Cronulla riots 20 years on: have attitudes changed since that hot December day when racial tensions exploded?
Some say Australia still has not tackled racism, and fear social media is a more powerful tool than text messages and talkback radio that stirred up rioters in 2005
Julie Cutbush noticed the chanting first. At home in Cronulla, in Sydney’s south, on 11 December 2005, the then high school teacher could hear shouting in the nearby beachside park.
“So I took a walk,” she says. “I turned the corner at the surf life saving club and I saw this mass of young males.”
It was a hot afternoon and hundreds of young people – mostly men, many bare-chested, some with Australian flags draped over their shoulders – were streaming from the train station across Monro park and into Cronulla park. They ran, carrying eskies full of beer, and as the alcohol flowed the hundreds swelled to thousands and the chants grew louder and more aggressive.
“They were calling out racial slurs – and then it just erupted,” the retiree, who now lives in regional New South Wales, remembers. “Violence, bottles, cans, whatever, were being thrown. It was a melee. It was abusive and they were all fuelled by alcohol.” She saw groups of white men targeting anyone who may have been Lebanese or Muslim – many, in fact, were neither – and she saw those men retaliating. Well into the night, police attempted to break up mass fights and thwart reprisals, while the cry “Fuck off, Lebs” reverberated.
“I didn’t think I would ever witness something like that. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the stuff of overseas. It’s not Australia, it’s not Cronulla, we’re all reasonably tolerant people here,’” the 68-year-old says. “Well, no, we’re not. We’re ugly. And the sad thing for me was that I probably had some of my students there.”
Simmering tensions
The violence was fomented by years of simmering racial tensions, says Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad. As a teenager at Punchbowl Boys High in Sydney’s south-west in December 2005, the author and academic had watched as “Lebs” became the “folk devil”, accused of being racists, terrorists and gangsters.
“I don’t think of Cronulla as one day. I remember it as a period,” Ahmad says. From about 1998 to 2004, front-page stories in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph were dominated by “Lebanese gangs”. Among the worst stories were the gang rapes of six girls led by 18-year-old Bilal Skaf and his younger brother Mohammed in 2000, for which nine males were convicted. Then the catastrophic events of 9/11, followed by the 2002 Bali bombings, made Islamophobia a daily reality for Muslims.
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October 2005 had been a volatile month, with police called to North Cronulla beach and surf club at least three times. A police report at the time found local beach users had “the opinion that Cronulla [beaches] are for locals only and show an obvious racial prejudice against Middle Eastern males”.
The peninsula suburb has long lacked the diversity that characterises much of Sydney. With a train station metres away from the beach, its surf is easy to access for people from south-west Sydney, where Bankstown is home to a large Middle Eastern Australian community.
The smouldering tensions came to a head after a fight between three volunteer surf lifesavers and a group of young men with Middle Eastern ancestry outside North Cronulla surf club on 4 December. The incident drew intense media attention, including from Alan Jones, whose talkback radio program “played a critical role in galvanising the troops around shock, horror, hatred and outrage”, says Andrew Jakubowicz, a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney. (A court would later uphold a ruling that Jones incited hatred and vilified Lebanese Muslims in the lead-up to the riots.)
That week, 270,000 text messages were sent to drum up support for an “Aussie pride” rally on Sunday 11 December. Three days before, police classified the risk of racially motivated violence in the area as “almost certain”.
Sunday, the day Cutbush remembers, became the centre point of the Cronulla riots, a days-long explosion of violence in Sydney’s south and Australia’s largest race riots since the 1860s.
Five thousand people, mostly young white men, swarmed around North Cronulla from 10am. At about 1pm, a man of Middle Eastern appearance was chased, eventually finding safety in the entrance of the North Cronulla hotel. In Dunningham park, near the surf club, a crowd sang Waltzing Matilda while two men of Middle Eastern appearance were kicked and punched. The train station became the frontline, manned by what police called “vigilantes” who set upon some of those arriving by train, the victims chosen simply because of their Middle Eastern appearance.
The window of a car being driven by two Bangladeshi men was smashed, so too was a window of a restaurant in which three Middle Eastern men had taken shelter. An ambulance was attacked, police were spat on. Chaotic scenes of police swinging batons and using pepper spray were captured by cameras, the images soon becoming infamous. The assailants were plastered across the news that night. Violent reprisals began in the early evening, the most serious of which were in Maroubra, Brighton-Le-Sands and Cronulla.
“I got text messages forwarded from my white friends telling me to come down to the beach in Cronulla and I got text messages from my Lebanese friends telling me to go down to Maroubra,” Ahmad remembers. He stayed at home.
The next day, 4,000 people gathered to protect Lakemba mosque, with volatility and reprisal attacks continuing into the evening – although police never established a genuine threat to the mosque. In Arncliffe, Brighton-Le-Sands and Cronulla, rioters armed with baseball bats, metal bars and firearms assaulted people in cars and streets. Shots were fired and police officers were almost run down.
According to a NSW police report on the emergency response, most of the 104 people who were charged in relation to the violence came from an almost even split of Sutherland and Bankstown. And, from 2000 to 2005, just 5% of “people of interest” to the police in Miranda – which covers Cronulla – were recorded as having a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern racial appearance. Forty-seven per cent were white European and 41% were recorded as race unknown. There were fewer crimes involving the children of Lebanese parents in 2005 than there were two years before.
The police report stated the “whole nation … looked on in shame” – but the audience was far larger. Adele Cutbush, Julie’s daughter, was 20 at the time.
“It was on the world news and people were calling to say, ‘Are you OK?’” she says.
Shakira Hussein, a writer and fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute, describes Cronulla as “a big deal” that left deep scars.
“The community carries the weight of it,” she says. “Cronulla came to represent much more than that beach and that day.”
‘The hostility remains’
Today, North Cronulla surf club is a building site. Census data shows Cronulla’s population is still overwhelmingly of English, Australian, Irish and Scottish ancestry. Its most-spoken non-English language – used by 1% of its residents – is Greek. It remains a popular beach destination, and is, says the state member for Cronulla, Mark Speakman, “an extraordinarily relaxed place”.
“Cronulla does not have the degree of multicultural diversity of most of Sydney, but it has become a more diverse place than it was,” he says, adding he has not seen any signs of racial tension “or, to be quite honest, any sign of tension at all” in his ward.
But Julie Cutbush is not sure things have moved forward a great deal. “We might like to all think that we’re educated and tolerant – but I don’t think attitudes have changed that much,” she says.
A Caringbah retiree watching the surf near the club agrees. “It doesn’t feel much has changed,” he says. “There is still an underlying racist attitude, certainly not overt, but still there.”
Today, 67% of adults believe that racism is a fairly or very big problem in Australia, according to Mapping Social Cohesion 2025. October’s Guardian Essential poll found the hard-right party One Nation’s primary vote had doubled to 13% since the May federal election.
“The hostility remains, the racism remains. And to people that think, ‘Oh, we’re much better now,’ I say, ‘Well, just look at the last five years,’” says Giridharan Sivaraman, Australia’s race discrimination commissioner.
He points to the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre, committed by an Australian citizen; the racism toward people of Chinese and Asian origin during the Covid pandemic; increased racism toward First Nations people during the failed 2023 referendum; and recent surges in both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
This September, NSW police had to intervene to break up a scuffle between pro-Palestine supporters – many of whom were Jewish – and pro-Israel counterprotesters on Bondi beach. Chants reportedly included “Go back to Lakemba”, “Get off our beach” and “White Australia”. In October, 15,000 people attended anti-immigration rallies which platformed neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
“I don’t think it’s improved, I don’t even think it’s the same – I actually think it’s worse,” Ahmad says of racism in Australia. “Cronulla has gradually expanded into a national problem, whereas this race riot was very much a local problem.”
One reason is technology. Twenty years ago, rioters “congregated using text messages,” says Sivaraman. “It relied on one person texting another or texting a group and trying to get people together.”
Like talkback radio, text messages were a “medium-low tech precursor” to the social media age, Jakubowicz says, with the police able to read all 270,000 of those sent in relation to Cronulla. Now, amplified outrage is constant – and Telegram and other encrypted messaging systems make its monitoring much more difficult.
The police were criticised for their handling of Cronulla. A year ago, the former assistant commissioner Mark Goodwin and former police minister Carl Scully, who led the response to the riots and their aftermath, launched a book controversially claiming the riots were “not racially inspired” – a position one academic said was self-justification for their actions at the time.
The NSW police declined to comment about preparations for potential trouble this 11 December.
“It’s become a talismanic event for the far right,” Hussein says of Cronulla. “The type of violence that we’ve seen in the years since is very much front of mind.”
Sivaraman says Australia has still “not yet tackled racism in a meaningful way”.
One cause for hope is slowly increasing diversity and representation in public life. “If Cronulla happened today, you’d have so many people in the mainstream speaking out,” Ahmad says.
Hussein agrees, pointing to the “great strides” taken by Muslim women on the national stage. “The fact that I am less noteworthy than I was 20 years ago is a good thing,” she says. But, even two decades on from Cronulla, she will still only visit the beach after careful consideration.
“It depends which beach,” she says. “It depends how many other people are there, it depends what day.”
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