Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the twelfth of December. I'm Lucy Tassel and Tam Kazlauski. This week marks twenty years since the Kronola Riots, when hundreds of angry, young white Australian men descended on Kronulla train Station and Cronulla Beach in
Sydney's South, attacking people of Middle Eastern appearance. In today's episode, we'll explain the context surrounding these riots, including the role of radio broadcaster Alan Jones, what happened on the day itself, and talk about how Australia has changed since them.
Lucy, one of the coolest parts of the way that we do the news at TDA, in my humble opinion, is taking a look at news events that happened when our audience might have been too young to remember them and actually acknowledging that even those events in early two thousands are probably out of the lifespan, if not. I
mean I was in two thousand and five. I was eleven, so young enough to start reading a newspaper, but mainly for the Sudoku, and it's really important to explain this context for the younger listeners, So why don't we start there.
Yeah, the best way to set the scene is, in fact, not even specifically for younger listeners, but just in general if you're not from Sydney, is to talk specifically about where Cronulla is, and especially where Cronulla Beach is. So Cronulla Beach is the only beach in Sydney that is really really close to a train station, So Kronulla train Station and Kernulla Beach very close together. It's just a
short flat walk. If you're coming from Sydney's southern suburbs, it's absolutely your most accessible beach, and that is a really important detail. There are other, obviously many iconic beaches in Sydney, but like if you're coming on public transport,
you need to transfer unless you're going to Cronulla. Suburbs on the train line that lead directly to Cronulla include places like Cogra, Hurstville and Rockdale where in the early two thousands, I've done a bit of digging into censustata From two thousand and one, a big proportion of residents in those suburbs spoke a language other than English at home and had been born in countries other than Australia.
That is in opposition to Cronulla about ten stops down the train line, where in two thousand and one and Cronulla eighty six point five percent of people's only spoke English right at home and eighty percent were born either in Australia or England. And both of those stats are actually higher than the national results in Australia at the
time two thousand and one. And so all of that is to say, you've got these suburbs north of Cronulla, You've got Cronulla itself which is very Anglo, very English speaking, and has this beach that's very accessible. It kind of means that everything was uniquely positioned to become a flashpoint in the early two thousands, a bit.
Of a microcosm of the changing face of Australia in the early two thousands as well. So what exactly kicked off these riots?
Yeah, So, according to a police report from two thousand and five, on Sunday, the fourth of December two thousand and five, at North Cronulla Beach, there was a verbal confrontation between a group of Cronulla Life Savers and a group of young men who were described as being of Middle Eastern descent. This confrontation escalated into a physical fight. And something I should note here also is that at the time these weren't professional life they weren't being paid.
These lifesavers volunteer life savers.
Volunteer Life Savers at North Cronulla.
And so this is one week before the riots eventually took Okay, cool, Yeah, So it's.
A summer Sunday, the fourth of December. One man was found guilty of assault and a fray over the fight the following year, So then that's Sunday, Monday, the fifth of December two thousand and five. Alan Jones, who at the time was the most popular breakfast radio presenter in Sydney, took calls on his breakfast radio show about the fight. So he aired from about five am to about ten am every weekday morning in Sydney, and he was the most listened to man on Sydney radio at the time.
According to a later review from Australia's media watchdog AKMA. That Monday, Jones agreed with a caller who described the fight as a quote horrendous bashing, and then Jones added he gave his opinion that it had been perpetrated by again, just to be clear his words, quote Middle Eastern grubs.
Okay, so a fight happens on Cronulla Beach on the Sunday, it makes it to Sydney Radio on the Monday. How do we get from that Monday Am call line to the riots on the Sunday.
Yeah. So every single weekday, Alan Jones's radio show airs in the morning every single day that week he talks about Cronulla and it's sort of sparked by this fight. On Tuesday, he spoke to a caller who said, this caller said they were from the Northern Beaches, and this caller said that area doesn't have the same problem as Cronulla quote because we don't have a rail line.
Okay. Interesting, and that goes back to that sort of geographic context that you gave before.
Yeah, exactly. On Wednesday, Jones read a letter from a listener aloud and the letter said, quote, invite all the biker gangs to be present at Cronulla railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive. Australians old and new should not have to put up with this scum, so very intense words. They're quite racist, I would say. And again, this is just being broadcast on breakfast radio as people are dropping the kids off at school on Sydney's most listened to radio station.
And that was probably then, based on your account, the first step in foreshadowing a future event, not necessarily just a criticism and a review of the past event.
So Akima found broadcasting this letter quote was likely to encourage violence or brutality, and quote was likely to vilify people of Lebanese background and people of Middle Eastern background on the basis of ethnicity. So Alan Jones was not necessarily expressing his own like those weren't his words, but it was his choice to read that letter from a listener allowed on the radio and then on Thursday. So now we're entering the fourth day of Alan Jones talking
about this every single day on his radio show. He mentioned some text messages that had been sent out.
Okay, so these are the mass texts and it's important to kind of set the scene two thousand and five, pre social media Facebook launched properly two thousand and seven, you know, this was the way that there was mass communication, right.
Yeah, exactly It's kind of hard to imagine, but it really was the easiest way to contact as many people as possible was to text everyone in your phone and say basically passed it on. Estimates suggest as many as two hundred and seventy thousand people got one of a series of texts. One of the texts that we know about is one that called on quote every Aussie in the area surrounding Cronulla to quote bash Lebanese and Middle Eastern migrants, adding quote, let's show them that this is
our beach and they're never welcome talking about Cronulla. If you weren't one of the two hundred and seventy thousand people who got the text, you heard about it anyway, because Alan Jones read it on air. Okay Akma notes that immediately after reading this text, he said, quote, well, now that's not the way. I do understand what you're saying, but we've just got to back off a bit here.
But on his program that same day, in response to a caller who called in saying, actually I have seen people be racist towards Lebanese and Middle Eastern people on Cronulla beach.
Okay, so kind of a contrarian viewed. Okay, that's interesting.
So a caller called in to say, actually, I have seen racism in action in Kronulla. Alan Jones said, quote, we don't have Anglo Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney. AKMA found this and other comments made by Jones that day were likely to vilify people of Middle Eastern background on the basis of ethnicity. So comments made by him, calls that were aired, AKHMA can make these findings not necessarily about him specifically, but about the
radio station. So saying like, got it, it's at the radio station's discretion to broadcast these things. So if you broadcast a call two GB can get.
In trouble and just quickly worth noting. I mean, AKMA is not the police, right, So there are media regulation watchdog. They can hand out fines, they can kind of ban people from appearing in certain contexts, but their powers are not the same as law enforcement.
Yeah, exactly, this isn't a criminal finding. This is just AKMA saying this maybe shouldn't have been broadcast because it could have had these effects.
Got it.
And then just to round out the week, on Friday, a person called into Jones's show to suggest Muslim people quote wanted to take over Australia. Then we have Saturday, Alan Jones. Not on the the eleventh, the Sunday one week since the altercation on Kronulla Beach is the day of the riots.
And take me through that day. So we've just arrived a week after a fight on the beach that has been escalated via radio and text messages. We arrive on that day. What does that day look like?
I think look like is the right way to talk about it, because when I think of the Kronola rights, I think of the images. I think of the press photographers who were there from places like the Australian Associated Press. I think of photos of young, shirtless white men at the beach with Southern Cross tattoos, maybe temporary tattoos, or with anti immigration slogans on signs or even in some
cases painted on their bodies. I also think of the images of crowds of white men running through the streets of Cronulla, clashing with police, physically attacking men of any other ethnicity. Reports of a man who was chased by hundreds of men into the North Cronulla Hotel where he had to kind of find refuge inside this RSL attacking two young men in a car who turned down the wrong street. These two men were sort of beset by
these crowds. There were glass bottles were thrown at the car, a window was broken, a man jumped on the hood of the car. One big moment of the day, and the thing that really comes to my mind when I think of the Cronulla riots is what happened at the train station. So according to contemporary accounts, crowds initially gathered sort of peacefully to do a sort of show of support for the lifeguard. That's what people who were there
tend to say. But then there were sort of calls made in the crowd that like a train sort of quote full of Lebanese people was arriving in the middle of the day. There were not that many people on the train, but anyone on the train who was a man of color, a non white man, was met with hundreds of angry white Australian men, many of whom were by that point drunk, who entered the train and began
physically assaulting them. And there's all these images of police boarding the train carriage and like beating people away with night sticks to get out of the train station.
Quite a few of those police officers have actually received Bravery awards and recognition because of the actions that they took on the train specifically.
Yeah, I mean it's really quite extraordinary to look at the Sydney Morning Herald also that day or the following day reported a man ripped a hijab off a young Muslim woman's head as she was trying to escape crowds at the beach. And there are also many, many contemporary videos of racist slogans being chanted by crowds.
I do want to touch on you just mentioned the Sydney Morning Herald. You mentioned Australian Associated Press before.
Yeah.
I think it was an example of the importance of good journalism as well, because we relied so heavily, especially in the kind of pre social media era, on the quality news reporting that probably the next day or later that day online and some of these images are still used in education and school curriculum around what multicultural Australia looks like. And it's a real example for me of journalism at its best.
Yeah, because we didn't have camera phones really exactly, those photographers and camera people and journalists being their other reason we know exactly what happened and in what order.
So now it's twenty years since, give me a sense of what has changed since then.
Well, Alan Jones is off the air and has been for many years, and it's currently facing court on separate criminal allegations. Another point of change is actually in those areas that I've mentioned, so Cronulla obviously, but also Rockdale, Cogra and Hurstville. I had a look at some census starter comparing two thousand and one to twenty twenty one.
What was really interesting to me was in Cronulla today there's actually a higher percentage of people who were born in Alia or England, while Australia wide those rates have actually dropped.
So interesting.
And meanwhile in Cogra and Hurstville and Rockdale there's a significantly higher percentage of people who were born overseas who now live there or who are speaking a language other than English at home than they were twenty years ago. So these areas have become even more what they were, even.
More entrenched in those sorts of stereotypes that existed in two thousand and five. Yeah, and what can you tell me then about how that fits into Australia more broadly?
Something that I found was interesting is so there was a twenty twenty four report from the independent Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, So they look at social cohesion, basically how harmonious is Australia's society. For that twenty twenty four report,
researchers surveyed about six thousand Australians. They found that half of those people believe Australia is accepting too many migrants, that statistic has increased from pre COVID levels, and they found that one in three Australia that they surveyed have quote a somewhat or very negative attitude towards Muslims one
in three. Despite that, though, the institute found that seventy one percent of these Australians said they believed quote accepting immigrants from many different cultures makes Australia stronger, and eighty five percent said multiculturalism had been good for Australia. So sort of saying like, overall we think, yes, this was good, but maybe right now we don't. But then there's also
I would say looking outside of data. I know I've talked a lot about data, but the thing that reminded me most of the Kronolar riots even though they weren't really violent per se, were the much for Australia demonstrations.
Earlier this year, only a couple of months ago.
So while they didn't, as far as I'm aware, descend into chasing down Australians of color in the street, I think we can point to that as kind of the closest event to the Chronolal riots, not being violent in the same way, but just in terms of a demonstration of mostly white Australians gathering to say we don't want migration to this country, or we want a lot less of it than we currently have.
And we've been hearing from Australia's security authorities for quite a few years now that some of that kind of far right extremism, the nationalism, that real kind of the exhibition of behavior that we saw in Cronulla in two thousand and five is the biggest security threat to Australia going forward. That's the view from Mike Burgess, the AZO chief.
So it's interesting that twenty years almost to the day of the Cronulla Riots, and whilst quite a lot of Australia has changed, and especially the demographics of Australia have shifted a lot, as well, some of those core views seem to have remained.
Yeah, and there were contemporary reports I was reading in the Herald from two thousand and five that there were people of known white supremacist neo Nazi groups on the ground in Cronulla that day in two thousand and five, and as we know, they have only sort of come out more into the open since then.
A really important part of Australia's modern history. Lucy, thank you so much for take us through that. Thanks Sam, and thank you for joining us on the Daily OS for that episode. A big week of news, and we've got one more pod for you later this afternoon with the evening's headlines. Until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkutin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.