The text messages circulating around Sydney’s Sutherland shire in early December 2005 explained precisely the purpose of the gathering. “Just a reminder that Cronulla’s 1st wog bashing day is still on this Sunday,” one read. “Chinks bashing day is on the 27th and the Jews are booked in for early January.”
On Sunday 11 December, more than 5,000 people, mostly young men, swarmed Cronulla beach. They wore Australian flags as capes, they had drawn the Eureka flag on their bodies. They were drinking alcohol and they were chanting – and they were beating up anyone who wasn’t white.
While tensions had been growing in the area for months, the catalyst had been a fight between three off-duty lifesavers at North Cronulla beach and a group of eight men of “Middle Eastern appearance”. The 2GB radio host Alan Jones was outraged as his listeners told stories of the “lebs” and “wogs” at the beach, and he said he was in favour of “a rally, a street march, call it what you will. A community show of force” and urged his listeners to attend. Police said 26 people were injured, 104 arrested and 285 charges were laid.
Memories of what happened on that southern Sydney beach nearly 20 years ago provoked anxiety among migrant communities even before last Sunday’s so-called “March for Australia”. But they have been recalled by many more in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi-led demonstrations, in which volatile confrontations culminated with dozens of black-clad men, including known fascists, allegedly attacking people at Camp Sovereignty, a longstanding First Nations protest site in Melbourne’s Kings Domain. Three men were charged.
Crowds surround a Cronulla hotel on the day of the riots on 11 December 2005. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP
The association between Cronulla and the March for Australia isn’t entirely accidental. The anonymous TikTok video that called for anti-migrant rallies on 31 August coupled stock footage of Australian flags with news footage from the Cronulla race riots.
Why was Cronulla a touchstone for the organisers of Sunday 31 August? Did we witness a repeat of it, or was it a marker of something worse? And what does it say about the prevalence of Australian racism?
‘An institution of racism’
Camp Sovereignty is a place that marks the dead: 38 Aboriginal people from around Victoria are buried there, their remains repatriated in the 1980s by Museums Victoria. The camp is both a vigil and a protest against the colonial infrastructure that continues to sideline the slaughter of Indigenous people: there is no memorial but a plaque set into a granite boulder. No path leads there from the road; no prominent signage points to it. A victim of Sunday’s violence, who spoke to Guardian Australia, noted the grim symbolism of a white nationalist attack on such a site.
“Australia is an institution of racism,” the Camp Sovereignty founder, Krauatungalung elder Robbie Thorpe, told Guardian Australia on Tuesday. “It’s the institutions of this country that have allowed this to manifest. They’re running around saying stop immigration; they’re immigrants themselves.”
Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne’s Kings Domain. Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/The Guardian
Australia has a long history of white nationalism, from the systemic violence inflicted on Indigenous people from the early days of British colonisation, to the White Australia policy and, more recently, its brutal offshore detention regime. Pauline Hanson expressed fears of being “swamped by Asians” in her first speech to parliament in 1996. A few years later, the then prime minister John Howard, facing re-election in the wake of 9/11 and the sinking of the Tampa, proclaimed: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
The problem of racism in Australia is as bad as it ever was, Australia’s race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, tells Guardian Australia.
“The racist violence keeps on pouring out on to our streets on a regular basis and we’re so quick to forget the last time it happened,” Sivaraman says.
“During Covid, we saw a huge increase in racism towards people of Chinese and Asian origin, including racist violence. During the voice referendum, we saw a mainstreaming of racism towards First Peoples. In the last year-and-a-half, we’ve seen a huge increase in antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, and now, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen a huge increase in anti-Indian racism.
“Interpersonal racism is prevalent and our structures are allowing this racism to happen and in some cases encouraging it.”
Sivaraman says he has “lost count” of the number of people from migrant communities who have told him over the past few weeks that they were scared, or feeling vulnerable, or unsure what to do. Members of Australia’s south Asian migrant community also described to Guardian Australia their shock and fear in the lead-up to the rallies.
Jana Favero, the deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, agrees multicultural communities in Australia feel exposed and insecure.
“This country doesn’t need to have a debate about immigration, it needs to have a debate about racism: it is something this country has never reconciled.”
While the noisy minority of neo-Nazis on the streets of Australia’s capitals dominate news headlines, there is a disconnect with the broader Australian public. The electorate, at this year’s election, resoundingly rejected the politics of fear and division, not only rejecting Peter Dutton from the prime ministership but voting him out of parliament entirely.
Protesters at the March for Australia rally in Melbourne’s CBD on 31 August 2025. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian
Police estimate a total of 21,000 people participated in the March for Australia. Those numbers were dwarfed by the scale of the Palestine solidarity movement – between 90,000 and 300,000 marched in Sydney alone on 3 August – but they are not insignificant. And while both the Cronulla riots and the March for Australia were widely seen as racist, they differed in one important respect: the significant presence of organised fascists.
Organised and emboldened
In 2015, the far-right group Reclaim Australia held a series of anti-mosque demonstrations. The group presented itself as ordinary “mums and dads” but never quite managed to hide its neo-Nazi links. Hundreds attended their rallies, and politicians gave them a thin veneer of respectability: the then federal government backbencher George Christensen spoke at the Mackay rally, Pauline Hanson in Brisbane and later Rockhampton.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The group quickly collapsed into infighting, and subsequent fascist groups struggled to transform far-right sentiment online into a mass mobilisation. Now, however, they seem increasingly confident about heading on to the street.
“I think these guys are a lot more organised,” says Clement Fermier*, a spokesperson for the Australian antifascist research collective White Rose Society. “They have a plan and they started to enact it.”
Protesters march down Bourke Street in Melbourne’s CBD. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
Prior to the March for Australia announcement, there had been “months and months of neo-Nazi news sources seeding any story about ethnic crime into these freedom movement spaces, and priming people for, ‘oh we need to do something about all these non-white people’,” Fermier says. The March for Humanity was the catalyst for mobilising them.
As with Cronulla, the mainstream media contributed to publicising the events last Sunday, even as the neo-Nazi connections became clear. And as with Reclaim Australia, some politicians got directly involved. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and party member Senator Malcolm Roberts attended in Canberra, and the federal MP Bob Katter spoke at the march in Townsville.
The protests were condemned as hateful by the federal government, but Anthony Albanese also said he had “no doubt” that “good people” would have been among the crowds – a comment that for many recalled Donald Trump’s much maligned comments that there had been “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, and one that was rebuked by the prime minister’s own backbench.
Amid growing debate in federal parliament this week about immigration policies and the rise in far-right activists objecting to multiculturalism, the Liberals were also caught in the crossfire when the firebrand Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price claimed Labor was bringing Indian migrants into Australia to boost its electoral chances.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in the Senate chamber at Parliament House 4 September. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Price described the March for Australia as “a pro-Australia march” attended by “quiet Australians” and a “demonstration of unity”.
The comments also undercut moves by the Coalition to reconnect with culturally diverse constituencies, and a bid by the shadow immigration spokesperson, Paul Scarr, to draw a line under the opposition’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric deployed under Peter Dutton.
‘We’ve got a really serious problem’
Reclaim Australia attempted to paper over its fascist elements, but at the March for Australia members of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network removed their masks, figuratively and literally.
“In the recent past, they haven’t been able to get out on the street the way they’d like to because they don’t have the numbers. They have had to go out in the middle of the night to do their stunts,” Fermier says. “[But] this was out in the middle of a day in the city, and it’s because they managed to rope enough people in to protect them.”
The longterm consequences remain to be seen. Leading members of the NSN face serious criminal charges, while different elements of the far right squabble online and some attempt to distance themselves from the overt Nazis. The new manifestation of the right may yet fall apart.
But the events of the past weekend show that a serious reckoning with Australian racism is ever more urgent, Sivaraman says.
“People only engage with this kind of open violence if they think they’re going to get away with it or they think they’ve got the support to do it. And that’s an enormous concern. That shows we’ve got a really serious problem.”
* A pseudonym
Additional reporting by Ben Doherty
Quick GuideContact us about this storyShow
The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.
If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.
Secure Messaging in the Guardian app
The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.
If you don’t already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select ‘Secure Messaging’.
SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post
If you can safely use the tor network without being observed or monitored you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.
Finally, our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.
Illustration: Guardian Design / Rich Cousins
Thank you for your feedback.