Face to face with the ugly Australian

‘Get back to your own f…in’ country you arsehole!’ The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

There was a protest in the city on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane late last week, on the little patch of lawn and pavement between St Paul’s Cathedral and Brunetti’s. There was an installation – more than a hundred dolls in a ‘cage’. Passers by were asked to ‘free’ one of the dolls from the cage and write to their local member or senator asking for an end to the detention of  children of asylum seekers.

This was the launch – late morning on an unpleasant blustery north wind Melbourne day when the seeds of the plane trees get down everyone’s throats and make them cough.

There was a fair crowd of the usual suspects – Grandmothers against Detention of Refugee Children, nuns, clergy of all stripes in their albs and crosses and purple stoles, justice workers from the Uniting Church, mothers with pushers, high school girls in checked summer uniforms.

The second speaker was Bashir, a young man from Afghanistan. He fled to Australia when the Taliban killed his father. He had spent gruelling time in detention in both Pakistan and Sydney, had eventually managed to get a permanent visa, was proud to have just finished his VCE exams. He fears for the safety of his three younger brothers still back home. He spoke haltingly but with passion and dignity.

As he drew breath between paragraphs of his speech, an open-windowed tram trundled past on Swanston and a young man, about the same age as the speaker, yelled – really yelled, it was clear and it was loud – those ugly words.

It was shocking, and it was perfect; a timely reminder that it is not only some of our politicians who are ugly Australians. The assembled crowd gasped. People like me are so often encased in something of a bubble populated by other good-hearted, left-leaning folk, many of them religious. We read The Age, we listen to the ABC, we go to the protest marches and write our letters to the politicians and feel despair at so many of the policies of the current regime on climate change, Indigenous issues, asylum seekers.

Many of us are in close touch with people on bridging visas. Which is great, but it is easy to believe what I believe when I am largely insulated from a portion of the population of this privileged land who want people to ‘Go back to their f…in’ countries’. The people who are part of the reason our Prime Minister rode to power on a slogan like ‘Turn back the boats’. 

I tried not to react too violently to the individual who personified this ignorance, a young man who was patently Anglo, ergo, he had come from his own f…n’ country not that many generations ago.

I tried to think about where he might have come from – his own story of hardship or cruelty that might have made him the stunted, reactive, small-hearted person he now apparently is. Maybe he has been unemployed for years and it has ground him down, made him deeply resentful of anyone he perceives as potentially stealing a job that might otherwise be his. Maybe he comes from a family that has imbued him with those attitudes. Maybe he is himself a victim of the policies of a government that has cut TAFE funding viciously. Maybe he is simply, to use his own unpleasant word, an arsehole, but usually there are reasons for people turning out that way.

This is why we have the government we have, I thought, as I turned back to listen to Bashir finish his speech. This is a reminder of the level of debate for many Australians.

So where does that leave me? I try and understand why people with repugnant attitudes are that way, attempting not to lash back at them with an anger to match their own, because anger will never persuade anyone. Maybe, I even try and get out of my leftie bubble occasionally. I continue to protest, to write the letters, to get to know individual asylum seekers if possible, to keep the issues front and centre in the media.

Last week marked a quarter century since the introduction of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. The fact that we are holding children in detention in a decade where we are still reeling under the collective horror of realising the damage done to the Stolen Generations and thousands of children who grew up in state and religious institutions, beggars belief. The fact that so many citizens of one of the luckier countries in the world cannot see the inhumanity of what is being done to asylum seekers, some of whom are children, is a call to all of us to communicate to the government that we can abide this happening on our soil no longer.

Comments

[Rod]

When I hear reports like the one you record Clare, it feels threatening to me. I feel afraid and I am a white anglo male! I fear also for the kind of society that is reflected in the attitudes and actions you witnessed. And why does compassion, hospitality and common humanity seem so powerless in the slash of that one single comment?

[Tess]

Well said! Living in rural Victoria I see a lot more of those ugly attitudes but thankfully most young people seem much more open to the idea that we might have space for the persecuted in this huge country.