I promised Des I would write something on the blog. It's not that I've been forgetting, but rather nothing's really happened since last time. Amy's started work and is gone throughout the day in the hospital, putting Australians to sleep and then not being sure if they're speaking nonsense as they wake up or just speaking normal Australian. I'm at home, STILL WAITING to get licensed to work (sonsofbitches sure took the application money fast enough SEVEN MONTHS AGO). In the meantime, I've watched a lot of Australian daytime TV enough to notice a few things.
It's not that I think Australians are racist. That's not it at all. It's that they're more racist than we are. Actually, that sounds somewhat insensitive - let me rephrase that. What I meant to say is, Australians are terrible people.
But seriously, they really are ready to say and do things that would make folks in North America freak out and speed dial the ACLU. You know how racists often preface their racism by the "I'm not a racist, but [insert racist comment]" disclaimer? Well... I'm not a (virulent) racist but damn Australia can be racist.
Here's a taste of something I got from the tourism centre in Perth about finding jobs in Australia. "...your bank account may be shrinking faster than a pygmy's pecker in ice water." At home, someone may have been disciplined for coming up with a phrase like this. Maybe the writer would even have been let go. Surely an editor would have hit the "track changes" button and written "not cool" in the comments. But here, this isn't a problem. Pygmy's peckers are small and funny and totally acceptable humor to insert into a government funded, family friendly guide to Western Australia.
Another dose of Aussie forthrightitudiness - I saw a documentary today on Australia's "stolen generations", a group of children forcibly separated from their aboriginal families and adopted by white families for no real reason other than that they were aboriginal. It chronicled the story of two aboriginal women raised by a white family who played for the Australian national soccer team. They were asked if their heritage affected their soccer ability, and they replied yes, their ancestry probably played some part in their athleticism. Then they asked their white teammate if their being aboriginal made them better soccer players. She replied, yes, of course, just as my being Italian makes me a better soccer player.
Then there's this genius. Judge for yourself.
Of course, I've hand picked these incidents to make the problem seem more of an issue than it really is. None of this is quantifiable, right? Good thing there're all these numbers from this racism survey. The news headlines about the study stated "Largest ever racism study finds... Australians are racist" but you can make up your own mind.
About 1 in 5 Australians think it's not a good idea for different races to marry.
About 1 in 2 Australians think there are cultural groups that do not fit into Australian society.
About 1 in 10 Australians think races of people are not equal.
Maybe 1 in 10 doesn't sound so high, but when you take into account what the population of Australia is, that's around 1.5 million Australians who need their faces punched. That's a lot of faces. My arms get tired just thinking about it.
And sometimes I'm not sure what to think, like this Telegraph article about Indians being racist about Australians being racist. Or in our first week here when some kid driving by in a car yelled "Oy, Asians!" at us and drove away laughing to his mates in the back.
Overall, I get the feeling that it's really not that Australians harbor more racist tendencies than Canadians. I think racist Canadians do a better job of covering it up. They know they're not supposed to make racist jokes during prosports luncheons or turn a bus into a kettle boiling with the most anti-French sentiment since Freedom Fries. At least when Canadians are racist they do it where they think they won't be heard. At home, it seems that often enough there are times when you really don't know if something someone said or did was racist. It happens so often there are websites to help you sort this sort of thing out. Here, if someone asks if it's racist, it's probably pretty racist.
So, in summary. I'm not a (rabid) racist, but Australians...
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