Concrete Playground

A wise man once said that ‘patriotism ruins history’. While this wisdom could be applied to a soup of mistakes, misfortunes and violent actions, it seems particularly relevant to the Cronulla riots of December 2005, in which a mostly Anglo-Celtic crowd took to the beach in order to “reclaim it from men of Middle Eastern appearance”. The result was an impassioned and aggressively chaotic display of territorial assertion. But how are we to understand this event without merely dismissing and simplifying it as a random act of racism?

A work collected and organized by Urban Theatre Projects, Stories of Love & Hate is the result of a two-year research and interview project involving those affected and connected with the riots from both the Sutherland Shire and Bankstown. Rather than media infused opinion, the play attempts to grasp the complexities and underlying issues of the riots firsthand, encouraging us to ask questions about communal fear, aggression, and identification in relate to the unsettling event, and whether hate can really be understood without also examining what is loved?
 
Extracts from Stories of Love & Hate will be performed, together with a talk from Roslyn Oades, Director of Urban Theatre Projects. This event is in part a response to the work Nulla 4 Eva currently being exhibited as part of Fiona Foley’s exhibition Forbidden.