I think a lot of people around Australia would know the area that encompasses beach suburb Cronulla as the place the 2005 race riots happened, or as the home of local football team the Cronulla Sharks (local football team/alleged sex pests).
But to me, The Shire will always be the area I grew up in, and so despite the terrible reputation the Shire has garnered, I’ve always had a real affection for the place - sort of the way a disappointing son might pine after the approval of a disinterested and negligent father.
The first thing you notice about walking around the area is just how beautiful it is.
The sun was out in a huge way the day we were there, and as soon as we got out of the car, the warm breeze and delightful smell immediately put me at ease.
The natural beauty of the area is so overpowering that it’s actually really difficult to concentrate or get any work done.
You can totally see why people want to live here.
Locals will often jokingly ask if you had to show your passport as you came into the area, the implication being that you are a visitor in a foreign land and at any time, you could be deported.
The local member, Scott Morrison, will be the immigration minister if the coalition wins government and there’s a certain inarticulate irony in the fact that the Liberal Party’s main man on immigration hails from an area famous for a xenophobic race riot.
But once you start talking to people in Cronulla, you get the sense that the whole community is self-aware enough to understand the public’s perception of what happened, and are eager to tread lightly around delicate issues of race and immigration.
A lot of Shire-folk see themselves as remnants of the real Australia, an Australia that is slipping away in the modern age; the affable bronzed surfer keeping watch along the coast for drowning tourists to save, rugby league, barbeques, weekends at the beach, and yes, admittedly, this version of Australia is a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon Australia.
But their feelings are explicitly culturally motivated, not racially motivated, as if everyone had to attend a well meaning but ultimately confusing "ethnicity in the workplace" seminar about five years ago and they’re pretty sure this is what they’re supposed to say.
I was struck with how left-leaning a lot of the younger people we spoke to were.
When they weren’t proudly disinterested, the majority of young people we spoke to were swayed along ideological lines because of issues of gay marriage and asylum seekers to ally themselves with the ALP and The Greens.
Obviously young voters tend to be more progressive than their older counterparts, but the predominance of young progressives in traditionally conservative places like Cook suggests age trumps location in politics.
The people were friendly, the weather was great, we even sat on the beach and had a coffee.
Overall, it was lovely experience with little to no actual substance and that may well be a representative summation of the Shire.
