Hailing from Mount Druitt, Western Sydney, Samoan-Australian group ONEFOUR have pioneered a brand of drill music in Australia that expresses the language and fashion of Sydney’s Eshay subculture. The roots of Eshay culture can be traced to the ‘80s and ‘90s inner-city graffiti scene in Sydney, which overlapped with the countercultural rave scene of the same era. Ravers wore baggy clothes for the purpose of being unrestricted while dancing all night. This is reflected in contemporary Eshay culture with the use of branded sports clothes and accessories like the bumbag (fanny pack).
It wasn’t until the late 2010s, after a resurgence in Aussie hip-hop driven by Sydney rappers Nter and Kerser, that the foundations were laid for ONEFOUR to ignite the Australian drill scene. ONEFOUR have merged Eshay culture with mainstream youth culture in Australia by virtue of their widespread success, facilitated by social media platforms like YouTube. The group epitomizes the Eshay look by sporting branded striped polo shirts, bumbags, and Nike TN shoes.
This social movement allows young people to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves. For some Eshays, their behavior may be influenced by various social factors, including the absence of strong male role models and a desire to validate a hypermasculine identity among peers, one that emphasizes toughness, dominance, and a rejection of vulnerability. Unfortunately, this results in social currency being tied to antisocial and sometimes violent behavior. However, through Mount Druitt’s community organization, Street University, where the group met their current manager Ricky Simandjuntak, ONEFOUR were able to channel their frustrations into the microphone rather than out on the street.
In 2019, the group saw rapid success with their first two singles “The Message” and “Spot the Difference.” That year, their singles finished as the second and third most popular music videos on Australian YouTube and quickly became global sensations. Their music videos feature their whole neighborhood showing support by riding quad-bikes and lighting flares, showcasing how connected ONEFOUR is to their community. This community participation reveals the desire to feel seen among people living in and around Mount Druitt. The Mount Druitt postcode is not only one of Sydney’s poorest, it is also disproportinately populated by Pacific Islanders like ONEFOUR, whose cultural identity is excluded by Australia’s hegemonic discourse and is rarely represented in the media and television. To their fans, ONEFOUR gives a voice to the marginalized through their emphatic music and unfiltered lyrics, which reflect their lived experiences of crime, poverty, and social dislocation. To the police, however, they reflect a threat to public safety.
Tragically, the New South Wales police have focused on policing the symptom rather than the structural causes of this antisocial behavior. While these destructive behaviors amongst Eshay culture are nothing new in Sydney’s poorer and more racially diverse communities, what’s new is the integration of Eshay culture into the mainstream, and strikingly, the substantial increase in area policing. If the police are the enforcers of public opinion, then the Australian media is at fault too. The perceived threat of Eshay culture has been inflated in the media since 2020. When polo shirts, Nike TNs, and Nike Dri-Fit hats made it out of suburbs like Mount Druitt and started showing up in white, middle-class homes, moral panic grew. If “cultures of crime” are hidden away in poorer neighborhoods, mainstream Australian media finds little to report. However, when a “threatening” subculture like Eshay comes into contact with wealthier neighborhoods, it becomes newsworthy. Mind you, the extent to which eshay culture has penetrated the mainstream tends only to stretch as far as fashion and music, highlighting the fallacy of connecting the culture itself to crime. Their growing influence and criminal past has made ONEFOUR the perfect scapegoat within this moral panic.
ONEFOUR’s 2019 invitation to the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Awards night was terminated by police efforts to stop the group from making public appearances. The ARIA rescinded their invitation, citing “police advice.” As ONEFOUR member Jemz said in defense of the group at the time, “we’re not a gang, we’re a music group.”
Despite this, ONEFOUR’s increasing association with crime earned them the attention of Strike Force Raptor, a branch of the New South Wales Police created to combat organized crime. This attention caused venues to cancel their live shows and justified invasive methods of police intimidation such as routine raids on the group’s family homes. In a 2023 interview, Jemz said it was normal for the police to “just come and lift the garage up, walk in, have a walk around my room and shit like that.” This targeting of ONEFOUR by the Raptor Squad is markedly evident in a voice recording of police Sergeant Trueman threatening the group: “I’m going to use everything in my power to make your life miserable until you stop doing what you’re doing.” In 2019, Sergeant Trueman conflated ONEFOUR with a bikie gang, saying that “if the Comancheros started singing a song and trying to call out and provoke the Hells Angels, and they wanted a concert, the public would expect us to shut that down.”
And shut them down they did. One of the more insidious examples of police intervention against the group came on the Melbourne leg of their 2019 tour. Three days before the show, the Victoria Police informed the host venue about the likelihood of crowd violence and manipulated the venue into canceling it. They explained that “if incidents of violence and disorder continue to occur at your premises after having been warned of these concerns, consideration will be given to making an application to the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation to vary, suspend, or cancel that license.” In defense of this statement, they declared that “community safety is Victoria Police’s number one priority, and [they] make no apologies for this.” ONEFOUR’s manager attempted to get in touch with the police to try and resolve the concerns, but did not hear back.
Compare this treatment with that of the white supremacist band, Blood and Honour, and the stark hypocrisy is apparent. In 2019, the band was banned from playing in Europe and declared a terrorist organization in Canada. In the lead up to a planned show in Melbourne the same year, the Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews, was faced with a petition signed by over 28,000 people pleading for the cancellation of the show. He conceded that although he considered the event shameful, he was powerless to stop it given a “deficiency in the law.” This came at a time when ASIO (the Australian version of the Secret Service) had labeled right-wing, racially motivated extremist groups as the number one domestic threat to public safety in Australia. This particular focus on right-wing groups was informed by recent violence, namely the single worst mass shooting in Australian and New Zealand history. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant livestreamed the murder of 51 people at two different mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The tragic and real threat of right-wing violence should have been enough to justify canceling Blood and Honour’s show. But the premier’s hands were tied over a “deficiency in the law” that didn’t seem to exist when it came to stopping live performances by ONEFOUR.
This imbalanced approach to shutting down live music by Australia’s law enforcement reveals a complicated interaction of both class and racially based discrimination. Instead of fighting organized crime—their alleged goal—all the police have done is attempt to silence ONEFOUR. By doing so, they also silence all those to whom the group gives a voice—those trapped in socioeconomic circumstances that tend to lead to crime in the first place. ONEFOUR member Jemz sums up the situation perfectly: “When they tell you that you’ve got to make a better future for yourself, why do they want to trap you in your past?”
Josef Wilks is an Australian exchange student in the College of Arts & Science, majoring in Politics and History.
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