White tribe: echoes of the Anzac myth in Cronulla

Since the publication of Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (1987), Australian Cultural Studies has turned to the beach as a primary site for examining national identity and the myths of Australian culture. In the text the beach is read as a liminal site between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, represented respectively by lifesaver and surfer. The meanings of anti-authoritarianism attached to the surfer are significant to the reading. And yet Fiske, Hodge and Turner also locate a heritage of authoritarianism, discipline and civic duty in the figure of the lifesaver: <br /><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />'Lifesavers have drills, march-pasts and patrol squads, while exercising a conservative pastoral </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">interest in their members’ moral health. They are agents of social control. Further, they see </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">themselves as servants of the community, sacrificing their weekends for others—a tradition of </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">sacrifice dear to a nation which twice voted no to conscription in the Great War.' (Fiske et al. </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">1987, 64–65) </span><div><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />The last sentence distils the bifocal meanings not only of the ‘culture’ of the beach but of </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">Australian cultural identity more broadly, framed by contested norms of civic participation </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">and moral values. </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">This binary frame has been a productive starting point for analyses of national identity </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">in Australian Cultural Studies since the 1980s. These have dropped off the radar in recent </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">years owing to a shift away from the national field and the privileging of a transnational </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">cultural agenda. And yet recent events in Australian politics and culture have </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">unexpectedly re-centred national identity as an urgent issue for Cultural Studies, </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">particularly in its use as a form of exclusion to targeted populations within the national </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">community.<br /></span><br />In light of these developments this article revisits Myths of Oz and its construction of surfer and lifesaver c.1987 to focus on the reordering and re-assemblage of these figures on Sydney’s beaches 20 years on. It also acknowledges that this is a process which cannot be understood in isolation from broader shifts in Australian political culture, and particularly the current obsession with national ‘values’ hinging on a strategic shift away from multicultural policies and the redefinition of the ‘fringe’ as an ethnic position.<br /><br />Reflecting on these issues, this article locates a slippage between the binary framing of the surfer and lifesaver in Myths of Oz and their complex ‘relationality’ on the beach today. Specifically, it examines how the surfer has recently become co-opted into the Australian mainstream and imbued with a form of ‘governmental belonging’ (Hage 1998) once attributed to the lifesaver alone. This slippage has been enabled by the overlap betweenlocal surfie cultures and exclusivist national cultures assembled by State and federal governments; particularly as both draw upon a normative frame that opposes the meanings of white belonging to Muslim groupings within the nation.</div>