It wasn't a surfer thing. Just your local patriotic Yahoo's for a turf war.
I remember as a kid in Mt Druitt in the 70's and 800 cops had to create a barrier between the mass brawls between Bidwell and Plumpton. It was started by the girls in a hockey match and escalated very quickly.
Hell, I remember via another School. We brawled all the way back to our buses with Plumpton after a fight broke out in a Volleyball game. Even our teachers were throwing punches.

Macquarie Fields (just one street) riot, I just happened to be there.
Rosemeadow ghetto riot... I just happened to be there.
Cronulla Riots... I was there also for one night. Just finished scuba night dive in Wollongong harbour when the Yahoo's came down to the water. But as they could tell we weren't Moslem and we carried big dive knives, they let us be.

In my mind. The Moslems were lucky the Media and Police protected them and condemned the very multi-cultural hordes of non Moslems.

As I nearly got into a biff with a Moslem at Murray's Beach (abo land) because he littered and got tough about it.
I said "Go back to Sydney where you come from!"
The idiot cried that I was being a racist 

The next big riot?
Well, chances are I'll be there too.

I can only say Aquarius that I had something like 100 fights with just 10 years in Mt Druitt. Move across Ropes Creek to St Mary's and it isn't physical violence, but mental violence from the 'Marys' with demeaning intellectualism.
To play tennis in Emerton as a kid, one had to carry a torch and bypass Letho through the storm water drains or get belted by the Letho boys.

I can see your son's point of view. Old Mt Druitt has seen a property price rise. Redfern squalor has turned into expensive Uni precinct. But regardless of price fluctuations, the social state of being in Sydney has degenerated extremely. Mt Druitt is far worse than in the 70's. I've lived next door to Glen Alpine, in Ambarvale. Sure it sold as a place that is better than next door, but like every place that is marketed as such, it has become no different to every other burb in Sydney.

I wouldn't buy a property in any city or an isolated regional village. Both attract the worst like the effects of over & under achieving. I've even lived 4 doors down from the Lodge in Kirribilli and even that wasn't good enough.

The only place to live in Sydney is on a boat on the harbour. If you can't do that, it's best to live as far from Sydney as you can get! Having lived in Melbourne (big version of St Mary's) for 7 years. It's just the same shyte as Sydney, just a different smell.

It wasn't until an amazing 4 years in a Riverina town called Leeton, that I discovered that amazing lost experience of a 'happy society'. Not a happiness paid for by money like suburbs surrounded by barbed wire and cameras. But a happiness made by the people themselves! Sure, there were some rotters, but they were a very lame minority that hid in the shadows to be forgotten. I still can't pin it down, but after living in Leeton for 4 years, I was a very changed man.

I can honestly say Aquarius that have seen many females I grew up with in the Druitt, still living there. They are far tougher than I ever was.

You're right in that the main problem with places like that which has a mish mash of different people's thrown together, there's a lot of push and shove until one dominates because there is no umbrella cultural identity to belong to. In Mt Druitt's case. Violence is it's only 'cultural' identity and reputation.

The cultural irony though is that if you put Pre 80s Melbournian Cops in the Druitt. They would have belted that area into a nice grateful and polite place.
Traditionally Sydney police kept the rich in check, while the poor gave em the finger behind their backs.
Traditionally the Melbourne police kept the poor in check, while the rich gave them the finger behind their backs.
...add that Brisbane police 'took' bribes.
Adelaide police would sleep with your wife or girlfriend.
Perth police were corrupt and criminal.
Darwin police would shoot you.
The worst police of all were the Hobart police though. They would make you marry into their inbred family. 

But that's all gone now as Australia has become a shemozzle of everything everywhere in each city now the same, each State the same. One Nation was a very bad idea.

I didn't stay in the Riverina. Had to move to Sydney. Despite good money, I couldn't get back into the city life again. Everyone was angry, miserable and all the negatives.
So I just headed south. I love being underwater, feeling that rapture of the deep (as they call it). Hence I stick to the coastline as a water spirit and where I am, it ain't to off the mark in happy, relaxed and nice people vibe here... Until the terrorists arrive at holiday periods. Lol

Arecent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’.

The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose. It’s as if, dumbfounded, they’d been confronted with Linear B.

This study’s findings feel existential. I can hear the rumblings of disaster, as if the foundations of western culture, eroded for decades, are teetering into collapse.



The text:

‘LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.’





When adults – who are studying literature, remember – are unable to grasp simple texts like Dickens, when everything is understood only partially or taken at face value, when people delight in or are un-ashamed of what they don’t know, then the consequences are dire. For them, reading and speaking are becoming declarative, their only mode of communication the absolutely literal. Wave goodbye to irony, to nuance, to layers of meaning.  Few participants grasped that the Megalosaurus is not real. I’d expect a ten-year-old to puzzle this out

We can’t pretend that this is normal. I’m not re-running the usual lament about ‘kids these days’. It’s worse than that. A number of factors have been contributing to this downwards spiral. Firstly, the long-term purposeful destruction of our common store of knowledge, stemming from the classics, the Bible and the canon. Secondly, the complicity of the educational establishment in its own collapse, gaily dropping standards for political and financial reasons. Thirdly, the ever-lower expectations that educators and publishers have of children and the resulting decline in their ability to think critically.