a subject - see the work of Louis Althusser) into the 'beat up' as antagonists, but it is a case of deliberate misrecognition, or more correctly of a paranoid political theory that poses all apparently anti-nationalist activity as hinged to a single, ill-defined constituency of intellectuals. Perhaps the conflict is actually between a version of capitalist activity and the dominant culture? What if the organisers are not part of a 'politically correct' conspiracy, but were in fact attempting to respond to the concerns of their customers, who have been made to feel uncomfortable in the past by the provocative use of the flag? Of course, now that this has been turned into a different kind of cultural-political exchange via that act of interpellation, 'we' (and who the hell is this 'we'?) are effectively 'hooked' into a position as antagonists - much as I have been in writing this. The situation is one to which we cannot not respond.
One final point: this act of interpellation in fact parallels that of the flag-waver perfectly. By waving the flag at another - and the flag is one of the most affectively charged symbols circulating in a national context - the flag-waver interpellates them: s/he is demanding 'proof' of loyalty, faith, the absence of ambivalence with respect to the imagined community of the nation, while at the same time offering the accusation of disloyalty, faithlessness and ambivalence. The interpellated 'Other' may in fact feel ambivalent about that community, and quite negative about aspects of the Australian state, or the dominant culture - about it's peristent strategies of assimilation, for example - and may not find an easy identification. In that moment of ambivalence, or of reservation, the flag-waver finds their 'proof' - but it is proof only of the inevitable failure and guilt of the 'Other'. That such a form of provocation is being mirrored by politicians and media commentators is a disturbing trend, and speaks ill of the liberal-minded credentials of a democracy.
]]>There are two points which I find problematic about Simons' review. The first is her characterisation of Lucy and Mickler's arguments about Gerard Henderson as "quite a slur". Anybody who only read her review would probably agree, but it misses the point by some margin. Lucy and Mickler's argument in relation to Henderson's work is quite straight forward, and Simons seems to recognise that it is an argument about what is absent in Henderson's work. Lucy and Mickler argue that Henderson's columnist persona is that of an "honest conservative", and yet Henderson does not turn his critical attention towards the kinds of corporate entities that fund his work at the Sydney Institute, which is to say that his "honesty" does not extend as far as his own interests, and those of the corporations with whom he is deeply, professionally imbricated. Nowhere is it argued that that imbrication is wrong in itself, it is his omission of those interests that is at stake. For Lucy and Mickler something is suggested by what Henderson does not write about, as much as by what he does. The image that Simons objects to - of Henderson "up to his neck in asbestos filings" - is a hyperbolic rendering of their argument, a rhetorical device, but it is not an unprecedented leap of logic as Simons suggests.
The War on Democracy is not a polite or worthy book, it does not use the sober rhetoric of the 'good liberal' media persona. It is a playful and messy text, but the position that Lucy and Mickler are taking is quite clear. They are arguing that it is not enough to defend democracy as a system of government, but that democracy needs to be thought of as "an idea and an ideal". It is precisely this way of imagining democracy that has facilitated - through campaigning, activism and agitation - so many of the rights now enjoyed by citizens in Australia, and it is this aspect of democracy that is at stake in the arguments of the conservative columnists in question.
The second aspect of Simons' argument that is problematic is her closing gesture towards an umediated public. I will quote the sentence here:
"We would be better off if the left would stop lathering up about newspaper columnists and instead concentrate on speaking to their fellow citizens, articulating alternative narratives in clear language."
This is a very nice idea, but it carries within it an inadequate image of the public sphere as a place in which unmediated, direct and clear speech between citizens is possible, and where "alternative narratives" are allowed to circulate as readily as dominant narratives. This is not how the public sphere operates in a mass society: we may imagine that this is what is taking place when opinions appear in our daily newspapers, on our television sets and from radio speakers, but that ignores the entire, complicated apparatus of media production, circulation and reception. Unfortunately, if we take the media as the terrain upon which these narratives neccessarily appear - whether dominant or "alternative" - then it is not enough to imagine that anybody can "speak" past newspaper columnists, and directly to fellow citizens. There are many possible strategies for proposing alternative narratives, and it is a viable enterprise to debate the success of The War on Democracy from this perspective. But to fault it - or any public intervention - for not meeting the conditions of a non-existent, utopian public sphere, is a disingenuous argument, one that is rarely applied to the columnists under question, and should not be applied here.
]]>Our speakers this time around are as follows, for anyone interested in coming along or just knowing what we're doing:
If you want to read the abstracts for any of these papers, or find out where and when they're on, you can search for them here.
]]>UPDATE: I've been having somewhat circuitous and heated discussions on other blogs about this issue, and I have done some further reading, including locating a transcript of the Mufti's sermon. Having read through it, I think that my original post remains adequate, although it was based only on reported speech in other articles. As Jodi has rightly pointed out in conversation, this is a translation, with all of the attendant problems. Also one political aspect of it that I failed to mention was the reference to 65 year sentences. I think the most difficult thing for a white middle-class Australian reader to accept here is that rape does not seem to be clearly differentiated from extra-marital sex, and by extension that a male perpetrator does not merit the same punishment as the female 'perpetrator' in the same act. This seems to be a deliberate inversion of the way in which the moral economy of rape tends to be asserted in the public discourse that has emerged since at least the 1970s. I don't have the authority to assume that this is what the Mufti intended, but even if it were, I would continue to argue that this speech has been brought out as part of a cultural political agenda that is decidedly illiberal. If the Mufti is posing his own illiberal agenda, then it is hardly surprising in that context.
]]>While we are reaching the point of media saturation over the issue of Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly's comments, I wonder whether we should spend some time actually discussing what was wrong about what the Sheik is reported to have said. It is my contention that the way in which the comments are reported implies that they are self-evidently extreme, without any recourse to explanation of why this might be the case, or how it is different to 'mainstream values'. This is a case of 'liberal' public reason posing the limits of its own applicability in the face of the moral repugnance of the other (see Povinelli, 2002). In doing so, public reason evacuates the scene, leaving only the essentialised 'self-evidence' of the other's degradation to be endlessly repeated.
In thinking about this, I haven't pursued every last story, confining myself largely to what has been reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (this, this and, from the ever-reliable Paul Sheehan, this).
The comments the Sheik is reported to have made are:
"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."
So, firstly, this is a fairly vulgar metaphor, particularly in this English translation. The alignment of 'woman' with 'meat' is an image that jars the current sensibilities of a white middle class reader (and no doubt, many other readers), even if the argument itself isn't particularly novel. In a Christian context, perhaps we could think of this as the rhetoric of the old school lay preacher. Certainly the comment is being offered in the context of protecting women from male sexual predation through adherence to a particular way of life, a particular dress code which are understood by the Sheik, and presumably his actual audience (rather than the national audience now imposed upon the sermon), to be properly Muslim. You'll also notice that in the quotation above, rape is not mentioned, even if it may be implied, and discussed elsewhere in the sermon. The Sheik has since explained that his comments were about premarital fornication rather than rape as such.
In this image, men are imagined as cats - which is to say, as predatory animals drawn to a meal that they are seen to naturally seek out where it is available. So although the Sheik says here that "the uncovered meat is the problem", there is also a recognition, albeit implicit, of the cats being a problem of a different kind. The meat is simply the site at which moral agency is seen to be applied, whereas the self-evidence of feline appetite is not open to such an application. So there is a very common schema at work here where women are designed as passive, attractive, visceral; and men are defined as active, attracted, lustful. Both of these gendered positions are being assumed as self-evident in the rhetoric, but it is the woman that is positioned as the site where moral agency can be applied. So this is a patriarchal (indeed paternalistic) argument, and therefore can be contested on those grounds.
Now that I've started to think about what might be wrong with the Sheik's comments, I'm struck by a very important question: how does this differ from other formulations about gender that circulate in everyday life and speech in Australia? Certainly I have heard similar ideas on gender expressed by white Australian men and women in many different contexts, rarely with a considered retraction. The substantive difference is that their arguments did not conclude with the idea that women should wear the hijab. Is the moment of reasoned self-correction that I depict in the story that opens this post really substantial enough of a difference to provoke moral outrage at those who do not, or are not given the opportunity, to publicly engage in such reflective moments?
Paul Sheehan has argued that the Sheik "has also done us all a favour by exposing the denialism favoured in academic, legal and media circles, and by some members of the NSW Government, that there is no problem reconciling community standards about the way women are treated and the attitudes of many Muslims living in this society." I also think the Sheik has "done us all a favour", but only if we take this situation as an instance in which to interrogate what exactly is wrong with patriarchal presuppositions, and also to think about what the purported differences between "community standards" and "the attitudes of many Muslims" actually are. Instead we see the scapegoating of Sheik Hilaly, and by extension Muslim men, in advance of any of these questions truly being posed. That is the real "denialism" circulating in this country, at the expense of a public reason that is no longer being actively demonstrated, but instead increasingly asserted as the minimal difference that separates "us" from "them". I can't help but feel, in this context, that it is liberalism itself that is being 'eaten by cats'.
]]>Gala Day - 27th October, 10am - 2pm, Sydney Uni no. 1
Sydney University Sport are hosting AIME for a touch football spectacular.
NSW Waratah Al Manning will join six of the Uni rugby players to conduct the workshop it should be a great way to end both the year 9 and 10 programs.
Gala Night - 27th October, 7.30pm - 10.00pm, Hermann's Bar, City Road Syd Uni
Hermann's Bar will be the location for the end of year function. The night will showcase the completed projects from the year 10 AIME proram. Entertainment will also be provided with Wire MC and The Street Warriors performing their unique mix of Hip Hop music. The night will also screen the AIME 2006 DVD for the first time. If you are interested in coming along please email kooriklub@gmail.com. Places are limited and it is invite only. Kids and mentors bring you parents or a friend along it will be a mad night.
Peace to you all
AIME crew
]]>Any interest let me know, I have a line to the boss haha.
clifton.evers@arts.usyd.edu.au
Our department has offered presentations in previous years on topics like "Gender in the Media". This year, we proposed a group effort - a mix of both Gender Studies and Cultural Studies perspectives on the contentious question of pornography - on some of the debates around what pornography is for and the kinds of problem it is often seen to be. Four of us agreed to present short pieces on different approaches to debates around pornography.
So far so good. Pornography is certainly one of the issues where both gender studies and cultural studies have a lot to say, and an issue that's clearly of general public interest as any survey of mainstream media indicates. But the organising body within the university came back to us with the decision that pornography was not an appropriate topic to offer to these students experiencing what university is like.
It's a strange decision, given that "current affairs" and "social issues" segments in newspapers and on television which these same students will be encouraged to consider as a valid field of public debate address similar questions. It would be a rare 17yr old who had no opinion on the various debates around pornography and those people could clearly choose not to select our session from among those available. It would, indeed, be a rare 17yr old who had never encountered a piece of pornography (although we were never intending to show any).
]]> Not only will undergraduate students taking many units at university be asked to consider such debates, but these are clearly issues that undergraduate students are particularly interested in debating. This is additionally odd from my perspective because I was planning to talk about the debates surrounding communities of teenagers writing and reading pornographic fiction online. While arguments over whether or not this comprises a social ill are part of those debates it seems very strange to assume the age peers of these community members are incapable of understanding or expressing an opinion on the issue.One of my colleagues wondered if we should have proposed a lego display instead, and I couldn't help thinking immediately of a Harry Potter Lego porn narrative site I was linked to when studying Harry Potter fanfiction communities. No, I won't provide a link here (I haven't asked the artist's permission and in any case it may be scandalously stumbled across by one of those many teenagers surfing the internet - but of course never encountering or having any ideas about pornography while they do so).
Yesterday a colleague at the University of Newcastle (thanks to Craig Williams) sent me a link to the following "report" on "Corporate Pedophilia" by "The Australia Institute" (under "What's New"). This report argues that girls' magazines and television programming directed at young children sexualise them, and points to the pervasive sexual images and practices of teenagers as one cause for this - as a sort of trickle down effect. Having recently been an expert witness in a court case on the content of tween girl magazines I can attest that this idea that teenage magazines are intensely sexualised is a well-established one in many quarters and that I am not the only one who would think that presuming older teens were ignorant about such things was odd.
To add to all these ironies the Australia institute has removed its images supporting this report on the grounds that they generated complaints from parents of the pictured children who didn't want their children linked on websites to "pornography". Particularly when compared to the high moral tone of the report working as an "exposé" this would have been another excellent example of the complex issues arising amidst ideas and debates about pornography.
I suppose the University is actually more concerned about the responses of teachers and parents to the idea of these students hearing academic debates about pornography, and perhaps that's inevitable and it was merely naive of us to imagine that the students were being given a representation of what we do. So we should all remember to keep it a secret that, just like the rest of Australia, at university we discuss issues surrounding kids and sex, and pornography is part of those discussions.
]]>Afterwards, I thought about how my reply might sound like a cop-out with a 'pedagogical' response to what at first blush looks like a 'political' question. But more on that later.
Week 2: On the menu is Sedgwick's concept of homosocial desire and homosocial bonding. The next day the avowed masculinist (well, I'm assuming it's him) posts a comment on a forum page of 'Dads on the air', a father's rights community radio station based in Sydney. He commits himself to reporting on what the Dep't of Gender Studies thinks about men. The tone of his post about Cultures of Masculinity is set early. He comments about Sedgwick's ideas:
'Homosociety and Power: How males force society to look at itself as male-centric, and why fathers aren't as capable of looking after their kids as their mothers.'
What's interesting about this comment, I think, isn't that he got it wrong. (I didn't say anything even closely resembling those comments.) But why - or how - did he get it wrong in this particular way? The instructive point for me, then, has been the realisation that it is because this student is engaged in a conversation with 'committed' others, he's not able to engage in dialogue with, say, Sedgwick. Returning to the question of pedagogy I raised earlier, however, I wonder if the emphasis on engagement can highlight (for the student) what it is that his political investment blinds him to? I hope so.
Anyway, his post was the catalyst for a number of other posts which attacked gender studies courses on masculinity and men. The author of one such response ended up complaining to the Sex discrimination office at Sydney Uni.
As the legal entity for such an accusation the School replied to this complaint, but I was involved in drafting the response. This was a useful exercise because it got me thinking about what it is that a course like Cultures of Masculinity does and why it matters. While I'd like criticisms of what I do to be less paranoid and hostile in advance of my actually doing or saying anything, the whole episode was a reminder that gender is something people think and feel very strongly about. So what we do is important (and risky) because it interrogates those thoughts and feelings.
]]>Key to the day was the involvement of community groups, as well as academics. In fact, the organisers copped a bit of flak for the language being used in the call for papers. It was suggested that the general public wouldn't be able to take part in the dialogue if the material to be presented wasn't made accessible enough.
On the day I found myself struggling with the abstraction that kept being put forward in the papers, and obtuse language being used to address the issues arising out of December 11, 2005 and its aftermath. While some papers, such as the opening address of Greg Noble, tried to make sure everyone would feel comfortable at the conference, many of the other papers didn't. There was repeated reference to dense academic theory and abstraction. Just backing, say the work of RW Connell or Emmanuel Levinas, up to the event and using it to explain what happened doesn't work. (In fact Connell is wrong about gender, but that's another post) Such a tactic distances us from what happened, the people involved and says: 'the evnt is interesting to my work and career'.
Theory IS important to analysis, and new langauge has to be used to unpack diffcuolt events. However, there is a time and place for it. Nothing was learnt by some speakers from the attack on the organisers [who tried to set up the community academic engagement from the outset]. I overheard a lot of comments asking what the hell the speaker meant and what planet they were from. Some people were polite about it, others were not. In the sessions, it often felt as if the speakers were talking 'about' Cronulla rather than engaging with it. Many papers felt very 'academic' and pretty far from what happened. All nice in theory, but so what? What were the speakers going to do with the material politically? How were their lives affected? What could be done on the ground?
In the afternoon there was a special session by community workers from Cronulla and other suburbs that were implicated. The speakers were very clear in the way they spoke - too many powerpoints but - yet simplified what were important areas, like racism etc. They also were pretty passive aggressive against the academics present, and some even challenged the academic analysis by refuting some of the confusing questions asked of them. I felt that the community workers still had the old 'ivory tower' opinion of academics.
What happened was that there was far too little to and froing in discussion as people had their guards up, so to speak.Future collaborative work was put in jeopardy.
We need to address the disjuncture between the theory we use as academics, the way we analyse things, and what the community wants , and quickly. I can't really blame the community and general public because they came along to the conference in the understanding that the talks would be in everyday langauge. But they weren't. Hence the frustration that bubbled along.
As academics we need to be situated in our talks, and work hard at translating the theoretical material so that others have access to it and the opportunity to debate it alongside us. It's not easy and can be very draining and expose us to critique more. Particularly when we are the work. We have to work twice as hard to make our work theoretically sound, but also very accessible. Our ocmmunity engagement needs to be very visible. Not to blow our own horn so to speak but to evidence our solidarity with community work and be seen to be 'putting ourselves politically on the line too' (in ways the public understand to be political). In this way we won't alienate the very people who would like to work alongside us and we would like to work with.
I know academics do community work all the time, but something was missing at the conference. Soething that demands us to revisit when we want to engage in very public debates and speak in ways that allow others into the work we do.
NB: Crossposted at blownglass
Buttrose begins by explaining how he came to “Theory” by taking a job teaching creative writing in an Australian university, a job which also involved teaching some of the ideas associated with French poststructuralism. His initial point is that these ideas, limited as they are, are communicated in “comically grotesque jargon” which presents an immediate barrier to intellectual and creative activity. Buttrose laments his despairing students, struggling against the lack of clarity in this writing. Remarkably, Buttrose suggests that “Theory”, or rather its anti-democratic opacity, “may have muddled the political will of a generation”, and that a crisis of the Left is attributable to the muddying of the waters accompanying a Theoretical take-over of the humanities. (Reading about this is actually remarkably heartening for a ‘Theory’-prone researcher in the humanities: my tendency to write long sentences turns out to be more politically efficacious than economic deregulation or changes to the forms and operations of power and sovereignty!)
The specific text that Buttrose cites as an example is Roland Barthes’ short-and-sharp “The Death of the Author”. According to Buttrose, Barthes is concerned with challenging “the authority of the author over his or her own work”. Barthes is seen as Theoretically assaulting the creativity of authors. On the contrary, it is Barthes who is asserting the creativity of writing: he is arguing that writing produces more than a reflection of the intentions of its author, that writing moves beyond the identity of its author, and is hence able to travel out into the world. More importantly, Barthes is arguing against a kind of criticism (and not, as Buttrose imagines, against “authors” themselves) that tries to explain literature by recourse always to the life and character of an author. In other words, Barthes is trying to break a dogma that beset thought in his own intellectual context. That he did so at the instigation of what he read in the literature of Mallarme, Valery, the surrealists and others, is only the most immediate reason to believe that Barthes is not anti-author.
Buttrose accuses postmodern “Theory” of arguing that “all meaning is deferred, relative and subjective.” This is a very simple idea of what is going on in the work of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, or Lyotard, and it may be too much to ask, within the frame provided by a polemical exchange, for some evidence or citation to support this assertion. At any rate, it is Buttrose’s own thinking that is most open to this characterisation. Buttrose argues that the work of an author, when it arrives in the form of writing, continues to contain within it the meaning that the author has given it, and their intention, and that they alone can answer the misinterpretations brought to the work by its readers. It is this very theory, I would argue, that implies “meaning is deferred, relative and subjective”. Deferred, because it’s meaning is not set until that point, whenever it may be, that the author has agreed with an interpretation; relative, always to the author’s intentions and ideas about their own writing, (which will change because people’s ideas change, a point on human nature that I’m sure Buttrose would support); and subjective, since meaning, for Buttrose, is always determined by the meaning attributed by the author – a singular subject – to his or her written words.
My point, though, isn’t really that Buttrose is stupid, or has simply got it wrong, although in some ways it seems he has engaged in a great deal of wilful misinterpretation. Indeed, Buttrose himself precludes this argument: those who disagree with “Theory” are always said not to understand it, and that if they did they would agree. This is not my point at all, as I very often find myself disagreeing with Foucault, Derrida et al. Rather, by way of conclusion, it seems that this kind of polemic has become ubiquitous in a way that it is argued that “Theory” has. That means that, for all of Buttrose’s admirable investment in creativity and engagement, the way in which he asserts those values is precisely as stultifying as he imagines postmodernism to be. A very broad spectrum of comment – left and right - works in exactly this way: it legitimises itself at the expense of “Theory”, but it doesn’t go so far as to ever get to the substance of it’s project. My main request then –and it is an idea with which Larry Buttrose will be familiar as a creative writing teacher – is that, in future, please try to show, and not merely to tell us, how darned creative and engaged you are. The first step in that direction is to jettison the clichéd polemic.
UPDATE: My name is Adam Gall, I'm a postgrad in the department. My profile is being updated, in case anybody wants to "call me out" for what I've written here.
]]>The older crew had sat back and watched the fight go down. The young blokes kept looking over for validation of their actions. In return they got nods and a complicity that spoke louder than words. The older blokes were letting the younger ones do the work of protecting their turf.
Many surfers express dislike of such violence, but a popular belief is it's a necessary evil that holds together an order of things that could otherwise fray.
The young blokes seem to be the most aggressive out in the surf. They're trying to impress the elder statesmen by making it very clear that they know the rules, and are willing to put their bodies on the line. I haven't seen a lot of violence in the surf, although I’ve been in a few fights myself. The violence only has to happen sometimes to set up the fear of pain, shame, humiliation and ridicule that communicates what's allowed to happen and what isn’t, and who's where on the pecking-order.
Recently I've been thinking through what happened at Cronulla on December 11, 2005. I've got to give a paper at a conference at Macquarie University. Surfing culture runs deep at Cronulla and I'd like to make some links between surfing culture and how some blokes behaved on the day. Today's event made me think about how the same processes were at work during the Cronulla riot. As one eyewitness explained
'One thing I did notice when I got caught up in the crowd at station was the number of young kids … who were eager to be involved in the action. Unlike some other older males who seemed, at times, willing to sit back and merely watch these proceedings, many of the younger males seemed intent on being close to the ‘action’ (in Barclay and West, 2006, p. 81).
Since the riot in December many families from non-English speaking backgrounds have been too scared to return to Cronulla Beach. Instead they favour Brighton-le-Sands, a neighbouring beach that might as well be on another planet. Brighton is not a surf beach and is far more racially and ethnically diverse than Cronulla.
Further to this, such mateship and practices of care aren’t the preserve of white surfing blokes. According to Randa Kattan (2006), the executive director of the Arab Council of Australia, there is an old Arabic saying: ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world’ (The Australian, January 28, 2006).
Barclay, R. and West, P. (2006) ‘Racism or Patriotism? An Eyewitness Account of the Cronulla Demonstration of 11 December 2005’ in People and Place, 14(1), pp. 75-84.
So what is it about this case that so thoroughly confounds good sense -- not the medias' (as if!) but, for example, the legal team that sought Karr's extradition, rather than filing his "confession" with the no doubt countless others that the case elicited. You tell me.
]]>