braving the burqini re branding the australian beach

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2010 17: 379Cultural GeographiesSusie Khamis: re-branding the Australian beachTMBraving the Burqini

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cultural geographies17(3) 379–390

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Corresponding author:Susie Khamis, Department of Media, Music & Cultural Studies, Macquarie UniversityEmail: [email protected]

Braving the BurqiniTM: re-branding the Australian beach

Susie KhamisDepartment of Media, Music & Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

AbstractA cross between a bikini and a burqa, the BurqiniTM reworks a conventional symbol of Australian culture in terms consistent with Muslim modesty. In turn, the BurqiniTM stakes a deeply ironic claim to one of the nation’s most revered sites: the beach. This article thus considers its significance in relation to two dominant stereotypes in recent Australian history: the ‘beach babe’, typically blonde, blue-eyed and bikinied; and a view of conservative Muslim culture that had taken shape in mainstream Australian media: as restrictive, regressive and misogynist. By appropriating the traditional bikini design for a contemporary Muslim clientele, the BurqiniTM is both a confronting cultural statement and a bold example of 21st century world fashion.

KeywordsAustralia, beach, bikini, burqa, Islam

IntroductionSince the late 1990s, high-profile terrorism associated with militant Islamic movements and events in the Middle East has turned international attention to Arab and Muslim cultures. This scrutiny has been most intense for Muslims living in predominantly non-Muslim countries, like Australia. There, and especially after 11 September 2001, Muslims suffered a heightened degree of suspicion and interrogation. This surfaced, for example, in the treatment of some Muslim women who chose to wear the hijab, or variations thereof: the chador, niqab or burqa – visible markers of Muslim identity. These women became walking targets for a range of largely negative encounters, from expressions of pity to outright violence and aggression. This article considers a highly provocative and deeply ironic response to such sentiments: the BurqiniTM, a swimsuit manufactured in Australia and designed by a Lebanese-Muslim woman, Aheda Zanetti.1 The name is a portmanteau of burqa and bikini. Unlike a regular bikini though, this one does not compromise the modesty of its target market: conservative Muslim women. It tests conventional representations of Australian beach culture, and suggests that, contrary to populist misconceptions, there is a place for Islamic cultural practices within Australian beach culture. Importantly, its provenance in Sydney’s southwest counters a widespread perception that some locales – specifically, those with a large Muslim population – are less open to popular Australian pursuits. In this way, the BurqiniTM has helped to re-brand the typical Australian beach.



380 cultural geographies 17(3)

Barriers and borders

The veil is one of the most widely recognized symbols of Islamic identity. This recognition has both a quantitative and qualitative basis. Modes of veiling pre-date Islam, have never been exclu-sive to Islam, and vary across Muslim societies. However, there has been a strong resurgence of veiling amongst Muslim women around the world since the 1970s, widely attributed to the rise in broad-based popularity of Muslim groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah. Although they had different agendas and emphases, these groups generally advocated a return to traditional Islamic tenets of dress, diet and decorum. They pledged a holistic and public commit-ment to faith that seemed in stark contrast to modern, secular life.2 In turn, and for a growing number of young Muslim women, veiling is no longer deferred until mid or later life, or after a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia (hajj). Rather, it has become an autonomous expression of religious devotion and group identity that requires no such rite or rationale.

In mostly non-Muslim societies, this phenomenon has been widely noted and highly conten-tious. At its simplest, and no doubt crudest, this controversy rests on some perceived link between the veil and a regressive, reactionary mindset.3 After bombings in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004) and London (2005), many non-Muslims saw in the veil some proximity to potential violence, and loyalty to something other than fellow citizens.4 Of course, splintered sympathies are hardly new; citizens routinely balance private interests and public obligations. In the context of the ‘War on Terror’, though, talk of pluralism became a political liability, as the popular mood hardened around fear and trepidation. As such, and since the veil demarcated the wearer in such an obvious way, it became a convenient and accessible site for debate. This was seen, for instance, in France, when several Muslim students asserted their right to attend their public schools veiled. While the issue had punc-tuated French politics since 1989, it peaked in 2003 with the creation of the ‘Commission to Reflect upon the position of Laïcité in the Republic’. Officially, the state acted to safeguard secularism. However, having already told students in Tunisia that French people saw ‘something aggressive’ about the veil, President Jacques Chirac’s personal position was far from opaque.5 Unofficially, many read the girls’ defiance as ‘insufficient assimilation’, and empathy for a much-maligned global movement.6

The issue here is how this fear – the threat to the nation symbolized in the growing presence of the veil – surfaced in Australia. In numerous cases, veiled Muslim women were publicly intimi-dated, insulted and attacked.7 In much mainstream media, the veil served an important discursive function: the more striking the differences between Australia and Islam seemed, the easier it was for its outspoken opponents to declare a hopeless divide. Conservative politicians like Bronwyn Bishop and Sophie Panopoulos used ostensibly feminist rhetoric to criticise the veil.8 For them, the veil signalled a cultural chasm between ‘oppressive Islam’ and the ‘egalitarian West’. Put simply, the BurqiniTM actively undermines this ‘cultural clash’ perspective, in its fusion of two motifs that are already loaded with symbolic and often contested meanings – the veiled Muslim and the Australian beach. Although its design will be discussed in more detail shortly, essentially it is a hooded, two-piece swimming ensemble that enables its (female) wearer complete comfort and movement in the water, yet exposes no more than her face, fingers and feet. Its creator is an Australian-Lebanese Muslim women from Sydney’s southwest, a figure doubly marked: this demographic embodies and expresses much of what has been so feared and scrutinized in Australia’s recent history.9 So, to appreciate how the BurqiniTM effectively facilitates cross-cultural dialogue, it needs to be seen why and how one group in particular became so closely associated with the ‘problem’ of Islam in Australia, and why the beach became so strongly identified with Australian



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culture. This will then help explain Australia’s most recent and high profile display of race-based tensions, as well as the BurqiniTM’s wider critical significance.

The Lebanese-Muslim PresenceThe number of Muslims in Australia is relatively small, but growing. According to the 2006 Census, out of a population of almost 21 million, 340 000 respondents identified as Muslim. This represents 1.7 per cent of the population, and a 20.9 per cent increase since 2001.10 Since the 1990s, the migrant group most regularly linked with this rise is the Lebanese-Muslim community. Australia has attracted Lebanese migrants for over a century, in three discernible waves.11 The first wave arrived between the 1880s and 1920s, and mostly consisted of hawkers, shopkeepers, and textile workers, while the second wave arrived during the manufacturing boom after the Second World War. Importantly, these waves experienced relatively smooth integration into the workforce. The same cannot be said for the third wave. In the wake of the Lebanese Civil War (1976–1991), the Lebanese presence in Australia doubled and became more varied. Whereas the first two waves of immigrants comprised of mostly Christians, the majority of more recent arrivals were Muslim. While earlier migrants found the transition into the Australian labour market relatively easy, this third wave experienced not only post-war trauma, but also higher barriers to the Australian labour market. Unlike the boom in factory work after the Second Wold War, from the early 1990s there were far fewer jobs that required minimal English skills.12 Consequently, and from the start, this group was materially disadvantaged.

Gradually, Lebanese-Muslim immigrants became associated with the suburban fringes of Melbourne and the Canterbury-Bankstown district in Sydney’s southwest. As many ‘clustered with kin who struggled to accommodate them’,13 they soon established a distinct cultural precinct, iden-tified by language (17.2 per cent of residents speak Arabic), religion (14.6 per cent of residents are Muslim), and national background (6.4 per cent of residents were born in Lebanon).14 In certain suburbs of Sydney’s southwest, like Punchbowl, Auburn and Lakemba, the percentages are even higher. Not only have Lebanese-Muslims in Sydney’s southwest suffered the most from anti-Arab crime since the Gulf War of 1990–91;15 with the electoral appeal of reactionary conservatism in the mid 1990s, and the subsequent attacks on Australian multiculturalism, this group’s commitment to Australia has been repeatedly questioned.16 Despite the fact that, as Batrouney points out, ‘ninety-six per cent of eligible Lebanese take up Australian citizenship – one of the highest of any immigrant group’17 – they have been singled out for their supposed antipathy to Australian values, and anti-discrimination boards have logged numerous cases where this has been demonstrated, through racial slurs, sexualized insults, and the violent removal of women’s veils.18

A branded communityBetween the mid to late 1990s, Sydney’s daily newspapers and talkback radio chronicled a grow-ing fear of Australian-Lebanese Muslims, particularly young men and their alleged drift into gang-like warfare. When the State’s then Premier, Bob Carr, made this issue the centre of his Labor party’s ‘law and order’ policy in the late 1990s, a move supported by then police commissioner Peter Ryan, the ‘problem’ of Lebanese-Muslims was seemingly confirmed. Sydney’s southwest became a political, policing, and media hotspot, a convergence that helped contour public discourse.19 Over the next few years, the impression that Sydney’s southwest was rife with race-based gangs became a culturally consonant one.20 In 2000 and 2001, one news item in particular reinforced this




impression: two young Anglo women in the Bankstown region were gang-raped, and their aggressors, mostly Australian-Lebanese-Muslim, allegedly made racist insults during the attacks. Mainstream media quickly linked the case to several other ‘similar’ incidents, that is, the rape of young, mostly ‘Caucasian’ women in this area (Sydney’s southwest) by young men invariably described as ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘Lebanese-Muslim’. The city’s most right-wing newspaper columnists and ‘shock jocks’ seized this as proof of a chauvinistic backwardness that typified Australian Lebanese males, equated the rapists’ motives with their race and background, and an entire community was effectively indicted. In response, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research issued a public state-ment that, on the issue of sex crimes in the Bankstown region, and on the cultural identity of the perpetrators, the sensationalist rhetoric was patently wrong.21 Nonetheless, an image of violence and misogyny took hold; when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Australian media was primed for a ‘signification spiral’.22 The link between Muslims and crime was further normalized, and the more that Muslims were associ-ated with disloyalty and disorder, the more prepared many were to redefine Australia’s ‘imagined community’ accordingly.23 A discourse of ‘good’ migrants and ‘bad’ migrants emerged, based largely on how willing migrants appeared to exchange old practices for arbitrarily determined new ones deemed definitive of Australian culture.24

With Canberra committed to the US-led ‘War on Terror’, Sydney’s southwest became an even bigger focal point for politicians, intelligence bureaus and journalists. After the Bali bombings of October 2002, in which 88 Australians were among those who died at the hands of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), fears grew that terrorists abroad had Australian agents. With dramatic indifference to citizens’ rights, police scaled up their counter-terrorism measures: they raided homes, confis-cated goods and questioned community leaders,25 actions met with broad political support.26 Particularly after the terrorist bombings in Madrid in March 2004, and London in July 2005, both connected to Islamist cells, there was even more fear and distrust. Many worried that, not unlike Spain and the United Kingdom, Australia had its own corps of ‘home-grown’ terrorists.27 For these reasons, Sydney’s southwest was increasingly associated with religious extremism, terrorist lean-ings, and disaffected youth. This association informed various cross-cultural encounters, but few as unsettling as what happened on a popular Sydney beach in December 2005.

The ‘insular peninsula’On 11 December 2005, a crowd of 5000 converged on Cronulla beach in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire to protest against what many considered years of anti-social behaviour, mostly by men of Lebanese-Muslim background. As it transpired, though, the protest became a daylong riot. According to many among the crowd, these ‘outsiders’ had consistently displayed a machismo disregard for the local beachgoers, particularly the women. Stories of unwelcome advances and sexual intimidation had circulated. An angry exchange a week earlier between off-duty Surf Life Savers – icons in Australian culture28 – and a group of ‘Middle Eastern’ men was pivotal to pre-cipitating violence: fed up and frustrated, locals vowed to reclaim the beach to its rightful owners, vigilante-style.

Cronulla represents a particular kind of Australianness. The Sutherland Shire has one of Australia’s highest proportions of people with English-as-a-first-language. While critics have named it the ‘insular peninsula’, former Prime-minister John Howard once referred to the Shire as ‘a part of Sydney which has always represented to [him] what middle Australia is all about’.29 Ironically, Cronulla is also a short train-trip from the closest Sydney has to an Islamic hub: the southwest, and this troubled Cronulla locals. Rumours spread and resentment escalated; this had



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simmered in Sydney generally, but Cronulla especially. It found release in the excitement of a hot, alcohol-fuelled day.30 Two men of Middle Eastern appearance that defied the belligerent crowd were jostled and jeered; when one of them pointed out that the Australian flag brandished before him was his flag as well, he was beaten. As the racist, nationalist chants became louder and more menacing, the crowd turned on one Muslim woman; she found shelter in a small beach kiosk.31

This ugly and embarrassing event sent scenes of racist bigotry around the world; for once, sunny Sydney was anything but postcard-pretty. In the midst of it all, something as seemingly trivial as dress presented at least one succinct explanation: as one Cronulla local put it, the ‘weekend tour-ists’ – Muslim men from Sydney’s southwest – ‘come here and stand around the sea baths ’cos their women have got to swim in clothes and stuff, or they [say] filthy things to our girls. That’s not Australian’.32 As a multicultural exercise, and by such reckoning, it appeared the most ambitious of intersections. The sub-text was that a typical Australian beach was no place for a typical Muslim female, and this perception in turn carried an array of assumptions, expectations and – as this paper argues – misconceptions.

Blondes and bikinisIf there is a sartorial contrast to the veil then, in Australia at least, it is found on beaches. Bikinis are a common sight; they are not worn exclusively by the young, lithe or uninhibited, but rendered ordinary by the breadth of their appeal. That religion-related modesty was raised as one ‘explana-tion’ for why Muslim men’s behaviour on Cronulla beach was ‘un-Australian’ has major implica-tions. It is not just the men’s presence on the beach that is queried, but the relationship between Islam and Australian culture. By this logic, a clash exists in the semiotic space between the bikini and the veil: where the former bespeaks a liberal, open-minded, and progressive Australia, the later hints at a regressive, inflexible, and sexist Islam. Construed thus, the difference is between the blithe hedonism of the modern beach setting, and the buttoned-up mores of a medieval theocracy. The bikini may have tested public decency once: at its launch in Paris in 1946,33 designer Jacques Heim had so much trouble finding a professional model who would brave the skimpy style, he hired Micheline Bernardini, a former nude model, to do the job.34 It took a few years for the bikini to shake its risqué connotations,35 but by the mid 1960s the bikini was a popular choice across Western Europe and North America.36 All the same, it remains the smallest ensemble most women would or could wear in public, so an element of frisson has not disappeared entirely.

In Australia, the bikini has evolved from a fashion statement to a national icon. In March 2006, Tourism Australia launched a high-profile international television campaign to lure tourists to Australia’s shores. One of the main selling points was Lara Bingle, (then) an 18 year-old bikini model from the Sutherland Shire. As it turned out, her bikini was nowhere near as scandalous as her script: ‘We’ve saved you a spot on the beach, so where the bloody hell are you’.37 Of the 57 words banned in advertisements on British television, ‘bloody’ was one of them.38 Desperate to save the (AU) $180 million campaign in one of its key markets, the tourism bureau sent Bingle to London, to woo Britain’s Advertising Clearance Centre directly. As Bingle’s mother remarked on her departure, ‘I’m sure once they see Lara, it will be fine’.39 The ban was reversed,40 and while it is unclear how much credit Bingle could take for the turnaround (she was accompanied by Tourism Minister Fran Bailey, who met with the key decision-makers in London), the episode turned her into a major star in Australia.41 Despite her ambition to be known beyond the campaign – ‘I don’t really want to be just a bikini girl for the rest of my life’42 – it still leads her public profile. The campaign had included other ‘unknowns’, like teenage surfer Riley Flanagan, farmer Fred Hughes, and amateur golfer Peter Kendall, but only Bingle achieved and sustained celebrity status.




Personal charisma aside, Bingle’s image repeats one of the most salient representations of Australian beach culture: the ‘beach babe’, often (but not always) blonde, blue-eyed and bikinied. Particularly over the last three decades, this picture has underpinned worldwide perceptions of what Australian beach goers looks like, and how they dress, behave and interact. This is rendered in several iconic images. For instance, the photograph taken in March 1979 of a young Prince Charles at Perth’s Cottesloe beach; when local model Jane Priest broke protocol to give the royal swimmer a quick kiss, her striped bikini not only boosted his glamorous and faintly playboy persona;43 it spoke to the sensual economy of the Australian beach: sun, sand and skin. For Cronulla-born model Elle Macpherson, the bikini helped launch her multimillion-dollar lingerie business.44 Photographed for the front cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue a record five times, between 1986 and 2006, Macpherson was dubbed ‘The Body’. This implied that, even by model standards, hers was legendary. A more kitsch (but no less calculated) take on the ‘beach babe’ came during the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, with pop celebrity and gay icon Kylie Minogue carried into the arena by a phalanx of camped-up men. Minogue’s flirty costume evoked the cheesecake glamour of the 1950s;45 the men’s red and yellow briefs were an overt (if slightly subversive) nod to the red and yellow uniforms of Surf Lifesaving Australia. In these various incarnations of the ‘beach babe’, then, Bingle et al form a deeply resonant but highly circumscribed montage: it points to a specific cultural matrix, with a preferred set of principles, practices and people.

The BurqiniTM

Given the bikini’s place in Australian culture, Aheda Zanetti’s appropriation of it is all the more audacious. Put simply, the most dramatic innovation in bikini design is courtesy of a Muslim woman whose biography bears none of the hallmarks of a ‘beach babe’, and all the traits popularly placed away from the beach. Zanetti’s family migrated from Lebanon to Australia when she was two years old. Growing up and living in Sydney’s southwest, the nation’s Muslim heartland, Zanetti’s milieu inspired her foray into design. She gradually realized that, in several important ways, the Australian marketplace failed many Muslim women. For example, as she helped a Muslim friend prepare for her wedding, Zanetti noticed that the vast majority of wedding gowns sold in Australia required some adjustment for Muslim brides. To help make her friend’s wedding gown more modest, Zanetti designed a white satin hood. What made the hood so attractive (aesthetically and functionally) was its simplicity: it required no pins, clips or ties, and covered the head snugly and neatly. Not long after, in 2004, Zanetti attended a netball match in which her 11-year old niece was playing. Zanetti noticed that, weighed down by her long cloth veil, her niece got tired far sooner than her non-veiled peers. Since the hooded garment she had designed for her friend’s wedding gown could be modified for her niece, Zanetti searched fabric shops for appropri-ate material. The subsequent design was a cross between a traditional veil, the hijab, and a basic hooded vest, so she called it a HijoodTM. This became Zanetti’s foundation piece, and with the slightest tweaks it worked equally well for other sports. With the torso lengthened and the addition of pants, it even worked as a two-piece swimsuit. Herein lay Zanetti’s most startling concept.

Working from her family home in Punchbowl, news of Zanetti’s swimsuit design spread quickly. It suggested a simple solution to what had become a perennial problem in Sydney’s southwest. Muslim women in the area had tried to arrange appropriate swimming arrangements, but with little success.46 Most notably, an agreement had been reached in 2002 to allow female students from Noor Al Houda Islamic College special use of Auburn Swimming Pool: for one hour a day over ten days in mid-winter, the public pool was open only to women – all women, not just the Muslim



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students. However, prominent and influential Sydney talkback host Alan Jones voiced his extreme opposition to this – ‘they go in there and dive in all their clobber!’47 The outcry from his listeners was so vitriolic that these classes were cancelled within months. Meanwhile, and elsewhere, those that dared enter the water in anything other than a swimsuit (say, a leotard, or clothes) risked such derision from unkind onlookers that many simply forfeited swimming altogether.48 Zanetti could therefore expect an eager and grateful clientele, but was not yet ready to enter the market, as the design was still un-named. She struggled to label the style she had designed.

As Zanetti worked on how to best pitch her swimsuit, another Muslim woman was making headlines, for not entirely unrelated reasons. Michelle Leslie was a prominent Australian model that was charged with drug possession in Bali, Indonesia, in September 2005. The drug charges were serious: caught with two Ecstasy pills, Leslie faced a maximum gaol term of 15 years. Still, over the next few months some Australian observers were more perplexed that 24 year-old Leslie had been a high-profile bikini model, yet had fronted the Indonesian court in a burqa. Seen by many as a flagrant bid for leniency, Leslie insisted that she was a Muslim convert, so her discretion was sincere.49 What puzzled many, though, was that one woman’s image bank could contain both a bikini and a burqa, as if one should automatically cancel out the other.50 Zanetti was intrigued by these debates that Leslie had caused, and was curious to see if there was in fact a contradiction to account for. At stake was the assumption that Muslim women were less likely to appear in public in something that could be classed as a bikini, an assumption that had helped to polarize Islam and Australian culture. Zanetti consulted a dictionary, and found bikini defined as ‘a small, two-piece swimsuit’. She reasoned that, her design was two-piece, like a bikini, and while it protected the wearer’s modesty like a burqa, it was a lot smaller than a burqa. Satisfied that she met the criteria, and with the support of her local Mufti, Zanetti proclaimed her design the BurqiniTM.

The BurqiniTM was a cultural revelation. It was not the first swimsuit designed for Muslim women, preceded by similar styles from Egypt, the United States and Turkey. However Zanetti’s advantage was that only her design was two-piece, so only she could access and exploit some asso-ciation with the bikini: this was an irresistible proposition. On the one hand, it was an elegant example of world fashion and married aspects of two very different cultures.51 On the other hand, the fact that the design did not underplay either of its constituent elements spoke to the democracy of diverse dress, ‘an implicit invitation to dialogue’.52

The BurqiniTM was a confronting reminder that, if the Australian beach was the egalitarian Eden of popular myth,53 then, for too long, some beachgoers had been more equal than others. Put another way, there was growing realization that much of what had been taken for granted in Australian culture required some revision if it was to stay relevant. Surf Lifesaving Australia (SLA), for one, is one of the most revered organizations in Australian culture, a symbol of disci-pline and sacrifice, and accorded almost unparalleled respect. An alleged affront to it was not only cited as a cause for the Cronulla riot; it was widely deemed proof of one group’s intolerable differences – that is, Lebanese-Muslims from Sydney’s southwest. However, on the basis of its own pre-riot surveys, SLA knew that it struggled to connect with certain sections of the Australian public. Although it had 115,000 volunteers in over 300 clubs,54 SLA was still mostly White and parochial; 86 per cent of club members had at least one parent born in Australia, and many had followed family members into the movement.55 On top of that, the fact that up to a third of the people that drowned in Australia each year came from a non-English speaking background showed just how much beach skills varied across the multicultural nation.56 After the Cronulla riot, then, SLA launched a (AU) $600,000 program called ‘On the Same Wave’, in partnership with Sutherland Shire Council and the Federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship (previously Multicultural Affairs). The program aimed to reach out to those that had felt most alienated by both




the movement and its privileged place in the Australian psyche – specifically, communities in Sydney’s southwest.

‘On the Same Wave’ was a seminal feat, and the BurqiniTM was a major part of its success. On 11 November 2006, the one-year anniversary of the Cronulla riot, 22 members of Lakemba Sports Club held their first training session at Cronulla beach for their Bronze Medallion, the necessary requirement for lifesavers. The ethnic mix was revelatory: Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Jordanian and Egyptian. Three months later, 19 of them graduated, including 20 year-old Mecca Laalaa, a veiled Muslim woman. Her participation was made possible only by Zanetti’s swimsuit;57 as part of the program, Surf Lifesaving Australia requested Zanetti’s involvement, and commis-sioned red and yellow BurqinisTM (Surf Lifesaving’s official colour scheme) for volunteers like Laalaa. The graduation ceremony became a three-way celebration: the 90th anniversary of Lakemba Sports Club, 100 years of Surf Lifesaving in Australia, and the official unveiling of the BurqiniTM. Within a month, over 9000 BurqinisTM were sold.

From her tiny headquarters in Sydney’s southwest, an area usually associated with socio-economic disadvantage,58 Zanetti was overwhelmed with orders from around the world. At one point, she halted all online sales for three months, to deal with the numbers she had already attracted in such a short time. While the economic efficacy of the BurqiniTM is not the main concern here, it will suffice to note that this is a relatively underplayed aspect of Australia’s export potential: the scope for Muslim-oriented goods and services is lucrative, expansive and remarkably elastic. According to Kamarul Aznam, managing editor of Halal Journal, the scale is phenomenal: on his assumption that half the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims dress modestly and spend around (US) $120 annually on modest clothing, the global market is worth some (US) $96 billion a year.59 Zanetti’s innovation is especially fortunate. In the worldwide fashion market, Australia’s forte is beach wear; brands like Billabong, Rip Curl and Mambo have, over the last few decades, forged a strong inter-national reputation in this niche area. The BurqiniTM adds to this successful image in a supremely atypical, but entirely logical and – it must be noted – highly profitable way. Zanetti’s contribution is therefore both culturally challenging and commercially sound. By mid 2008, her customer base spanned Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

ConclusionZanetti’s venture into swimwear design coincided with a national conversation about Australian citizenship. For decades, this had been a mostly procedural, bureaucratic exercise. After the early 2000s, though, it became progressively tilted towards patriotic features, like the introduction of a Citizenship Test in 2007, with questions on Australian history, customs and culture.60 The aim was to encourage new arrivals to learn English and to understand the Australian way of life, stated thus: ‘While migrants are not expected to leave their traditions behind, it is expected that they embrace Australian values and integrate into the Australian society’.61 The BurqiniTM shows just how mal-leable the concept of an ‘Australian way of life’ is. Zanetti had heard numerous stories of Muslim women that had been literally sidelined at their local beach: observers, but not participants, specta-tors rather than swimmers. Testimonials on the BurqiniTM website recount this at length.62 The designer’s ingenuity therefore reflects empathy as much as enterprise: one of the most beloved features of Australian culture, a day at the beach, was less than complete for a growing number of Australian citizens. For these women, and as an aid to cultural integration, the BurqiniTM made a compelling case.



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As much as the BurqiniTM reflects a faceted identity, it is not for ‘cosmopolitan consumption’.63 It cannot be corralled with other forms of ‘safe’, White multiculturalism. It is unlikely that urban sophisticates, for example, would purchase a BurqiniTM in some politically correct quest for air-brushed exotica; it does not offer the broad market appeal of say ‘World music’ or foreign cuisine. Besides a cautious expansion of the colour palette, Zanetti eschews tampering too much with the original template: comfort and discretion are her primary considerations, not the novelty and glam-our of fashion. The main concession to personal taste is the three fits the BurqiniTM comes in: Slim, Modest and Active. Even this, though, reflects nuances in the Muslim market more than anything else. Amongst Muslim women, definitions of modesty vary, another fact largely unnoticed by many non-Muslims. Zanetti’s range thus allows for degrees of looseness, but not exposure. They all ensure top-to-toe coverage, and decorative prints are heat-pressed onto the chest area to guaran-tee that even this famously erogenous zone is fully concealed. The BurqiniTM’s promotional mate-rial suggests none of the Orientalist sensuality or enigmatic subservience that so often accompanies marketing associated with Muslim women.64 Instead, it communicates an assertive, autonomous and proud presence, and exuberance that, in the midst of terrorist anxieties, few members of Zanetti’s wider community expressed in public.65

The BurqiniTM makes the Australian beach a far more inclusive, accommodating space, and, at the very least, the fact that it came from a Lebanese-Muslim woman in Sydney’s southwest shows the abject poverty of dominant stereotypes and assumptions. The idea that the veil enforced women’s inferiority had become a popular refrain. Herein lay the recurring paradox in how the veil had been framed in Australian public discourse: as a signifier of oppression and dissention, denial and defi-ance.66 The BurqiniTM complicates this tendency further yet: it symbolizes a bold temerity, and chal-lenges not only how Muslim women are perceived, but also how the Australian beach has been imagined. At the same time, the fact that it conveys a willingness to enjoy a quintessentially Australian pursuit contests the widespread perception of an inevitable and unbridgeable dichotomy. Islam and the Australian beach are not culturally incompatible, and although the Cronulla riot of 2005 remains a regrettable blight on Australian history, the popularity of the BurqiniTM, and its co-option by organi-zations like Surf Lifesaving Australia, suggests that the multicultural project still has much promise.

Acknowledgements

For her time and cooperation with research for this article, sincere thanks to Aheda Zanetti. For the feedback on an earlier draft of this article, I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 Unless indicated otherwise, all information about or attributed to the BurqiniTM and/or its designer Aheda Zanetti is drawn from an interview with the author (Sydney, 3 July 2008).

2 El Guindi, Fadwa, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p. 143; Stillman, Yedida Kalfo, Arab Dress: A Short History (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000), p. 158.

3 C.M. Daly, ‘The “Paarda” Expression of Heejab Among Afghan Women in a Non-Muslim Community’, in Linda B. Arthur (ed.) Religion, Dress and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p. 147; H.M. Benbow, ‘“False Tolerance” or False Feminism? Hijab Controversies in Australia and Germany’, Overland, 181, 2005, pp. 10–15.

4 S. Yasmeen, ‘Muslim Women as Citizens in Australia: Diverse Notions and Practices’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 42(1), 2007, p. 48.




5 I. Abraham, ‘Hijab in an Age of Fear: Security, Secularism and Human Rights’, Australian Religious Studies Review, 19(2), 2006, p. 172.

6 J. Windle, ‘Schooling, Symbolism and Social Power: The Hijab in Republican France’, The Australian Educational Researcher, 31(1), 2004, p. 108; John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 247.

7 S. Poynting, ‘“Bin Laden in the Suburbs”: Attacks on Arab and Muslim Australians before and after 11 September’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 14(1), 2002; T. Batrouney, ‘Arab Migration from the Middle East, Agora, 41(4), 2006, p. 13; C. Ho, ‘Muslim Women’s New Defenders: Women’s Rights, Nationalism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Australia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 30, 2007, pp. 290–8.

8 Benbow, ‘“False Tolerance”’; Ho, ‘Muslim Women’s New Defenders’, p. 290. 9 A. Aly and M. Balnaves, ‘The Atmosfear of Terror: Affective Modulation and the War on Terror’, M/C

Journal, 8(6), 2005, <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/04-alybalnaves.php> (1 December 2008).10 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Census QuickStats: Canterbury-Bankstown (Statistical Region)

(2006), <http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au> (11 February 2008).11 T. Batrouney, ‘A History of the Lebanese in Australia’, Agora, 41(4), 2006, pp. 32–4.12 K. Betts and B. Healy, ‘Lebanese Muslims in Australia and Social Disadvantage’, People and Place,

14(1), 2006, p. 28.13 D. Brearley, ‘Ethnicity and Bad Publicity a Volatile Mix – the Cultural Divide’, The Australian, 9 May

2002, p. 12.14 ABS, Census QuickStats.15 Batrouney, ‘History of the Lebanese’, pp. 32–4.16 T. Batrouney, ‘Arab Migration from the Middle East: From “White Australia” to “Beyond

Multiculturalism”’, Agora, 41(4), 2006, pp. 5–17.17 T. Batrouney, ‘Family, Business and Community’, Agora, 41(4), 2006, pp. 24–8.18 Poynting, ‘“Bin Laden in the Suburbs”’, p. 45.19 S. Poynting, G. Noble and P. Tabar, ‘Middle Eastern Appearances: “Ethnic Gangs”, Moral Panic and Media

Framing’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 34(1), 2001, pp. 67–9; pp. 71–4.20 P. Manning, ‘Arabic and Muslim People in Sydney’s Daily Newspapers, before and after September 11’,

Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 109, 2003, p. 59.21 K. Warner, ‘Gang Rape in Sydney: Crime, the Media, Politics, Race and Sentencing’, Australian and New

Zealand Journal of Criminology, 37(3), 2004, p. 346.22 T. Dreher, ‘Speaking Up and Talking Back: News Media Interventions in Sydney’s “Othered”

Communities’, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 109, 2003, pp. 122–3.23 G. Turner, ‘After Hybridity: Muslim-Australians and the Imagined Community’, Continuum: Journal of

Media & Cultural Studies, 17(4), 2003, p. 414.24 M. Humphrey, ‘Culturalising the Abject: Islam, Law and Moral Panic in the West’, Australian Journal of

Social Issues, 42(1), 2007, p. 12; A. Aly and L. Green, ‘“Moderate Islam”: Defining the Good Citizen’, M/C Journal, 10/11(6/1), 2008, <http://media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php> (24 November 2008).

25 S. Poynting and V. Mason, ‘“Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace”? Britain, Australia and Anti-Muslim Racism since 11 September 2001’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 27(4), 2006, pp. 378–9.

26 V. Mason, ‘Strangers Within the “Lucky Country”: Arab-Australians after September 11’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24(1), 2004, pp. 235–8.

27 S. Poynting and G. Noble, ‘“Dog-whistle” Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 109, 2003, p. 44.

28 C. White, ‘Picnicking, Surf-Bathing and Middle-Class Morality on the Beach in the Eastern Suburbs, 1811–1912’, Journal of Australian Studies, 8, 2004, p. 109; K. Saunders, ‘“Specimens of Superb



Khamis 389

Manhood”: The Lifesaver as National Icon’, Journal of Australian Studies, 56, 1998; E. Jaggard, ‘Australian Life-saving and the “Forgotten Members”, Australian Historical Studies, 112, 1999, pp. 24–5.

29 Quoted in C. Johnston, ‘An Insular Peninsula’, Age, 17 December 2005, p. 24.30 R. Haddad, ‘Treat Us Like Dogs and We’ll Bite Back’, Age, 17 December 2005, p. 24; C. Nader, ‘Young

Men Behaving Badly Span All Races’, Age, 17 December 2005, p. 25; D. Tsavdaridis, ‘We Own this Beach – Court Hears the Words that Sparked Cronulla Riots’, Daily Telegraph, 21 June 2006, p. 5; S. Poynting, ‘Multiculturalism at the End of the Line?’, in S. Velayutham and A. Wise (eds.) Everyday Multiculturalism Conference Proceedings, Macquarie University 28–29 September 2006 (Sydney: Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, 2007), p. 2.

31 C. Evers, ‘Locals Only!’ in Velayutham and Wise (eds.) Everyday Multiculturalism, p. 5; A. Johns, ‘White Tribe: Echoes of the Anzac Myth in Cronulla’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22(1), 2008, p. 13.

32 Quoted in R. Guilliatt, ‘Fighting on the Beaches Exposes Australia’s Ugly Side’, The Times, 17 December 2005, p. 42.

33 R. Turner Wilcox, The Dictionary of Costume (London: B. T. Batsford, 1969), p. 28.34 K. Lette, ‘Sixty Years of the Bikini’, The Australian Magazine, 24 June 2006, p. 16.35 N. Hoad, ‘World Piece: What the Miss World Pageant Can Teach Us About Globalization’, Cultural

Critique, 58, 2004, p. 59.36 James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 258.37 M. Farr, ‘Bloody Poms Lose Sense of Humour in the Fog’, Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2006, p. 3.38 I. McPhedran, ‘I Swear, it is Just a Friendly Ad’, Herald-Sun, 15 March 2006, p. 29.39 Quoted in B. Johnson and L. Silmalis, ‘Lara’s Bid to Rescue Campaign’, Sunday Telegraph, 12 March

2006, p. 16.40 F. Bailey, ‘Bloody Hell, Here’s How We Did It!’, The Australian, 29 April 2006, p. 1.41 K. Davies, ‘Shire Beauty – Why Sutherland is Sydney’s Sexiest Suburb’, Sunday Telegraph, 11 June

2006, p. 101.42 Quoted in B. McManus, ‘Stepping onto the Star Machine’, Age, 26 October 2006, p. 8.43 W. Caccetta, ‘The Bare Essential’, The West Australian, 3 June 2006, p. 62.44 K. Hush, ‘A Model of Business Acumen’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 2008, p. 6.45 S. Nixon, ‘What the World Saw as We Closed the Games and Said Goodbye’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2

October 2000, p. 3.46 S. Thompson and C. Whitten, ‘Cultural Collision: The Challenge of Planning for the Public Spatial Needs

of Muslim Women’, Women & Environments International Magazine, 1 April 2006, p. 14.47 Quoted in ABC, Media Watch – ‘Drowning in Hate’, 9 September 2002, <http://www.abc.net.au/

mediawatch/transcripts/090902_s4.htm> (21 January 2008).48 Nadia Jamal and Taghred Chandab, The Glory Garage: Growing Up Lebanese Muslim in Australia

(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), pp. 94–101.49 M. Forbes, ‘Lies and Bribes – What She had to do to Win Her Freedom’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26

November 2005, p. 1.50 N. McMahon, ‘Muslim? Model? Michelle Leslie’s Many Guises’, Age, 21 November 2005, p. 1;

C. Overington, ‘Model Muslims’, The Australian, 29 November 2005, p. 11.51 J.B. Eicher and B. Sumberg, ‘World Fashion, Ethnic, and National Dress’, in Joanne B. Eicher (ed.) Dress

and Ethnicity: Change Across Space and Time (Oxford: Berg, 1995), p. 304.52 J.I. Miller, ‘Fashion and Democratic Relationships’, Polity, 37(1), 2005, p. 19.53 C. Ford, ‘Gazing, Strolling, Falling in Love: Culture and Nature on the Beach in Nineteenth Century

Sydney, History Australia, 3(1), 2006, pp. 8.1–8.14.54 N. Squires, ‘Burqini Debuts on Aussie Beaches: Lycra-suited Muslim Women Lifeguards Kick Sand in

Face of Cultural Cliché’, Daily Telegraph, 2007, p. 3.




55 D. Teutsch, ‘The Changing of the Guard’, Sun-Herald, 12 November 2006, p. 71.56 N. Wilson, ‘Out of their Depth’, Herald-Sun, 6 January 2007, p. 71.57 R. Bonner, ‘Australian Muslims Go for Surf, Lifesaving and Burqinis’, New York Times, 9 March 2007, p. 4.58 Betts and Healy, ‘Lebanese Muslims in Australia’; G. Noble and P. Tabar, ‘On being Lebanese-Australian:

Hybridity, Essentialism and Strategy among Arabic-speaking Youth’, in Ghassan Hage (ed.) Arab-Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

59 Quoted in R. Young, ‘Muslim Style: Standing Apart While Fitting In’, International Herald Tribune, 19 September 2007, p. 13.

60 K. Betts and B. Birrell, ‘Making Australian Citizenship Mean More’, People and Place, 15(1), 2007, pp. 45–61.

61 Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Australian Government (2007) ‘Do I Need to Sit the Citizenship Test?’, <http://www.citizenship.gov.au/test/background/history.htm> (12 August 2008).

62 See <http://www.ahiida.com> (6 December 2008).63 G. Hage, ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-

Building’, in Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds (eds.) Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 99.

64 Faegheh Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 10–38.

65 Scott Poynting, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins, Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other (Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology Series, 2004), pp. 179–209.

66 A. Aly and D. Walker, ‘Veiled Threats: Recurrent Cultural Anxieties in Australia’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 27(2), 2007, p. 210.

Biographical note

Susie Khamis is a Lecturer in Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies. Her interest is in the branding process – how people, places, ideas and goods are invested with imagery and asso-ciations and the consequences of this on individuals, communities and nations. Her work has been published in Australian Cultural History, Journal of Australian Studies and M/C: a journal of media and culture. She can be contacted at: [email protected]



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