"It sticks with you, I was only 12, but it was a crazy time. Everyone was very cautious and it was dangerous."
A little over nineteen summers ago, the pretty beachside suburb of Cronulla, home to more good surfers than anywhere in Australia except maybe Snapper Rocks, went to hell after middle eastern out-of-towners clashed with local lifeguards.
Text messages punched out on Nokia phones swirled calling for retaliation against any Lebanese who dared visit this hard-core surf town right there on Sydney’s southern rim
The subsequent riot was the culmination of several years of tension between the predominantly white, Anglo-Australian population of Cronulla and the Lebanese community out west.
December 11, 2005, was a wild ol day, anyone with a less than northern European hue was targeted, and the repercussions were felt for weeks.
Even Bondi Beach, a forty-five-minute-drive north had boom gates set up to stop mischief makers and a little bit south of Bondi in Maroubra, one Bra Boy attempted to take on half of Beirut in a melee that is still talked about in reverent tones.
Cronulla’s Connor O’Leary, who is surfing for Japan in this year’s Olympic Games at Teahupoo by virtue of his Japanese mum, says he was forced to hide his heritage on that fateful day lest racist wolves tear him apart.
“That was obviously a big moment, but for me, there’d be little things, like I’d be in history class and the Hiroshima bombings would come up. It’s not like it was targeted towards me, but there was that stigma around Asian culture. Not Japanese, but in Cronulla, if you were Asian, there was a stigma.
“I never got bullied but whenever it came up, I’d try and hide it just to fit in. I wasn’t a confident kid so I tried to be as Australian as I could because I didn’t want confrontation. It’s also great to see Cronulla come through that period too though, see it move on from that and become much more open and more multicultural.”
