Australia as a racist country, continued

It’s taken me a few years to think this through, but I’m not really happy labelling Australia as a racist country. What, you say, after what you put down in your last blog? Yes. I wish to include the superset term. Australia isn’t so much racist, as xenophobic.

As a coloured person or migrant, it’s difficult to see slights as something other than a reflection of your skin or accent, and so it’s taken me a while to truly put things in perspective. Australians dislike people, not because of their skin colour, or accent. Australians dislike people who are different.

Alan is an Anglo-Australian. He was born and educated in Australia. As an adult, in the early 1990s, he had the opportunity to work in the USA for a very large bank. After being promoted to a position of managing mergers and acquisitions with smaller banks, he decided to move his family back to Australia for its quality of life. Eight months later, he was still unemployed by any Australian bank because he had no “local experience”. He ended up moving back to the States.

Brad and Christine were highly-educated Swiss nationals, both in high-powered jobs in Geneva, handling finance and technology positions across Europe. They spoke English fluently. They thought the pace of life in Europe to be too hectic, and decided to migrate to Australia. Two years later, Christine is still unemployed and Brad is a part-time teacher at one of the local primary schools.

Derek is an Anglo-Australian who grabbed the opportunity to work in Italy when he was in his early 20s. After meeting his girlfriend over there, they decided to move back to Australia. Derek was a bit smarter because he organised his transfer while still in Europe. During his six months in Australia, however, his girlfriend (an Australian citizen) remained unemployed. At the end of that time, he organised a transfer to Hong Kong. “I can’t stand it,” he told me. “The prices in Australia are outrageous, the food is horrible, the service is atrociously rude everywhere and Ek-Ong can’t even get an interview with a single company. I don’t know if we’re ever coming back.”

Fred is a hard-working IT programmer who fell in love with someone in another state. A white Anglo-Australian, he moved from Adelaide to Sydney. By the time I spoke to him, he’d been living in Sydney for five years. “The first two years were hell,” I remember him telling me. “I had to live off my savings for the first few months because I couldn’t get a job. The headhunters kept telling me I didn’t have ‘local experience’. Eventually, I got a junior programmer gig and have been working my way up in seniority again since then.”
“What would it be like for a Sydneysider moving to Adelaide?” I asked.
“The same,” he replies. “They’d give you the same answer. Two years. That seems to be the amount of time it takes to properly break into any city in Australia.”

It’s not just about ancestry. It’s about differences. Ask Clive James why he doesn’t live in Australia. Ask Germaine Greer. Australia is not a place for anyone “different”, even if that person happens to have the same colour skin as the majority population. That firmly nails the crime as one, not of racism, but of xenophobia.

I wonder if part of the problem is that an entire continent got colonised by one major and ruthless group of people? In my alternate-world musings, I’d like to think of what Australia could be if, in addition to establishing a true dialogue with the native Australians, it was also colonised by two or three other ethnic groups. Of course, there would still be problems, but perhaps there wouldn’t be the kind of myopic and thoughtless cruelty of word that puts other nations to shame. I wonder.

But to get back to the original point. I want to be perfectly clear on this. Nobody physically bashed me for being an Asian. All I endured was year upon year of what Pung would call “casual name-calling”. So, there couldn’t possibly be any “long-term effects”, right? Then how is it that whenever I’m about to be introduced to a white-skinned person, I wonder whether they’ll ignore me or shake my hand? Whether, in white-majority social situations, anyone will talk to me or just walk away? Before I married J, I worried that his family would not approve of a “coloured” woman with their son. (I’d been in that situation before.) And I wonder whether the Australian/English women I meet occasionally who call admittedly short-haired Little Dinosaur, usually sporting something with pink hearts on it, a boy are trying to make some kind of malicious point or are just wilfully blind? Casual rudeness, thy sting is just as venomous.

According to Australian standards, because I haven’t been tortured or physically scarred, that means I couldn’t possibly have suffered any lingering effects from “irritating condescension” or “casual name calling”. I couldn’t possibly have been a victim of xenophobia, regardless of its frequency and my own resultant social fears, could I? You tell me.