Her shop is in the Amaroo flats, an early 1960s building of red brick and white-painted iron balconies. On one balcony, faded small Australian and Cronulla Sharks rugby league team flags hang limply victorious.
In the days before and after the December 11 riot last year Cronulla was Sydney’s Australian flag capital. They fluttered defiantly off high-rise balconies and in the windows and verandahs of old brick flats. Now only 20 or so flags fly around town, like patriotic diehards remembering a lost war.
Yet if much of Cronulla has become ashamed of such flag-waving, in the stairwells of some old blocks of flats Australian flags hang inside glass front doors, hidden and unfaded.
Monday is the first anniversary of the Cronulla riot, when about 5000 people - overwhelmingly younger than 25 - took control of the North Cronulla beachfront and nearby streets. The riot began as a payback protest against the assault on local surf lifesavers by young Lebanese-Australian visitors two weeks earlier but spun out of control.
Occurring on a hot Sunday afternoon, the riot was custom-made for television news. It received intense overseas coverage, especially in the winter cold of Europe, where many saw the sun, the beach, the waves and the bikinis and wondered, amid their Muslim train bombings and rioting Muslim youth, what in the world had made Australians that angry.
IN SYDNEY the riot shaped events and issues that crossed the year, from rape sentences and terrorist fears to the comments of Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly.
Institutions and governments have poured in millions of dollars to address problems but, a year later, the cost for Cronulla remains high.
Business has tanked. Seven restaurants have closed. In Cronulla Bicentennial Plaza a few shops remain unleased for Christmas and traders have little alternative but to hope that the good times return.
The experience of the restaurateur Ray Bradbery, the president of the Cronulla Chamber of Commerce, shows how bad racism is for business. “People started calling the day after the riot - the Monday - and cancelling Christmas bookings and it’s been down ever since,” he says. “We all just want it behind us so we can move on. But many haven’t made it. Some businesses went under, some lost their homes.”
Many locals say one unintended positive was that it made Cronulla’s beaches less crowded. Almost all said those charged with offences were not from Cronulla.
Some mentioned that angry Glen “Steely” Steele, the “face” of the riot, was not a Cronulla resident. A former Cronulla Sharks player, Steele had his 15 minutes of fame that Sunday afternoon by posing for television cameras in blue boardshorts and bare feet, his chest and back covered with spittle and beer, bellowing “F— off, Lebs” as he struck a simian pose.
Steele was lent on by embarrassed locals. He subsequently apologised to the Lebanese community and blamed alcohol but soon fled. He has been spotted surfing around Culburra since.
The nuances of the Cronulla peninsula are easily lost on visitors.
While the riot occurred around the North Cronulla beachfront park before the horde raced up the plaza to beat a few hapless young Lebanese-Australians attempting to flee on a train at the railway station, Cronulla is a series of tribal areas where boardriders, sunbakers and tribes of youths, retirees and shift-workers occupy different “hang” spots stretching from Wanda Beach north of North Cronulla through “End of the Wall”, “The Alley”, Cronulla Point, “Shark Island” and Shelly Beach down to “Sandshoes”, near the mouth of Port Hacking.
In the early 1960s newsreel teams would film the arrival of youths from Sydney’s western suburbs at Cronulla railway station. Back then they were called “Rockers” and they engaged in pitched battles with locals who the media christened “Surfies”. As ever, the fight was about ownership, wealth and class. Now ethnicity has been added but it is still very much about ownership. Yet Lebanese-Australians are not the only ones to abandon Cronulla since the riot. At Shelly Beach the Palestinian-born proprietor of the shop looks across the road to the park dotted with mature Norfolk pines and laments: “That grass would be filled with Islander families at weekends. Not now. Even they’ve disappeared, and nobody in the riot was worrying about Islanders.”
Nobody seems to know where the people have gone. Many can understand the reluctance of Lebanese-Australians to come back but, if the parlous state of business is any indication, Cronulla’s fellow residents in the Shire have been slow about coming back, too.
“Maybe it’s because they don’t want their kids at risk of being near violent behaviour or they just don’t want to be around,” Bradbery says. “But one thing’s for sure - it’s hard to get people to come back.”
At Bundeena, across Port Hacking, Cronulla’s loss seems to have been the Royal National Park’s gain. The owner of Cafe Manna, Jeff Tarrant, says: “Since it’s started getting hot a couple of weeks back, it’s been unusually crowded here in Bundeena.”
OFFICIALDOM has been moving mountains to try to remake Cronulla.
Tens of millions of dollars from the public purse have been spent on Cronulla because of the riot.
The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs has given $600,000 to Surf Life Saving Australia and $260,000 to Sutherland Shire Council for projects called On the Same Wave. They are aimed at promoting lifesaver training among youth with migrant heritage, particularly Middle Eastern youth.
The first four lifesavers recruited from the western suburbs are expected to pass surf bronze qualifications and be on patrol by Christmas. More are expected by summer’s end.
It could have happened earlier as other surf lifesaving clubs have crash courses for surf bronze certification. That said, the program’s ethnic liaison officer, Suzie Stollznow, says focus group studies among western suburb high school students found many would feel better at the beach if clubs used Lebanese-Australian lifesavers.
The Iemma Government is spending big on increased police numbers patrolling Cronulla. In addition to the estimated $20 million spent on police overtime in the days after last year’s Cronulla riot, Operation Beachsafe launched last October put hundreds of general-duties officers, the dog squad, highway patrol, helicopters, mounted branch and motorcycle units, and detectives from the Middle Eastern organised crime squad into Sutherland Shire and neighbouring St George.
Backing up the law, the shire has expanded alcohol-free areas around Cronulla’s beaches. In a related move, Rockdale Council this year began a campaign of loudly playing middle-of-the-road rock music in car parks along Botany Bay to discourage outsiders gathering late at night.
Adding to the feeling that life has returned to normal, the inaugural Cronulla Olympic Distance Triathlon and the NSW Surf Life Saving Championships will be staged around Sutherland Shire beaches in March.
But not everybody is rushing to solve problems resulting from the riot.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority is still dithering over complaints about the riot and comments by 2GB’s Alan Jones and Brian Wilshire. “The two inquiries are close to conclusion,” a spokesman says.
Before the riot started, hundreds gathered on Prince Street overlooking North Cronulla beach, drinking beer and eating sausages from a barbecue set up on a truck’s tray beneath a sign reading “No tabouli”.
Many old flats along the beachfront road sported Australian flags that morning but today only one remains. The young man who lives in that apartment says nobody has complained and he would not care if they did.
“It’s all good, mate,” he says in that odd beer-advertisement language designed to stop communication. “Have a good one.”
Two doors up Prince Street a first-floor flat slyly pokes fun at the whole sad mess: an East Timor flag flies in a small window. Multicultural or postmodern?
