I was a young journalism student when I watched news footage of hundreds of young white men storming Sydney’s Cronulla beach. Boys armed with flags and weapons, incited by exhortations from the likes of talkback broadcaster Alan Jones and by text messages asking “every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day”.

Geographically, the Arab lads of Bankstown and Shire boys of Cronulla were neighbours, but culturally the consequences of infringing West Side Story-beach lines were clear. The 2005 beach riots made international headlines. Southern Cross-tattooed patriots marked their territory, scrawling “100% Aussie pride” in the sand and popularising the slogan: “You flew here, we grew here.”

For a young feminist Muslim woman from western Sydney who had just adopted hijab after moving out of home, it highlighted every political nerve I balanced on like a high-wire artist.

I lived in a student dorm in Sydney’s inner west, trying to leave behind a difficult home life and forge a place in a post 9/11, completely white media industry where diversity was not even a corporate buzzword yet. A world where the daily screeching racist headlines about oppressed women, jihadis, Islam, surveillance, Asio, the war on terror and stereotypes of Arab male predators actively abetted violence against “people like us” both at home and........

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