Multiculturalism at the end of the line?

![CDATA[The locals call Cronulla and the surrounding Sutherland Shire ‘God’s country’, and some of them are joking. One Cronulla businessman was not joking when he told ABC television in January that there should be road spikes deployed electronically on the three roads to and from Cronulla to trap lawless outsiders (7:30 Report, 2006); he was proposing to levy locals $10 per week each to fund a vigilante squad connected by mobile phones. This insular, possessive and exclusionary attitude did not first arise in 2006. Gabrielle Carey (2005: 25), who co-authored a fictionalised account of the Cronulla youth surfing culture in Puberty Blues, recently recalled these attributes from her local experience there about three decades ago. In 1989, local surf club informants gave the following ‘tip’ to the Sydney Morning Herald beach guide, indicating incidentally their view of outsiders, ‘kids railing in from west and south western suburbs’, as the source of tension on the beach: ‘Steer clear of the aggro between different ethnic groups because the pushing and shoving sometimes turns ugly’ (Monaghan and Rutherford, 1989: 20).]]