The opening paragraphs of “Under the beach, the barbed wire”, still being drafted: 
So, this weekend, Sydney’s beaches were - this is a term that will fast become normalised - subjected to a ‘lockdown’. This meant that only the residents of beachside suburbs could go to the beach. This being precisely what the pogrom at Cronulla sought to accomplish, to make what is contingent reassert itself as necessity, as natural. Such an affable term, ‘resident’. But this much is clear: the organisation of landed property and Crown land (which is what coastlines are in AU), today as much as yesterday, is dependant on violence, colonisation and borders.
Last night, the police organised a massive show of force and arms outside the mosque in Lakemba (Sydney) in an attempt, as they said, to halt retaliations that had already occured the night before in Maroubra. In any case, that mobilisation gives the lie to claims that the police were outnumbered and outmanouvered during the rampage in Cronulla ealier.
Lakemba gets fully kitted up riot police and over a hundred police vans; Cronulla gets cops in baseball caps - the very picture and meaning of ‘community policing’.
That - “Under the beach, the barbed wire” - was the title I momentarily thought of using for a piece on the Cronulla pogrom.
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