An example of this can be found in the article in the current issue which discusses the riots that broke out at Cronulla in the summer of 2005. I was living away from Australia at the time; I therefore read the article with interest, hoping it would explain to me what the sequence of events was that had led to such violence. Unfortunately, the absence of an eagle-eyed copy editor or line editor led to the omission of one vital piece of information. The writer probably assumed everyone reading the piece already knew it, thus breaking the rule that you should never assume your reader knows everything that you know. As a result, when I reached the end of the article, I was still unable to understand how such a thing came about:
The assault was almost certainly the result of the lifesavers' intervention, but because no-one's ever been charged with an offence in relation to the assault, I'd imagine that it's impossible to state anything about it in print for fear of defamation.
ReplyDeleteIt was hard to follow these events even for those of us who were in Sydney at the time! Lots of rumour and half-truths abounded.
Thanks, M-H, but their intervention with whom?
ReplyDeleteSome 'middle-eastern' boys, one assumes, who were never identified - nor were the girls who were supposedly insulted. It was all rumour, innoendo and mystery and I doubt that any media would have been prepared to say more.
ReplyDeleteWell then, I got completely the wrong end of the stick - I'd assumed it was local Cronulla boys, who got frustrated, because the lifesavers didn't do anything, and moved on from that to full-scale riot. If it was Middle Easterners (or rather Australians of Middle Eastern extraction), then the rest of the Monthly article becomes harder to make sense of. In the article those identified as Middle Easterners are quoted as saying, 'We try so hard to assimilate and be Aussie, but now we know we will never be accepted'. Attacking surf-lifesavers would have to be regarded as not a hugely assimilative gesture. As I said at the beginning, if you're going to put forward an argument, you do need to supply all the available facts.
ReplyDeleteAttacking life-savers comes under the heading of completely, totally and irreparably un-Australian. This was put forward as one of the reasons for the riots, that middle-Eastern people attacked 'our' heroic lifesavers and therefore had to be put in their place.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that has come out of the whole debacle was that we are told that surf clubs now try really hard to recruit from middle-Eastern communities. Apparently there were no lifesavers of middle-eastern origin (I can't believe I wrote that!) before the riots; it's never been clear whether they never applied or weren't accepted.
I think it could probably be used as an example in a dictionary to help define the odd concept of 'un-Australianness'. The Monthly article explains that a two-year initiative to recruit and train 'lifesavers of middle-eastern origin' was a success but has now petered out. I suspect the problem won't go away until origins - middle-eastern or otherwise - are not things people are aware of or care about (on either side).
ReplyDeleteAgree, agree, agree. I hope I live to see that day.
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