Race Around The World

Whenever I was asked by people on my recent travels through assorted parts of the world what Australia was like, I usually boiled it down to a few key phrases. We're very lucky to live here. Beer is expensive, though vaguely commensurate with what we earn. And there's an undercurrent of latent and not-so-latent racism that we're still struggling to come to terms with.

I touched back down adjacent to Botany Bay last Monday, just as a race relations shitstorm of epic proportions was just starting to blow itself out before Eddie McGuire did what he does best – opened his mouth to enjoy the sound of his own voice.

For what it's worth, my point form assessment of recent events in the world of Australian Rules Football goes something along the lines of this: you don't call anyone an ape, let alone a black man; Adam Goodes and Eddie McGuire's handling of the incident and its aftermath was all class; at least it was, until Eddie's only crime (apart from being a Collingwood man) was attempting to take the piss out of a situation which is far too sensitive to take the piss out of, particularly if you're neither funny nor intelligent enough to get away with it. (PRO TIP: no one is.)

That was last week. Yesterday, we all awoke to the news that Mr Yunupingu, the frontman of Yothu Yindi, had passed away. The outpouring of respect was universal on my Facebook feed, populated mainly by an educated Gen X middle class driven more by music than any overt interest in social activism. I'm hardly one to go waving placards in support of the Tent Embassy myself, though have written about the remix that took Treaty to the world and taken a stab at Australia's uneasy relationship with its past 'round these parts before.

What I love about this sad news is how it demonstrates again the power of music to bring people together, much like that time Daft Punk released an album and I got accused of everything bar crimes against humanity when I took a gentle swipe at the hype machine surrounding it.

Because you know what? Everyone loved Mr Yunupingu and everyone loves Treaty, even those who tend to refer to blackfellas as abos or coons or boongs rather than indigenous Australians. Or, you know, just Aussies. (As a side note, anyone keen to tunnel deeper into the rabbit hole of music from the first Australians should check out the excellent playlist compiled for The Monthly by Paul Kelly last year.)

Casual racism isn't an exclusively Australian thing, of course. While I was off globetrotting, my Ethiopian host told me how she'd had to repeatedly explain to a Dutch traveler that referring to a waiter as a 'monkey' because he couldn't speak English wasn't cool. Then there was the time in New York City where my friend and I were bailed up on the streets by a black man who told us how much he used to love coming to Sydney for Mardi Gras, but that he hated the Aboriginal people because one group had attempted to separate him from his shoes after a big night out.

On the flipside of that, I spent eight days as the whitest part-Aborigine in Harlem without anyone so much as casting me a sideward glance.

Now I'm back in Redfern. On any given day walking through the clean, quiet streets here, I'll be asked for spare change by five percent of the indigenous population, asked for a cigarette by five percent, and have my existence treated with the general ambivalence that I'm accustomed to by the remainder. Swap the skin colour from black to white, and the percentages are essentially the same.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the price of beer here is still a national disgrace.