by Alice Pung
You grow up in a factory town that never recovered from the ’80s recession. Vacant commission houses become a common sight along the streets of Braybrook, like a row of teeth rotting at an alarming rate. Old families move to more rural areas to find new jobs. Because rent is so cheap, new families begin migrating to this working-class neighbourhood that now has no work – Vietnamese, Tongans, Cambodians, mainland Chinese. But the new migrants are resourceful. They work as seasonal fruit-pickers, or in far-flung suburbs where other factories are running, or sewing in their poorly ventilated garages out the back. They don’t mind spending four hours of their day on a bus. They don’t mind eating instant noodles for two meals out of three each day. Some even save up enough to start small businesses.
Meanwhile, the factory closures reduce once-proud working-class white families to their second or third generation of welfare dependency. Like your own mother, the only literature these folks read are the supermarket ads, and the only news they see about yellow or brown people is on TV, on A Current Affair, about dodgy South-East Asian drug dealers, illegal immigrants coming here to steal their jobs and Indonesians locking up fun-loving Schapelle Corby. The other thing they watch on TV is Neighbours. In 1993 the first Asian family appears, the Lims from Hong Kong, who are then quickly accused of barbequeing a beloved neighbourhood dog.
But the old families in Braybrook barely see their Asian neighbours to know whether they cook family pets or not. Then, a decade later, they notice that those chingas have a new Toyota Camry parked in their driveway. When no one in their own families has ever owned a new car, and they’re still putting advertisements in letterboxes to earn a buck, how come the government are helping refugees and not them? This is an outrage! The next day, after work, your dad notices that someone has made a deep angry scratch across the silver paint of his car boot.
*
A few years ago, you are in line at a shop in your home suburb. ‘Here you go, sweetie,’ says the sandy-haired woman behind the counter with the dangly triangle earrings, handing you your change and towels in a bag. You are still loitering at the store looking at discounted socks when you notice the next man at the counter. Dressed in the dignified two-decades-out-of-season suit of newly arrived migrants, he very politely asks for a bag. He’d bought polyester bedsheets in a slippery, clear plastic package. ‘Nope,’ says the woman definitively, ‘we don’t have any bags.’ What she could have said was, we don’t have any big enough. What she could have done, as other sales assistants had done, was offer to wrap two large bags together, or use string. But she doesn’t.
And there it is – the moment you know that you are safe, that you have blended in so completely because there is a black Sudanese man behind you. The relief you feel, but also the guilt and pity – which is not a word we like using these days – towards the new arrival is enormous. You are now an invisible watcher, and your invisibility has come at the expense of someone else.
The man lowers his head, and then tries again. ‘Sorry, I have to take this on the train. I cannot carry it like this. Please can you help?’ This tall, regal man reduced to begging for two plastic bags. You cannot bear it. She throws them across the counter at him, and turns away to tidy up the till.
*
Years later, you are out of Braybrook and you have a job where the most dangerous workplace hazard is getting a papercut or scalding yourself with tea, not losing your forearm to a careless foreman in a factory. You get to write about your childhood and talk about race in public forums, and because you are in a position of comfort and respect, none of it seems so bad anymore. You can even laugh at STOP RACE MIXING while you are onstage with a barrister and a broadcaster at a writer’s festival discussing Australia’s national identity. The barrister says that the Australian identity has nothing to do with the Australian people, who are largely decent people: ‘It is as if we live our lives simultaneous to these lives that the media project.’ The broadcaster announces, ‘Racism in Australia has a lot to do with class, and unless we address class difference, or our perceptions of the working class, xenophobia and racism will not change.’
We need to have these conversations about the shape of national identity, everyone concurs during the question-and-answer minutes allocated at the end of the panel. We need to start these conversations, as ordinary Australians, to show the world that we are not racist. But you know that back in Braybrook, no one is starting these conversations. There is a Burmese saying about not wasting your time playing a violin to a buffalo. To the people with whom you grew up, your working-class friends and family members, who has time to play a violin when the fields need ploughing?
*
You and your husband do not talk about STOP RACE MIXING except as a funny anecdote to share with others. These days, STOP RACE MIXING barely has any effect on you, because you are insulated by the kindness and decency of your new friends, many of whom have never even heard of Braybrook. No one except the mentally ill would be racist towards an employment rights lawyer who might help them with their unfair dismissal claim, they tell you. No one would be racist towards their Chinese family doctor. Woe to the poor sod who was dumb enough to put such crap on a writer’s windscreen! This piece is going to be published, and you’ll be paid for it. Meanwhile, STOP RACE MIXING may never get out of sordid suburbia, never have a voice beyond their self-funded poster campaign. Joke’s on them, sucker! But in a way you know that you’re also cowardly – STOP RACE MIXING and you are fighting a paper war, the only difference being that you have wider distribution.
Perhaps the truly brave are those who transcend the need to conduct The National Conversation, and go to direct action. Your Chinese school classmate Corrina would have hunted down STOP RACE MIXING in the car park, taken down his numberplate, yelled out, ‘Fuck you, inbred bogan’, and later arranged for some of her boyfriend’s homies to rearrange his/her car and/or face. No further words necessary.
LIVING WITH RACISM
In the killing fields of Cambodia, my father was threatened with having his tongue cut out with a sickle for speaking his native language, Teochew Chinese. When he and my pregnant mother arrived in Australia in 1980 and discovered that their new country encouraged them to maintain their language and culture, they were incredulous. My father named me Alice because he believed I was delivered into a wonderland, a place that allowed for the full expression of human personality and potential.
The White Australia policy, which barred non-white immigrants, had recently ended, and a new era of multiculturalism had begun. National policy mandated that at school we all learn another language in addition to English. There was an explosion of international food and festivals.
But Australia’s fling with multiculturalism was temporary. In less than fifteen years, politicians began advocating assimilation for non-whites. In Australia today, the discussion around race and immigration has deteriorated to the point where many politicians no longer appear to believe that assimilation is even possible.
Racism has returned to the front of public discourse. Visiting Australia this week, the United Nations special rapporteur on racism, Mutuma Ruteere, condemned Australian politicians for ‘xenophobic hate speech’.
I grew up near Footscray, a West Melbourne neighborhood then brimming with factories and optimism. Refugees had always moved to Footscray to start anew: Eastern Europeans in the 1950s and ’60s, South-East Asians in the ’70s and ’80s, Africans in the ’90s and the new century. A foreman gave my dad a trial at a car-trailer factory, thinking this 100-pound man would not be able to lift heavy metal parts. He didn’t know that my father’s previous job as a slave labourer was to bury dead bodies. He got the job.
But when businesses began to move production overseas in the early 1990s for cheaper labour costs, many proud working-class Anglo-Australians – including the kind of foreman who hired my father – were laid off. These were hard-working folks who had left school at fifteen and had been loyal to single companies for decades. The mood shifted.
Some people in Footscray started to see multiculturalism as a punishment inflicted on them by the government. After all, it was the working-class whites who had to share their neighborhoods, jobs and schools with the new arrivals.
One evening, when my mother, brother and I were walking home, a car pulled alongside. The teenage passengers rolled down their windows and yelled out: ‘Go home! Stop stealing our jobs!’ I was too young to know that Australia was going through its worst recession since the Great Depression.
‘Most Australians are good,’ my father told us. ‘Those are the bad ones. Just ignore them.’
My best friend’s father mowed the lawns at our school. Her mother worked for the juvenile justice department. They were white Australians who lived in a concrete house like ours. The mother would tell us about poor children she encountered who felt hopeless; one kid was so desperate he injected Vegemite in his veins in search of a high.
Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, these working-class white kids could no longer leave school at fifteen and easily find jobs that would set them up for life. Now they were lost, on the streets causing trouble, tormenting the newcomers. The immigrants were also scrabbling at the bottom of the barrel, yet we were seen as the main threat to the Australian working-class way of life.
It had long been this way for migrants in Australia. In drafting the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, Alfred Deakin, who later became prime minister, specifically went after Asian immigrants. ‘It is not the bad qualities but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us,’ he said. ‘It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.’
In the mid-1990s, Pauline Hanson was elected to parliament and formed her new political party One Nation, claiming that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’. It was an easy claim to make: in 1971, the Asian population of Footscray made up a mere 1 per cent of the population, but by 1996, it had risen to 17 per cent.
At the same time that Dad was telling us to ignore the Bad White Australians, Bad Asians were beginning to appear everywhere. Vietnamese heroin dealers on the seven o’clock news, Filipino welfare cheats on the radio, Chinese slumlords in the papers. Ms Hanson declared that Asians had ‘their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate’. People started wearing printed yellow t-shirts, the word ‘full’ emblazoned across a map of Australia.
Keep your head down, my parents advised, because there was no point in fighting such bigotry.
The next time I went to my best friend’s house, her father had tacked up a poster of Ms Hanson draped in the Australian flag. He sought to reassure me that it had nothing to do with our family. Echoing my father’s line about white Australians, he said, ‘Youse are the good ones.’
After almost two decades out of parliament and a brief stint in jail, Pauline Hanson has been re-elected to the Senate, her One Nation party winning four seats there. Now their main target is Muslims, but the game is the same.
As Mr Ruteere, the UN official, pointed out, our problems in Australia are not unique; in Europe and America similar xenophobic ideologies are brewing. Refugees are no longer comforted by a welcoming Australian government. Our new arrivals are no longer benefiting from a national policy of multiculturalism that tells them they belong. They are told to fit in or get lost, yet no one demonstrates how to achieve this assimilation.
I now understand how terrified those without power in Australia feel. I am reminded of a line in Ecclesiastes: ‘I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them. On the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them.’
Racists feel that no one, neither society nor the government, appreciates how the modern world has left them behind. But one group shares their unrelenting feelings of deep-seated fear and anxiety: their victims.
What I have learnt from experience is this: in your moments of vulnerability, the bigots will still come for you. Your tongue could still be cut out, your windows smashed. You can go about quietly achieving and trying to keep a low profile, but you can never choose invisibility. When the bigots decide to see you, they will see you.
But I am no longer keeping my head down. I can see them, too.
WHO IS THE ORDINARY REASONABLE PERSON?
Senator the Hon. George Brandis QC
Attorney-General, Minister for the Arts
Parliament House, Canberra
Dear Senator Brandis,
According to your proposed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the standards of ‘ordinary reasonable members of the Australian community’ will determine whether or not something is ‘reasonably likely to vilify’ a particular race, colour, nationality or ethnicity. If I may, please let me introduce you to three candidates for your cohort of ‘ordinary reasonable members of the Australian community’.
It is just after midday in the back room of an electrical appliance store, and these men are having lunch. They are retail veterans, having done the same job for at least two decades: the guy from the warehouse who has hands like leather gloves and can dismantle a fridge box in a few minutes, the fast-talking guy from the shop floor who’s planning his once-in-a-lifetime holiday to Europe, and the manager who likes to put heartfelt homages to Steve Irwin in his shop ads. But business isn’t so good these days. The store is in one of the most archaic and faltering of commercial places, a shopping strip. Down the same street are a Mediterranean restaurant, an African hairdresser, a Vietnamese chemist. Around the corner there used to be an adult video store next door to a halal butcher and an optometrist.
The manager and the warehouse man lean over the salesman, who is holding an open newspaper. Reading this particular paper is a sign of cultural belonging and a protection against the hostile world outside. ‘Look at this,’ the salesman says, referring to the sentiments expressed on their favourite columnist’s page. ‘The government says no to racism, but yes to free speech.’
The manager knows all about this freedom of speech. In his previous life, some soldiers once caught him speaking his own language to another man. The two men were made to kneel down and stick out their tongues, while the soldiers – young boys, really – wielded sickles to inflict a medieval punishment. The men begged their way out, but the manager will never forget such terrorism. Luckily, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in this country. They’ve all come here for safety.
In his younger days, the warehouse man once saw a truck that was loaded with starved bodies on their way to burial. ‘Some of their limbs were still moving!’ he said, shaking his head. They vote for the party that will give each man and his family a sense of security.
The proposed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act say that whether something racially vilifies or intimidates will not be determined ‘by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community’. This neighbourhood is a place where ‘no particular group’ resides, so maybe these lunchroom guys are the ‘ordinary reasonable members of the Australian community’ on whose views this judgement will be based. I certainly hope so, because one of them is my father.
The people in my father’s shop have come from places like the former Yugoslavia, the south of Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, and they have escaped communism, socialism, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, war and hunger. They see themselves as real men, not wusses with easily ‘hurt feelings’. They know that one day the talk will come back to them again. How they should not be in this country if they are ungrateful. How they should not be here if they continue to speak their own language, if they don’t assimilate.
These guys may have to look up the word ‘bigot’ in a dictionary, yet they understand racism on a visceral level. In their sixth or seventh decade of life, they sigh and know nothing has changed about human nature or racism but at least laws in Australia protect them from getting killed or bashed.
‘Australian
newspapers are not like the ones back home,’ Dad tells me. ‘They would never publish anything untrue.’ These men know they’ll never be in the paper unless they do something dodgy, and that’s fine. Their hope is for their kids to be better educated and to have a voice.
My university studies and legal work taught me how to engage in reasoned debate, just as yours did, Senator Brandis. Yet I take no comfort in the fact that I may belong in your ‘reasonable member’ group that determines standards, because the problem with my voice is this: I have never known what it is like to be denied housing or jobs because of my race, to be dragged away by soldiers in the middle of the night, to be forcibly separated from loved ones or have my land pilfered. If someone yells abuse at Salesman Charlie, Warehouse Jack or my dad, if someone clenches their fist at one of these guys because of their skin or language or food, these men think there will be a knock on the door, their houses will be burnt down, their tongues cut off, bodies carted away in trucks, accented sons bashed up in the street.
The sort of fear that exists in their minds might lead a more ‘reasonable’ person to wonder: Why are you carrying on like Armageddon will come? Why can’t you form a decent coherent sentence? You can’t even let go of past grievances and move on, you behave irrationally, and for crying out loud, speak English on a bus!
Under the proposed amendments, these reactive, inarticulate, overly emotional ‘feeling’ types will suddenly not be reasonable persons by any stretch of the law. Fear is not an abstract thing debated by politicians, Senator Brandis. These folks see fear where no one else does: in public transport inspectors even though you bought a train ticket, in realising you have too many soccer mates walking down the street at the same time because you’re all black, in always having a light on in the house even when you sleep.
