Celebrating our special day as a nation as only some idiots know how.....

 

Terrified customers hide in small cafe as drunken youths run amok........

Some of my friends like to jibe at my anti-Australian attitude on Australia Day as I am always on about our special day needing to be the 1^st January each year, but seriously I tried really hard to embrace this special day last Sunday, and it was working, until....

It was 2.30pm and my wife Katherine and I went to a small cafe in John Street, Cottesloe. The cafe is in a quiet street that leads down to the main Cottesloe Beach, about 700 meters away.

We had met two friends who were visiting from Denmark in Northern Europe and we had just started to share a tea and coffee, when up from the beach came 50-60 drunken and drugged youths going beserk and in a 'progressive' fight.

Bashings, throwing of bricks and chairs; anything they could find. One young man was stabbed. They got to within 50 meters of our small cafe, when we patrons had to hide inside as there were too many of them and the chairs and tables outside were potentially 'perfect' ammunition.

It was mayhem. The young man who had been stabbed made it to our cafe before he collapsed, badly beaten and bleeding. Ambulance called.

Others were running passed us all screaming, "Get the shotty"; a reference, I guess, to needing to get a shotgun. Glasses smashed, chairs hurled and more bricks thrown. A good old Aussie Day riot.

And we are hiding there at the back of this lovely small cafe with two guests from another country.

So am I proud to be an Australian? Afraid not folks. What a disgrace. If that was in Asia, the SAS would have been there; these yobbos would have been herded up, taken in for five lashes of the cane and then placed into the army for 12 months.

I find it interesting that recent research (West Australian Saturday 25^th January) showed that many West Australians now feel unsafe in Bali. And many Australians still see Indonesia as a country as an ‘unsafe’ place to be. Yet last year when I spent ten days studying Indonesian language in the city of Yogyakarta in central Java, I was able to walk the streets every night without a care. It even ‘felt’ safe.

This is a big university town with over 50,000 students. Most cafes at night are full of young people, all texting, ‘Facebooking’ and talking at once; as young people do. But not one single fight, or any signs of abusing each other, and no drunken yobbos wandering the streets looking for a fight.

But here, "Oh well, this is Australia Day and the boys are just letting off steam". The police arrived, took a few names and left the scene that was still covered in litter. No charges laid and the boys can now get back to drinking and talk about whether, "Will we be in Facebook or even the news tonight?"

In a moment of emotional frustration I said to my family that perhaps in future the Australians who participate in the senseless violence need to be dealt with more severely, including an automatic 12 months stint in the army cadets to learn the meaning of discipline, respect and the meaning of taking responsibility for their actions. And any migrant youth who were found to be involved should be given a one way ticket: Back to their birth country.  Goodbye and go away. And if that means you will be separated from your family who now live in Perth? Too bad.

Later that day however, with the benefit of some quiet contemplation, I realised that I actually don’t know what the right course of action should be, and what the right answer to this mindless violence is; something that should be left in the hands of those with far greater knowledge of this issue than me.

But what I do know is that, as a civil society, we can do better than this. And we can do better than finding ourselves having to tell visitors from overseas to hide behind the counter of a small cafe as drug and booze-filled yobbos’ bash each other senseless on the pavement in front of us.

Ross Taylor is the president of the Indonesia Institute (Inc)

January 2014.