Five years ago, a first-generation Australian-Lebanese girl introduced her conservative Lebanese parents to her first serious (Anglo-Saxon) boyfriend.
It didn't go down well, and a few days afterward, the girl received numerous phone calls from concerned friends about the likelihood of her relationship sustaining societal expectations and criticism. An Aussie bloke and a Lebanese girl could never work out, they'd told her, and the evidence was there before them: race riots against Lebanese by the Aussies down in Cronulla.
In the five years since, many are still unsure as to how the riots occurred, and what their perpetrators had wanted. No more Lebs in Australia, no more Lebs at the beach, or 'no Allah in Cronulla'? Whatever the motive, it seemed that in a world where appearances are everything, anything 'of Middle-Eastern appearance' was something to be feared, and needed to be stopped.
The riots themselves may have subsided, but their roots are still around us. For all our sayings about judging books by their covers and looks being deceiving, our biggest problem is our innate susceptibility to stereotype. Representation, or misrepresentation, in media, pop culture, social/political policies or even everyday conversation, has the power to shape our perception and attitudes towards the other.
And it is this 'us and them' grasp of otherness that still prevents us from moving forward after witnessing our young men fight, protest and retaliate over difference or, rather, their warped, alcohol or frustration-fuelled misconception of it.
And misconception is where our problem lies. A few weeks ago, I led a scripture class at a high school in Cronulla. Afterwards, I joined a few of the regular teachers for breakfast, and was told plenty of people in the shire still don't take kindly to 'Lebs'. The students couldn't fathom that I, their teacher, was a 'Leb'.
So what was a 'Leb' exactly?
At the time of the riots, to Labor's Federal Member for Bankstown Jason Clare, 'Leb' was the six Lebanese Muslim boys he took to Kokoda to bond with six Aussie boys from the shire. Not a mixture of mixed-faith Lebanese boys, which meant that all the Lebanese Christian boys who were socially rejected and attacked in the media had to stay at home, forgotten about where positive press was concerned.
'Leb' is the Muslim girl who wears the hijab and is verbally assaulted for outwardly sharing her faith, even though her fellow Muslim female, who harbours more anti-western sentiments and sympathises with Bin Laden, gets off scot-free from the public because she doesn't wear the hijab.
'Leb' is also the role of the drug dealer, criminal or terrorist in Aussie films and television, reserved for those who don't fit the physical mould where casting is concerned.
If we struggle to get an ethnic character on Neighbours, it makes for a good media and cultural studies university debate. But we need to apply our 'otherness' education elsewhere. Ethnic enclaves are the biggest downfall of multiculturalism, but they are a reality of our society.
Unfortunately in a society where image and representation are everything, our perceptions of the other become blurred across boundaries, suburbs and ways of life, and then, on the off chance that we clash somewhere in the middle, we can't take the interference, and we riot.
Granted, the Cronulla Riots subsided just as they'd erupted, but the solutions at the time seemed to involve engaging people from opposite ends of the spectrum in as many peace-keeping press opportunities as possible. Not very productive considering that afterward, these people dusted themselves off and once again went their separate ways, to lead very separate lives in the same great country.
In the five years that have passed, I doubt that our grasp of our differences (and let's face it: it's the acknowledgement that we are, in fact, all different that will save us) has been perfected to the point where we have learned from the mistakes that led us to that social horror.
Rather, any debates about racial cohesion seem to have fallen by the wayside, which is devastating considering the new generation of youth who still see otherness in the same vein as those behind the riots. Unfortunately, we've become content with sweeping the issues that bought us to Cronulla under the rug — and we've never taken out the trash.
And in the share house that is Australia, that is not what we might call a 'fair go' for our countrymen.
Sarah Ayoub is a freelance journalist and media commentator who contributes to a number of print and online publications and blogs regularly at her website Wordsmith Lane. She is working on her first novel about the Cronulla Riots and is currently studying at the University of Sydney, where she is writing a postgraduate research thesis on the glamorisation by the Australian media of gang culture among Sydney's Middle-Eastern community.