People talked about Greeks taking over our green grocers and resented the Slavs in our vineyards. Then there were those pesky black chaps (Aborigines) once a year trying to sell props to housewives. Props were long forked sticks to hold up laden clothes lines, long superseded by the Hills hoist.<\/p>\n
Life at home was not affected by this background noise. Nor was life at primary school with the 100% little white Anglo-Saxon faces, some bare footed and puny but not a shadow of intolerance. Bullying yes, but that is another matter still with us today. Looking back racism and fear always lurking in the background.<\/p>\n
It was at high school in a small rural coastal town that I first personally came face-to-face with racism. There were Aboriginal families in the town. At school there several Aboriginal boys who were good at sport and accepted as equal. A relative successfully ran the local illegal bookmaking business. The town certainly regarded them as different, and if life was bad for them it attracted\u00a0\u201cWell\u00a0what can you expect of people like that\u201d?<\/p>\n
On the other hand there was an Italian family, who ran a sawmill. Their son was probably the best cricketer the school ever produced. There were two beautiful daughters. This family was highly respected.<\/p>\n
This was during the war. Teachers were scarce and we ended up with a rotund German who tried to teach us Latin. He had been unfortunate to have been in Australia when war broke out so was interned for a while and eventually put to work. We called him Herr Grubner and played endless tricks on him. He was fat, myopic, couldn’t control the class and, as we had been taught to hate Germans, he was hated, the poor inoffensive man that he was. Italian POWs were everywhere in their maroon uniforms working on farms where the men had left for war.<\/p>\n
The place was an American submarine base as well as port for ships and people fleeing from the Japanese push south. The Yanks brought nylon stockings and some prosperity to the town.<\/p>\n
Other interlopers were construction crews from ‘Curtin’ s Coolie Corps’ who built a fuel depot. The Coolie Corps were itinerants who had been rejected for military service but capable of physical work. There was no resentment of either group.<\/p>\n
After the War the DPs (displaced persons) and reffos (refugees) came in waves, Balts doing menial work in hospitals, Italians cutting cane, German, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Dutch and just about every nationality worked on the Snowy Mountain Scheme. A million \u00a310 Poms deigned to honour us with their presence – many went back as soon as the 2 year bond was up.<\/p>\n
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At university there was the first wave of Colombo Plan students. Over the years I shared residential accommodation with a number of these students. There were no resentments, rather a shared learning experience.<\/p>\n
There were however a group of students who came from rural Western Australia who had an attitude to Aboriginal people I had not experienced before. They dined out with glee on stories of brutality. I had not then learned of the early stories slaughter and poisoning.<\/p>\n
When I moved on to work in the CSIRO people trained in scientific research were in short supply in Australia and the organisation recruited staff from all over world. So it had a multicultural ethos and there was no racism.<\/p>\n
Tony Abbott’s Assisted Migration Scheme Application Form 1960
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