Misc
Cronulla is a diptych that recalls and examines events involved in the 2005 Cronulla Riots.
On 11 December 2005 over 5,000 people gathered at Cronulla in Sydney’s south to ‘reclaim the beach from outsiders’. The stated justification at the time was an alleged series of anti-social altercations perpetrated by Arab men, culminating in a violent incident between a group of middle eastern men and a pair of off duty life guards. Radio broadcaster Alan Jones would then go on to cover the incidents in a way that would later be ruled as ‘inciting hatred’ by the NSW court.
The assembled crowd while initially peaceful soon became violent, targeting anyone of middle eastern appearance, and then anyone who didn’t appear Anglo-Saxon, including two Bangladeshi students who were visiting the beach. The image in the artwork refers to an incident captured by photographer Craig Greenhill that occurred on a train at Cronulla Station, where two men were violently set upon by a group of up to 30 men. Just prior, a text message had circulated that were Lebanese men on the train, and when it arrived at the station it was boarded by the crowd who found and attacked the men, one who was Lebanese and the other who was a dark-skinned Russian. The assault was quelled by the quick actions of Police Officer Craig Campbell, who I painted for the 2017 Archibald Prize.
While some quarters still justify the actions of the mob at the Cronulla riots, the fact that violence was perpetrated against a set of individuals who had nothing to do with any alleged prior incidents, but were targeted because of their racial appearance, aligns closer with the tradition of lynching that any call for justice.
The diptych contains one canvas depicting the violent actions of the rioters towards one of their victims on the train, and another canvas showing an empty carriage. I wanted to separate these images to examine and contrast how quickly benign spaces become sites of violence. Superimposed across the image is the phrase,
“So where the bloody hell are you?”
The content, application and composition of the text refers to the 2006 Tourism Australia campaign helmed by then managing director of Tourism Australia and future Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The contrast between the text and the image is a contrast between two portrayals of Australian identity that were consumed largely by an international audience. One is the carefully constructed and focus-grouped phrase, carefully developed and workshopped by an international advertising agency, and the other an explosion of violence that exposed an underlying and deep-rooted issue with racial tension in the country. By using the image on the train as opposed to the beautiful images of whale sharks or the outback, the phrase is recontextualised and now poses a different question to the audience. Instead of being an invitation laced with cheeky, borderline-vulgar colloquialisms, the phrase asks viewers where they were, and where they are, twenty years on from what I understand is the biggest, most well attended, attempted lynching in Australian history.