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...we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. (1)
On 4 June 1944, after the successful evacuation from invaded France, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech that simultaneously announced the British people's determination to hold their Island continent fast from the 'grip of the Gestapo' and finally evoked the power of America as the guarantor of 'old world' liberties. This has a familiar ring to us in the current context of the global war on terror. Traditonally, the beach has been an important site for the defence and assumption of territorial sovereignty. It is the place where invasions have begun, such as Gallipoli, and where territory has been defended. In Australia, it is re-enacted as the place where a flag was planted in 1788 by Captain Phillip in the name of some far away sovereign, as an act of white possession. The beach marks the border between land and sea, between one nation and another, a place that stands as the common ground upon which collective national ownership and identity are on public display; a place of pleasure, leisure and pride.
Common ownership of the beach looms large in the Australian imagination but as violent attacks on Cronulla beach on 11 December, 2006, demonstrate not everyone shares the same proprietary rights within that space. This article explores how patriarchal white sovereignty is exercised through protest in relation to a space of everyday culture: the beach. While the events at Cronulla have been commonly described as 'riots' because of the unruly behaviour of predominately white males, we argue that it was a protest; it had rules and was a form of organised violence underpinned by a rationality of possession. We will also examine broader ways that the beach figures in the circulation of white possession through popular cultural texts and in ways of using and appropriating racialised space.
Moreton-Robinson (2007) has argued that patriarchal white sovereignty is a regime of power that in the Australian context derives from the illegal act of possession and is most acutely manifested in the form of the State and the Judiciary. (2) The development of Sovereignty as we now know it came into being through wars carried out by Kings and their knights. (3) The transition to modernity precipitated the transfer of the King's sovereignty to the State, which in the form of the Crown, is the sovereign holder of land and this transference also encompassed authority over a territorial area and the people within it. Thus social contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau argued that the formation of the democratic state within modernity was enabled by a contract between men to decide to live together, govern and make laws for such living. The Crown has always been represented as the King and feminists have argued that modern patriarchy is characterised by a contractual relationship between men and part of that contract involves power over women. (4) However, Charles Mills argues that the social contract underpinning the development of the modern state is also racialised. (5)
The racial contract originally stipulated who counts as full moral and political persons setting the boundaries for who can 'contract' in to the freedom and equality that the social contract promises. The universal liberal individual, who is the agent of social contract theory, was European men who collectively identified as white and fully human. This racial contract allowed white colonists to treat Indigenous people as sub human appropriating Indigenous lands in the name of patriarchal white sovereignty. Thus, sovereignty within Australian modernity is both white and patriarchal and as a regime of power it is constraining and enabling. Thus, for example, while all citizens have equal rights, not all citizens have the resources, capacities and opportunities to exercise them equally. Race, class, gender, sexuality and ableness are markers that circumscribe the privileges conferred by patriarchal white sovereignty within Australian society. As a regime of power, patriarchal white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and maintain its investment in the nation as a white possession. One of the ways in which this possessive investment manifests itself is through a discourse of tolerance involving the right to exclude or include people within the nation thereby supporting the existence, protection and maintenance of white space. This makes the fact that people were attacked by 'locals' at Cronulla Beach due to their 'middle-Eastern appearance', anything but insignificant.
The Beach in Popular Culture
The beach has maintained a persistent status as icon, site of memory and backdrop for teenage rites of passage in Australian culture. Examples are innumerable, from the ubiquitous back drops of video-clips for Australian rock bands like INXS and Midnight Oil to the long-running soap opera Home and Away set in a coastal town, the surfer-chick novel Puberty Blues through to the 'quality' ABC drama production Sea Change, in which a magistrate moves from the hustle and bustle of a capital city to experience an earthy sense of 'community' in a sea side town. From the late 1990s, the term 'sea-changers' entered the Australian English lexicon to describe participants in the process of moving from the inner and outer suburbs of major capital cities to establish a better 'quality of life' on the Eastern sea-board. Similarly in Coast Culture, architect and author Phillip Drew explores the enduring obsession of settler-Australians with the beach, from the first resorts established in Manly (Sydney) and Mt Eliza (near Melbourne) through to the mega suburbs that began to spread to the north and south of Brisbane in the 1980s. (6) Below we explain the importance of white...
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