Some insensitive people refer to the western Melbourne suburb of Sunshine as Scumshine, and this is one of the reasons it has that name:
Two teenage gang members are back behind bars after a sickening attack on a blind grandfather.
The 63 year old had his shoes and mobile phone stolen during the violent robbery. @NearyTy_9 #9News pic.twitter.com/oM4v1Jl6gS
— 9News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) March 17, 2021
Those boys will be out on parole again shortly so watch out Scumshiners!
As this is a lonely outpost of common sense we say what a lot of people think: we should not be accepting any immigrants from Africa, above all, refugees.
The last time a mainstream politician said something remotely resembling this was in 2007, Immigration minister Kevin Andrews, a conservative Catholic Liberal, and the media descended on him in a righteous haranguing overdrive of fury. There is video, can’t find, of him being visibly and stammeringly and heavy breathingly flustered by it all and no mainline politician has made the mistake again of bringing up the African or Sudanese Question, because it’s A RACISM, and the media does not like anybody doing A RACISM.
At the last election campaign PM Scott Morrison made a populist promise to cut immigration levels, without making any mention of specific groups of course, and when he stated this for the cameras it was quite clear that there was some shame and awkwardness involved for him, because he knows that just suggesting cutting numbers across the board is assumed to be A RACISM by a lot of people.
As an interesting aside, some other funny names for Melbourne suburbs/places:
- Frankston – Frankghanistan
- St Albans – Stab Albans/St Stabbins
- Highpoint (Shopping Centre) – Knifepoint
- Cranbourne – Crimebourne
- Laverton – Lavatory
- Dandenong – Sudandenong
- Craigieburn – Curryburn
- Springvale – Chingvale
There are many more….
While the names sometimes suggest something very dangerous it has to be said that none of them is that bad, particularly if comparing to some parts of some American cities, principally at least because the number of Africans – as an apposite example – is not very big in any of these places, and there are lots of just regular people there who’ve bought houses because everywhere else is insanely expensive.
There’s also virtually no gun violence on the street. Serious criminals have guns of course, handguns, which are more or less completely illegal, but they mostly tend to shoot other serious criminals with them, as part of the bizarre feuds which the Melbourne underworld has a storied past of, and present. And even these dimwitted young Sudo boys in the video may have some awareness that if they carry or use guns they are taking it to a whole other level and are painting a big bullseye on their chests for the dozens of paramilitary police that will descend on them at their homes.
These suburbs mostly have one thing in common – lots of diversity.
Frankston North, or what people refer to as The Pines, which you’re not supposed to call it anymore (“The Pines” was the name of a big housing commission estate there), is considered one of the worst, or poorest suburbs in the city, and it’s probably the cheapest suburb in Melboring to buy a house in, but this latter fact is heavily influenced by its great distance from the CBD (40 km), and the fact the houses are very old and rundown, and it’s an outlier in that it’s not very diverse, still heavily Anglo, and it doesn’t seem to crop up much or at all in stories of random violent attacks like the above.
Not suggesting there is no violent crime there (there is certainly a fair bit of property crime), nor that young Anglos are angels and don’t beat people up, but if they do it’s likely beating up other young men, as young men are wont to eye each other off and start stuff when in groups/pairs, but random sadistic beatings of old men for their phones and shoes is not going to be a common thing, even in The Pines.
Frankston as a whole is a peculiar place by Australian standards, in that there is a very sharp division in it, between north and south, the south being partly solid middle class and partly seriously wealthy with sprawling estate type properties. People think the (Rupert) Murdoch family was from Frankston, but not really, it was Langwarrin well to the east, which is part of the City of Frankston administratively, but feels separate and is still semi-rural even today.
As an uncle of your scribe used to say: it’s all very interesting.
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