by Fiona Wright
Cronulla had changed, and the image of it I still carried was one that had set in stone, and had become as kitsch and heavy as a paperweight – not to mention as obsolete. (And I felt like a wanker, still carrying my outdated disdain.)
This upset me, so deeply and deplorably, because one of the things that scares me most about my illness is that I feel sometimes that I have calcified beneath the pressure it exerts on me each day – and I never feel this so keenly as when I’m confronted by external change.
Menai, the suburb I grew up in, is exactly halfway between Cronulla and Bankstown, I like to say. As children, our summer weekends would often swing between these poles: Bankstown for the shopping centre, the cinema, my grandparents’ trim fibro house, Cronulla for the beach and the old-fashioned ice-creamery alongside it. We had yellow foam-bellied bodyboards, and would catch the already broken waves close to the shoreline, bouncing along wildly on top of the water. I was never much of a swimmer, although I loved – I still do – wading out beyond the breakers, feeling the pull of energy, the tug of the current on my body as the waves rose and fell. I’d daydream out here, alone and in the quiet, bumped and buffeted about.
But Cronulla didn’t become truly important to me, as a place, until my late teenage years – we’d go there, my rabble of friends and I, to play, at being adults, to start carving out a place in the world of our own. I want to say that the beach, this liminal space between solid land and liquid sea, is somehow suited to the liminal time of adolescence, that time of uncomfortable and uncontrollable transformation and transition. But I know the real reason for the time we spent there is more practical – there are so few public spaces available to young people, to hang out in that daylong and weirdly timeless way that teenagers do, fewer still that are cheap enough for the minimum-wage weekend earnings that we’d only just begun to work for. Even at Cronulla, even then, the local council would pipe classical music through speakers in the plaza and its side streets as a deterrent for precisely this kind of ‘loitering’. My friends lived mostly in and around Hurstville – Penshurst, Peakhurst, Blakehurst – or Riverwood, none of them as far south or west as I. We’d been thrown together in an academically selective school not local to us. We didn’t have a common ground, a place familiar to us all from our all-too-recent childhoods. But Cronulla was close enough for us to travel to on our own, staying on the train until its terminus, and far enough from our parents to feel somehow illicit, somehow exciting.
As teenagers, we’d tumble out at the station and wander through the surf shops, the junk shop, the incense-heady Tree of Life before heading to the beach, and we’d picnic on the children’s play equipment in Dunningham Park, which so slowly gives way to sand. Occasionally we’d share banana smoothies and a plate of nachos in a café; only one of my friends, the impossibly precocious and glamorous Eleanor, drank coffee. We didn’t surf, and rarely swam – I think we were too self-conscious for that, although we never would have said so at the time. For my brother and his friends, of course, it was different – his teenaged trips to Cronulla were spent mostly in the ocean.
Mine is, of course, a very different teenage experience of the place than the one for which Cronulla is famous, that of Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey in their adolescent memoir Puberty Blues – a book I didn’t read as a teenager, but only came across years later, more than thirty years after its original publication in 1979. The two protagonists, Debbie and Sue, do not swim at Cronulla – although for them, this is because it’s unthinkable, in their social circle, to do so. Girls are expected to wait about on the beach in order to watch their boyfriends surf, occasionally running up to the kiosk to buy banana fritters or meat pies for them to devour; they look forward to rainy weekends, because only then can they actually spend time with the boys. Their Cronulla is dominated by the surf, by tightly knit and defiant bands of locals, each of which, they state, ‘resents the intrusion of any other tribe on to their beach’.
In some respects, I think all teenagers are tribal, because all teenagers are ill-defined, still so new and uncertain in their being that the only way they can describe themselves is in opposition to something else. In some respect, all of Sydney’s suburbs are tribal, separated as so many of them are from other parts of the city by the natural barriers of the harbour, the rivers, the hills, the man-made tangle of poorly connecting public transport. My friends and I were outsiders in Cronulla – and would have been too in the earlier Cronulla of Debbie and Sue – but we wore this proudly: we’d openly scoff at the young women shivering in their bikinis in the Plaza in mid-winter, their Southern Cross tattoos jutting out beneath their tiny waistbands. The difference wasn’t only territorial, I suppose – my friends and I prided ourselves on dressing differently, with the coloured hair and mismatched clothes of the tail end of grunge. Maybe it was gendered, because we were all women; it may also have been racialised – my school drew students from the length and breadth of southern Sydney, so we were a diverse crew, and this became all the more obvious against the prevailing whiteness of the beach – although I don’t think that I understood this at the time.
In Puberty Blues, Debbie and Sue define themselves first in terms of which beach they’re allowed to frequent: South Cronulla, or Dickheadland, where they sit at the beginning of the book, alongside the bad surfers, ‘the Italian family groups and the “uncool” kids from Bankstown’; then North Cronulla, to which they graduate after ‘dropping’ their daggy boyfriends; and finally Greenhills, the beach furthest from the suburb proper, which the ‘ultimate surfie gang’ frequents. ‘To graduate into the surfie gang,’ they explain, ‘you had to be desired by one of the surfie boys…You had to be not too fat, but not too skinny. You had to be not too slack, but not too tight. Friendly but not forward. You had to wear just enough make-up but never overdo it.’ These were exactly the kinds of girls my friends and I would sneer at, even though our friendships too were codified with rules, all the more insidious for being unarticulated. Because we wanted to be different, we never spoke of the things that defined our tribe, made us the same. The rules of adolescence are terrible and complicated, especially for girls, and regardless of whether it is 1979 or 1999 – a year that seemed to us so potent and foreboding of change.
But the reason Debbie and Sue’s awfully gendered role-playing on the beach, and their determined and continual marking out of their territory and tribe, is so disturbing to me now is that they read, perhaps inevitably, like some kind of forewarning. Debbie and Sue’s repeated injunctions are against ‘the Bankies, Towners or Billies’, the outsiders from the west, against whom the Cronulla surfies ‘wage an endless war’. The Bankies come, Debbie explains, from ‘the greasy western suburbs’ and are ‘easy to spot’ because of their cheap boards, unfashionable jeans, and one-piece swimming costumes; later, she describes them as ‘tattooed, greasy, bad-surfing undesirables’. The difference is not only territorial – ‘You didn’t need to come from Bankstown to be a Bankie,’ Debbie states – it is class-based, and more importantly, it is racialised. It’s not a big step from these oppressive, objectifying sexual relations and protective tribal identities of 1979 to the build-up of small incidents and angers that exploded in Cronulla in the summer of 2005: one of the charges the surfies laid against the ‘Lebs and wogs’, those contemporary trespassers from the western suburbs, was that they had been disrespecting our women – women not unlike Debbie and Sue, waiting on the beach, on their towels, in their bikinis, for their boyfriends.
My brother received the infamous, rapidly circulating text message in December of 2005, and sent it on to me, deliberately, to rile me up. Had the term existed then, I was the kind of woman who would have been labelled a social justice warrior, passionate and mouthy, and my brother found this (he still does) hilarious. It reads, in part, and with its original punctuation intact, ‘every Fucking Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day’, and ‘this is our beach and they’re never welcome back.’ He wasn�
�t caught up in the furore, although I have wondered, sometimes, if he might have been, had we lived closer to Cronulla – he was still a young enough man to be susceptible to risk, to thrill, to unthinking, bad decisions – but I also know that this is unfair to him: he was, and is, a gentle and kind man, and his needling of me has always been affectionate and entirely for show.
But there were other phrases I’ve never been able to forget: we grew here, you flew here and Fuck Allah, I love Cronulla. There was a sausage sizzle set up in a car park, with a sign that read FREE SNAGS NO TABOULI. A whole pig spit-roasted on the beach, skin tight and red and shiny.
What I remember most clearly about that time, though, were the days of tension beforehand. Like my friends, my siblings and I all stayed away from the beaches during that week, but we heard helicopters passing over our backyard, far more cars than usual roaring through our suburb. We watched the news each night and listened to the heightening rhetoric of the locals and commentators alike. We knew something was brewing, the thick summer air felt charged, electric. I was nauseous with anxiety, maybe even fear.
On the morning of the day the storm eventually broke, the day a scuffle on the beach escalated into racial violence and young men were set upon by mobs for looking different, I drove to our local shopping centre. I can’t remember why exactly, perhaps it was just something, anything, to do amid all the high feeling and vague threat. I had just turned twenty-two, and drove my mother’s old car, a three-door, jellybean-purple Hyundai Excel. I’d been losing weight, by this stage, for almost three years; I kept the front seat pushed as far forward as it would go so I could see over the steering wheel. I can’t think, that is, of anyone who might look less threatening than I did, but as soon as I turned on to the main road I was pulled over by a broad-shouldered policeman, who wanted to search the car and boot in case I was carrying weapons. This happened twice more in the days that followed: that night, a convoy of cars from the west had headed east, their inhabitants thinking of retaliation. The suburb I grew up in is exactly halfway between Cronulla and Bankstown, and you need to drive through it to cross from one place to the other.
The Cronulla riots distressed me deeply, and disgusted me. I know I’m not alone in this – the events of those few days were horrific, the images that circulated through the media shocking in their violence, the ugly, twisted expressions on the faces of young people who looked so similar to my neighbours, my siblings, myself. There are two of these images in particular that I’ll never forget: in one, a crowd of muscly men with their fists raised and surfer-long hair dangling in their eyes surround a single, much smaller man in a tight, white shirt and jeans; he is curled over the hood of a car, his arms protecting his head. In the other, inside a train, a group of young men are almost climbing over each other in their attempt to get to the dark-haired man facing away from the camera, sitting on one of those sweaty vinyl seats that my thighs would stick to every time I caught the train to Cronulla in summer, the high windows only opening outwards at the narrowest of angles, and always with a juddering thud. Most prominent in the photo: the beautifully yellow-blond hair of one of the attacking men, the Australian flag worn as a superhero-cape by another. And fists, raised above the head, the arms below them sinuous and taut.
I have never been punched in my life, have never felt a blow like that against my body. I’ve never punched another body either, and I know that this is only because I have been fortunate, that the circumstances that might change this are all too easily imaginable to me, especially as a woman, and especially as a woman who often walks alone, in urban and suburban spaces, by day and night alike. In each of these images, the camera has caught these fists in flight, moments before an impact that I still can’t quite imagine.
But what I could imagine immediately, what I can remember still, were the places in these images, the spaces that I knew so well. The interior of an outdated Sydney train, pulling up at the terminus of Cronulla Station, which looks strangely like a school playground, asphalted over and gated with slender metal poles painted a pale apricot, and creaky on their hinges. The car park that runs the length of North Cronulla beach on an ever-increasing incline and is always littered with the hard-centred orange fruits of the palm trees planted at regular intervals behind the curb. Elouera Street, Gerrale Street, Waratah Street, Nicholson Parade. It was, in a sense, a shock of familiarity: I’d never seen these places in the pages of my newspapers before, never seen them at the centre of public consciousness and national debate. They’d only ever existed for me in the most immediate, physical sense, and here they were, suddenly abstracted, suddenly unreal.
But there was something else at play here too: I’d always felt different, somehow, in my suburb, different from those other kids who looked like me, different from my neighbours’ children, different from the surfies and the Bankies alike, unhomely in the very place that was supposed to be my home. In some sense, these days, I think this is the experience of any writer, just as it is the lot of any adolescent, and I’ve only realised as I’ve grown older and moved away that I’m unlikely to ever feel anything other than anomalous wherever it is I might live. But at the time, and with all the righteousness that twenty-two year olds still have coursing through their veins, I felt that I suddenly, and unequivocally, had evidence of my difference: my suburb was the kind of place that could so easily become embroiled and implicated in this kind of ugliness and suddenly it felt good and right that I didn’t even want to think that I belonged.
I moved away from my home suburb not long afterwards. This had nothing, of course, to do with the riots, and everything to do with independence: I’d recently returned from travelling overseas, to places entirely unfamiliar and unknown to me, where I’d been living by myself and hanging out with groups of friends who spent their evenings together at each other’s houses, or in pubs and bars; and I’d come back, too, to an hour-long commute by car to the ugly office tower in Strawberry Hills where I was working. I moved into a tiny upstairs bedroom in a shared terrace in the backstreets of Newtown, near the Imperial Hotel, famous for its drag shows, and the School of Performing Arts; I placed my writing desk beneath a windowsill that was so crumbly with termites that the previous tenant had strapped it together with floral-patterned wallpaper in the hope that it would hold. I’d fallen in love with Newtown as a teenager, had wanted to live there ever since, and I loved how unsuburban it seemed. There were run-down pubs on every corner, strange and dusty shops selling second-hand books, Fijian groceries, Tibetan prayer flags, cafés and an art-house cinema. I bought my first-ever theatre subscription, a cheap deal for under-25s, went to my first raucous house parties where I didn’t have to pre-arrange how I’d get home, and held hungover picnics in the grounds of Camperdown cemetery, with its cracked and crooked headstones and occasional vaulted tombs. I rode a bike – which was eventually stolen – to work in the small hours of the morning, often past people who were still staggering home from the night before; I walked the streets past gardens planted with magnolias and frangipanis, ancient fig trees. I loved it here, but still felt vaguely (and unexpectedly) out of place and ill at ease, and this too was an adjustment.
I mention this mostly because Newtown also has changed, is still changing, and although this saddens me sometimes, it isn’t shocking, perhaps because my history in this place is less deep than it is in the places where I grew up, lasting as it has for only ten years, rather than the thirty years of experience I have with Menai, with Bankstown, with Cronulla. (For my grandparents, this experience may well have been reversed – they left St Peters and south Newtown for the south-western suburbs shortly after the Second World War in search of a better life, not knowing that I’d repeat their relocation, so many years later, in the opposite direction. They would often tell me stories of catching trams to the Enmore Theatre, playing football at Henson Park, shopping for children’s dresses called ‘Gorgeous Gussies’ near the smokestacks of Sydney Park.) The run-down pubs have one by one been refurbished, and
two of them – including the Newtown Hotel, one of the first gay bars in Sydney – have recently been bought by the restaurant mega-group Merivale, gutted, then reopened unrecognisable (although the pokie lounges stayed open during all of the renovations). There’s a Mad Mex, a Pie Face, two frozen yoghurt chains, a Max Brenner (and the protests outside of it have stopped); the cinema now screens comic-book blockbusters alongside its indie program. A Woolworths has opened around the corner from that first share house, and has photoshopped its usual advertising banners, so that the blonde actor grinning madly as she hugs a hot croissant also has a hipster tattoo on her tricep. I’ve been watching this, the whole time knowing I am implicated – it’s young, middle-class people like me who are driving these changes, I buy expensive drinks and sourdough bread right alongside them. But it also seems to me that this very urban space is suburbanising – more chain shops, more baby shops, more renovations – while at the same time Cronulla, and so many suburbs like it, has been urbanising. The inner west is also the only area in Sydney that grows less culturally diverse each time the Bureau of Statistics takes its measures.
I can’t help but think of my school friend who lives now in Gymea Bay, a suburb not far from Cronulla, almost halfway again between it and the suburb where we both grew up. It’s great for her, and for her husband – they’re close to the shopping centre, to the council offices where they both work, to their family and friends, and to the restaurant strips in Miranda and Cronulla where they spend a lot of time. I’ve been aware of how much they love this, dimly, for a while, but never listened properly when they talked about the places they had tried out, the elaborate and impressive meals they’d eaten there. I know in part that this was jealousy – these meals just seem like one more impossibility to me, one more pleasure that’s denied – but it was also a failure of imagination, and, even worse, a lingering, defensive disdain for the place in which and to which I’d felt so different all those years ago. It took going back to Cronulla for me to really understand this, to appreciate the rituals and the joys that they find there. (And I felt like a wanker, dismissing things I didn’t understand.)