‘Tell your Indian mates they are making it worse’

"Why are you taking photographs of our neighbourhood, duckie?" the middle-aged white Australian woman asked me cheerily, as she sat sipping a beer by the kerbside.
It was a cold and blustery Saturday in Melbourne, and I had ventured out to Sunshine, the western, low-income suburb that is home to a large number of Indian students and where a recent upsurge in attacks on Indians has prompted heightened night-patrolling by the police. I had met a few of the victims and eyewitnesses, and was on a walkabout of Sunshine to take some pictures, when I had stumbled upon the beer-swigging sheila.

I introduced myself as a journalist for an Indian newspaper who had come to report on the incidents involving Indian students. At that point, her sunny disposition was blown away by the cold wind of profane bigotry.

"It's a f***** disgrace," she spat out, her face contorting in anger. "You tell your Indian mates they're makin' it worse for themselves with all their screamin' and shoutin'."

Happy for the chance to encounter alternative perspectives (even if they were foul-mouthed), I asked her if she felt that the allegations of racial attacks on Indians were without substance. But by then, she was virtually frothing at the mouth, and hopping up and down in her chair.

"You listen to me!" she shrieked. "They are a disgrace, a f***** disgrace! They're behavin' worse than 'em Africans," she thundered, waving in the direction of a knot of black immigrants down the road from us. "And if they don't like it here, they can f***** leave."

That's a sentiment I'm not unfamiliar with. Australia has grappled long and hard with the heart of racial darkness, although the periodic right-wing outbursts have met with spirited defence of its multiculturalism. On Facebook right now, the group, **** Off We’re Full, 'advises' immigrants to Australia to adapt to "the Aussie way of life" — or leave. "If you aren't happy here, then move on!" its founder says, in words that echoed my recent acquaintance's sentiments.

Those radical views gained political traction for a brief while in the mid-1990s, when Pauline Hanson, an Anglo-Australian woman who once ran a fish-and-chips shop, stoked fears of an avalanche of Asian immigrants to Australia. A book brought out by her One Nation party visualises Australia in 2025 by playing on the far-right's nightmare scenario of liberalism: Australia, she said, would have a population of 1.8 billion and be headed by a lesbian named Poona Li Hung, chosen by the World Government with its capital in Vuo Wah!

Unable to get a word in edge-wise now, I excused myself from the shrieking sheila. Still reeling from her parting words — "You go and take care of your country, we'll take good care of our Australia!" — I stumbled into Sunshine station, wondering idly at its somewhat inappropriate name.

Perhaps I still had a dazed look about me, for a couple of big-built Aussie blokes lumbered up, asking if I were lost. After my recent encounter, I was a trifle wary but was pleasantly surprised by their genuine warmth of manner. We chatted briefly about the 'bad press' that Sunshine had been getting, and they laughed about the snooty, upmarket South Yarra folks, and we parted as mates. It was like balm for my bruised soul. Perhaps Sunshine can never be entirely overcome by the heart of racial darkness…