4

This is who we are

And what it is like to be white is not to say, ‘We have to level the playing field,’ but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word ‘advantage’ at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.

Fran Lebowitz¹

In June 2020, tens of thousands of people in Sydney defied COVID-19 public health orders to gather in the heart of the city. It was one of many Black Lives Matter protests taking place across the world. I stood as close to Sydney’s Town Hall building as I could get, trying to maintain a respectful distance from the people around me, my hands sanitised by roving marshals who carried pump-packs and distributed face masks. I strained to hear much of the speeches, but I heard these words loud and clear: ‘If it wasn’t for George Floyd, I wouldn’t be standing here today.’

The speaker was Mrs Leetona Dungay. She is the mother of David Dungay Jr, a Dunghutti man who died in Sydney’s Long Bay jail in December 2015, aged twenty-six years old. In an uncanny foreshadowing of George Floyd’s terrible last moments, which were captured on camera and transmitted around the world, Dungay’s last words, repeated again and again, were ‘I can’t breathe.’² None of the corrections officers present when this young man was held down and sedated suffered any disciplinary action, continuing the standard pattern of Indigenous deaths in custody where no one is held accountable and nothing changes. Dungay’s bereaved family need to be tenacious in their fight for justice, more than they should have to be; the case is going to the United Nations. Leetona Dungay has said, ‘I want the United Nations to tell the Australian government to change its ways. I want the United Nations to say loud and clear to this racist government that black lives matter. All I want is justice. I want real justice where the life of an Aboriginal man is worth something.’³

Resistance to police violence and repression has shaped the lives of Aboriginal people since the earliest days of the penal colony founded by the British at Sydney Cove. Likewise, #BLM was not born when George Floyd was killed in 2020. Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi co-founded Black Lives Matter in 2013, after the acquittal of the man who killed Black high-school student Trayvon Martin.⁴ By then, the struggle for racial justice had been ongoing for decades since the civil rights movement, for centuries since the original sin of transatlantic slavery. But when Floyd – African American and unarmed – was murdered by White officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis in May 2020, Black Lives Matter was energised further. Its aims – ending police brutality, mass incarceration and systemic racism – were simultaneously local and global.⁵

David Dungay Jr’s name was one of many read out at the Sydney protest. Say Their Names. More than four hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in police or prison custody since the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. At the time of writing this unconscionable number is edging closer to five hundred; more Indigenous men and women have died in detention since the protests in 2020. Protesters stood on city streets across Australia in the middle of a pandemic, crying out for an end to this systemic violence against First Nations people and for the perpetrators to be held to account. Among a forest of placards, many combining the BLM raised-fist symbol with the red, yellow and black of the Aboriginal flag was a sign that read: My skin shouldn’t be a death sentence.⁶

Everywhere I turn I see personal stories and collective histories threaded around skin colour, shaped by it, in opposition to it, embracing it. Skin colour imbued with pride, loathing, obsession. Fetishised, existential, moving from the inner life of the soul to the public life of the body politic. Skin colour as a predictor of inequality, of struggle. Skin colour citing history as its witness, bearing witness to Whiteness, denying Blackness, serving oppression. Anita Heiss, writer and member of the Wiradjuri nation, boldly asks in the title of her memoir, proudly claiming her identity and challenging simplistic expectations, ‘Am I Black Enough for You?’⁷ The decades-old slogan of defiance ‘White Australia has a Black History’ shakes the non-Indigenous awake, forces them to see the truth. It shifts who gets to define the relationship between skin colour, history and culture.

The slogan speaks to me, but I acknowledge that as a White Australian I am not the best person to write about the various forms of violence Indigenous Australians and people of colour face in this country. Yet, in a book about skin, the question of skin colour is unavoidable; to evade it would serve no one. To listen and learn from those with lived experience of racism is my start and end point. In between, I seek not to act out performative but empty gestures but, instead, to work for change, not least as White Australia seems chronically apathetic, incapable of acknowledging its own history in a meaningful way. Its failure to engage properly with the peoples and cultures of the country it colonised is ongoing.

Alexis Wright, award-winning writer and member of the Waanyi nation in the Gulf of Carpentaria, calls for a new, foundational way of seeing the country through the lens of Aboriginal culture. ‘Let’s imagine a day so great we celebrate Aboriginal sovereignty and governance, the most important legal entities of this ancient continent. Aboriginal Sovereignty Day, for a land that needs its ancient songs and stories, the ones that have been handed down generation after generation, through thousands of years, to care for this land.’⁸

Race is not a biological category, as we have seen. But alongside class and gender, race is an all-consuming, life-defining cultural, social and political category. Humans argue nonstop about what race is and what it means. Even commenting on blatant racial inequality can provoke shameless, self-serving accusations that the complainant is being deliberately divisive, ‘playing the race card’. The energy that people put into arguing whether or not they are racist generates far more heat than light.

Take a long look around. We might argue about what is racist and what is not, but it’s harder to deny what race, personified by the shifting category of non-white skin, does. Statistics can tell many stories. Here’s one: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up 3 per cent of the Australian population but 28 per cent of the prison population.⁹ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people report higher levels of everyday discrimination than every other community group.¹⁰ But when Leetona Dungay calls the system that killed her son racist, who is listening? When a public health expert examines the poor COVID-19 outcomes for people of colour and concludes that racism, not race, is a determinant of health, outrage ensues. When a White morning television host calls for the nation’s border to be closed to Muslims, or for Aboriginal children to be removed from their families, there is overstated disbelief that she could possibly be called a racist. Critical race scholar Alana Lentin elucidates a disingenuous trope of our time whereby calling someone a racist has become worse than actual evidence of racist behaviour. Often, she says, ‘the power to define racism is taken away from those most affected by it’.¹¹ Twisted narratives make the victimiser end up appearing as if they are the victim, which leaves the original victims blamed and vilified in a gaslit hell.

In my everyday life in Australia, or if I travel to Europe, or to the settler societies of Aotearoa New Zealand or North America, or to some parts of Latin America, my white skin shields me like an invisibility cloak. I fit in. My skin’s power lies in its signal that I am part of the dominant group. This privilege, this lack of otherness, declutters my headspace. I don’t have to pre-empt or deal with the knottiness or hostility that people with black or brown skin are more likely to encounter. It’s all smoother sailing for me, a cis woman, a financially secure, able-bodied English speaker, suffused with the cultural and social capital of White privilege. And its optics; if being seen to be White carries force, it can also obscure the vision of those looking out from their own Whiteness.

Complacent, unwitting, I float through a world that tells me, yes, my name is on the guest list. No, officer, I do not, and likely never will, fit the description of the person you seek. I never have to put up with the coded undermining, the second-guessing, the dreaded ‘Where are you really from?’ when you’re from right here, this place – Australia, the United States, Canada, Britain, wherever it may be – born and bred. But not White, and therefore different. I heard British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, recount her version of this scenario. She is Black. At immigration control in an Australian airport, she hands over her British passport. It says UNITED KINGDOM on the front. The passport’s first page lists her birthplace as LONDON. The immigration officer, a woman, hands back her passport and, smiling, asks, ‘So, where are you from?’¹²

Poet Jaswinder Bolina describes the crude diluting and jumbling of cultures and skin colours in the schoolyard he experienced while growing up with Indian parents in the Chicago suburbs. In his case, classmates debating nomenclature between subcontinental and Native American before settling on what ‘Indian’ meant in his case. In his book Of Color, he writes, ‘Dots, not feathers, the other kids cracked in school, even though in my family’s part of the old country you see mostly turbans and chunis, not bindis. That a single word can conflate the descendants of one continent’s achingly ancient civilisations with those of another, half a planet away, is evidence of colonialism’s continued hold on the American imagination.’¹³

Not only the American imagination. Everyday microaggressions that suggest I don’t really belong might not be directed my way but they circulate through the air I breathe. My birthright includes a lifetime benefit-of-the-doubt leave-pass. I may feel outraged when I read of another death in custody and know, without having to be told, that the deceased is Aboriginal. But however angry and discomforted I may have felt at the protest, I don’t live with the grief and trauma daily.

Jamaican-born American writer Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen, a remarkable, prize-winning, bestselling poem, has said, ‘Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.’¹⁴ Violence, historic and contemporary, done to Black and Brown people fills the pages of her book. It also fills the streets, police lock-ups and refugee camps of our world. I read Rankine’s words and think of my own White liberal imagination, resident on sovereign lands that were never ceded. Black Lives Matter is a challenge to the structural power I benefit from.

The subtitle of Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling, eponymous book about White fragility, Why it’s so hard for White people to talk about racism, is on point; I couldn’t agree more, it is hard. Though I confess I don’t much like the essentialising and reductionist tone of the book itself. But maybe I’m being defensive and proving the book’s point, my threshold for racial stress lower than I’d like to believe.¹⁵ Alison Whittaker’s dissection of ‘the delight in and market for white self-aggrandisement through self-minimisation’ seems spot on. Whittaker, a Gomeroi poet and legal researcher, argues that the notion of White fragility placates White people – transforming self-behaviours within the rubric of self-help – rather than transforming power structures.¹⁶

So, I want to see beyond my White force-field, but will not channel my energy into guilty hand-wringing or crying White tears. With a mix of idealism, pragmatism and cash, it is surely better to act to make change, alongside others. As individuals with histories, we drag behind us the messiness of our own narratives and inner lives, living in history’s aftermath. Self-flagellating in front of those we have oppressed as they cheer our suffering may bring momentary gratification but not lasting racial justice. Paternalism won’t improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ health outcomes and life expectancy. It won’t move us towards the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the listening that truth-telling demands. It won’t stop incarceration and police brutality. It won’t end voter suppression. It won’t re-make the precarious work we call ‘essential’ without ever paying decent money to the mainly people of colour who do it.

A Black president and first lady in the White House, Barack and Michelle Obama could not magically flick the switch to a post-racial world. The first Black president, through the act of being himself, may have ignited the fear and rage that elected Donald Trump. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described the 45th president of the United States as ‘The first white president’, because ‘he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact’. Before he was even inaugurated, President Trump unleashed and emboldened festering White nationalist forces and their operating currency, hate. Coates writes, ‘It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true – his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.’¹⁷

Our psyches, Black and White, are weighted by reminders that history has not changed course, that it is being replayed. Trump’s presidency showed how little it takes for White nationalists to mobilise and operate in plain sight. Neo-Nazis and White supremacists, with guns, on the streets of America in Black churches, synagogues, mosques. Targeting people of Asian appearance. Armed insurgents wearing T-shirts bearing anti-Semitic slogans and racist tattoos roaming the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Mexican and Central American children in cages, families separated, Muslim travel bans. An Australian terrorist murdering worshippers in mosques in Christchurch. And the resurgent countervailing forces sprout, the heirloom seeds of Black Lives Matter falling on fertile, if contested, ground across the world.

Jaswinder Bolina comments that more often than outright racists, he encounters White people who believe race isn’t an active factor in their thinking: ‘The thing I least believe about race in America is that we can disregard it.’¹⁸ But we must remind ourselves of the particularity of our histories. Reni Eddo-Lodge writes, ‘While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.’¹⁹

Australia allows itself to fall into the same trap. But the specifics of a case such as David Dungay Jr’s, and so many more, past and present, are easy to find once you look. Many White Australians choose not to, even though this is a golden age of Indigenous storytelling,²⁰ with so much art, story, criticism, reportage, film and research by Indigenous Australians. In her memoir A Question of Colour, Pattie Lees writes about growing up in Cairns with an Australian Irish father, a Danish stepfather and a Torres Strait Islander mother. Made a ward of the state in Cairns, Queensland, with two of her siblings, she was shipped to Palm Island.

This seeming tropical paradise was a penitentiary and an authoritarian mission, established to force Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to assimilate. It operated, writes Lees, ‘according to a hierarchy of colour and privilege’.²¹ On the boat to Palm Island from Townsville, in 1960 when she was aged ten, Lees sees people who she assumes are from Africa but who are, of course, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: ‘They were real black, pitch black, not a shade inbetween . . . Until that point these individuals were probably the darkest people I had ever seen. I never had a sense of colour or race until that moment.’²² As she writes about struggling to become seen as a ‘proper blackfella’ like her fellow inmates in the girls’ dormitory, I thought too of the stories of all the other girls and boys separated from their families there and across Australia. The official transcripts containing intimate details of the Janke family (Pattie Lees’ name before she married) that appear throughout the book are a chilling demonstration of the state apparatus that was devoted to separating families.

A Question of Colour is hopeful, but the damage it describes is almost beyond comprehension. I recalled a scene from the now-classic play by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving. The unnamed Woman, the sole performer, is on a stage surrounded by mounds of red earth. In one scene, ‘Home Story’, she launches into the complex story of Aboriginal kinship, who can marry who. ‘And this one here is about culture, family, song, tradition, dance. Have you got that? . . . You always have to marry within your own skin.’ It’s hard to understand, and The Woman explains she doesn’t always get it right. It’s complicated. She’s moving piles of dirt around (or, in the 2021 production, shells), telling which mob can marry who. Then, having arranged the piles, she says, ‘Now imagine when the children are taken away from this. Are you with me?’ The stage instruction at the end of the scene reads, ‘The WOMAN flays her arm through the remaining large pile and circle, destroying it.’ These aren’t piles of dirt. We’re watching dispossession and death, a whole world upended. The shells are children, graves. The epilogue to the 2021 production of the play (which is life-affirming, and at times even joyful) includes these words: ‘We need change. We need action.’²³

Were Australia a person, its relationship status would best be described as ‘complicated’. Sitting at the bottom of Asia, on the edge of the Pacific, it is home to the oldest living indigenous cultures on Earth, whose deep knowledges and storytelling, as Alexis Wright says, connect First Nations peoples to sovereign Country in ways colonisers deliberately ignore, still. Australia is Anglophone, part of a Commonwealth of countries united by the British Empire, and also a military ally of the United States. This is one source of tension with China which, paradoxically, is now one of Australia’s biggest sources of immigrants, along with India, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.²⁴ One in ten Australians has an Asian background. Australia, by government design particularly since the mid-1970s, is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places on the planet. But often you wouldn’t know it. In a line-up of ethnicities, most would select as the archetypical Aussie a white-skinned person who has spent too much time in the sun.

Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane has said, ‘Despite all of our official multiculturalism and commitment to racial equality, our policy machinery still reinforces this idea that we don’t see race or ethnicity: we certainly can’t measure anything involving it, even if many other liberal democracies find straightforward ways to do so.’²⁵ The United States, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom all collect data on the race and ethnicity of its citizens, but Australia does not. As Soutphommasane says, ‘All we can say is that 30 per cent of people were born overseas.’²⁶ One recent article bluntly set out the repercussions of this, a reminder of how complicated these discussions are: ‘Are you even trying to stop racism if you don’t collect data on race?’²⁷

Soutphommasane said to me that this lack of data ‘reinforces our “colourblindness”, which contradicts our official multiculturalism’. In other words, our world view is Eurocentric. There is, he says, powerful political deflection of any efforts around anti-racism. He paraphrases the self-serving argument of some politicians and policymakers: ‘If race is a social construct, then even talking about race is farcical and can reinforce racism.’ This kind of thinking stops us from seeing the diversity of our fellow citizens and noticing their absence in the rooms where it happens. Whiteness remains the default.

Soutphommasane has written, ‘If representation were a measure of success on multiculturalism and race, what does the lack of diversity within the leadership of our political, governmental, educational and business institutions say?’²⁸ Indeed, if you were to close your eyes, spin around and point randomly at an assembly of Australian politicians, corporate leaders, journalists, broadcasters, celebrities, experts, pundits, military top brass and university professors, in all statistical likelihood, when you open your eyes, you will be pointing at a White person. A quarter of the Australian population has a non-European or Indigenous background, yet 97 per cent of Australian CEOs are White. Politicians don’t reflect their constituents – only 6 per cent of all federal politicians have a non-European parent or are Indigenous.

The disconnect about who we are and what we look like seeps into everything. Here is one foreign policy example: in a 2020 speech given at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University, scholar Louise Edwards did not hold back: ‘Australia’s relations with Asia seem to be in a time machine that is moving backwards.’ Identifying a variety of national groupthink, she said, ‘Many Australian leaders seem to be labouring under the misconception that Australians are all white and that we all hail from Liverpool, Limerick or London. In an apparent inability to see the population of this country in all its full glory of languages, religions, colours, classes, they nod occasionally to ethnic communities with multilingual ads in times of crisis.’²⁹

Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a scholar and Koenpul woman of Quandamooka country, has written searingly about the privilege of White middle-class women and the institutional nature of Whiteness.³⁰ She said recently that ‘Australia still refuses to own the fact that race is absolutely fundamental to the way in which this society operates.’³¹ Tiwi, Larrakiah, Chinese and Muslim writer Eugenia Flynn is blunt: ‘Racism towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is the foundational racism on which this entire country is built.’³² How can settler-colonial societies like Australia overturn the racial status quo of Whiteness when we use historical amnesia as a security blanket? It is an obstruction that stops us seeing the diversity of our fellow citizens, of who we are.

Historians Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt, who live in Tasmania, run a website called ‘The Real Face of White Australia’,³³ a literal snapshot of a cohort of Australians in the early twentieth century. The site’s homepage displays hundreds of rolling photos from the archives. So easy is it to lose time as you scroll through this gallery of faces, and so much do they shift one’s view of history, that I found myself thinking of the ‘stimulus’, those images or text extracts that English teachers use as writing prompts for their students. Those who hold on to views of Australia as a place of White homogeneity, and migration from Asia as a recent thing, should check out this stimulus. The photographs of these Australians often invisible from history, taken a century ago and lined up in sepia on their screens, might make them see the face of the nation afresh. Notwithstanding its original inhabitants, Australia was never as White as some may think, even given the restraints of the White Australia policy, enacted in 1901 and manifested in various laws and statutes.

In these black-and-white portraits of (nearly all) men and boys, most wearing waistcoats and suit jackets over white shirts and neckties, the subjects stare straight at the camera, or turn to be photographed in profile. They wear cloth caps, or hats of straw or felt. The hatless have neatly parted or close-cut hair. There are occasional examples of Manchurian coiffure – shaved head at the front with a queue plaited down the back. Some men sport moustaches, others are bearded and turbaned. Better quality than modern digital passport photos, these official photos evoke defiance, pride and hope. Sometimes resignation, or defeat, on men who appear frightened or ill. Most of the faces are Chinese.

Clicking on a photograph brings up letters, forms and even handprints, documents of a life’s journey and evidence of an oppressive bureaucracy. The primary document attached to each photo usually has a single reason for being: to generate a certificate of exemption from having to take the dictation test. This infamous test, which remained in place until 1958, was a cruel administrative tool administered on the basis of skin colour. It forced non-Europeans, ‘coloureds’ and ‘Asiatics’ as they were mainly named, all lumped together, to take a fifty-word written test that could be given in any European language to ensure that they would fail and would thus be excluded. Non-Whites who planned to depart and come back to Australia, where they lived, from overseas, where they were visiting, needed to obtain an exemption from taking this test on their return. Exemption was crucial, because passing the dictation test was impossible. (Politically undesirable or ‘immoral’ Europeans were occasionally given the test too in a language that would guarantee failure.)

Imagine being an educated Punjabi with good English and being forced to take the test in French. You would be asked to transcribe a sentence like this actual 1908 test example: Very many considerations lead to the conclusion that life began on sea, first as single cells, then as groups of cells held together by a secretion of mucilage, then as filament and tissues. The sentences were changed every fortnight to prevent cheating. Failure meant deportation, even if you were returning to Australia and had family awaiting your return. Not a single person passed the test after 1909.³⁴

The test was transplanted to Australia from a statute designed to stop non-indentured Indians from entering the British colony of Natal in Southern Africa. Natal was the demographic reverse of settler-colonial Australia, with an extant population that was overwhelmingly Black, but the same imperial machinations were at work in both places. Australian historian Henry Reynolds has pointed out that the Boer War of 1899–1902, where Australians (and Canadians) fought and died with the British against the Boers, was concurrent with frontier conflict – ‘the killing times’ of bloodshed and massacre of Australian Indigenous peoples. The same White men could have been involved with both, part of one vast imperial frontier.³⁵

The purpose of the dictation test was to ‘install a racial bar without mentioning race’.³⁶ This deceptively simple but apt phrase also happens to describe the insidious ethos that underpins much of Australia’s history and sometimes its present, where, like a child caught with a hand in the biscuit jar, we act in ways that can only be described as racist while vehemently denying that we could possibly be racist.

I chose to spend some time with William Perera, one of the faces from the website, born in 1877, whose details were documented in 1908 and, thrillingly for the researcher, again in 1915. So many of his personal details were available to me simply because he was from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The extraordinary state apparatus responsible for immigration kept fastidious paperwork – signed, stamped and in triplicate – about people’s appearance if their skin was not white. William’s second photo was taken by the Commonwealth Studio in Haymarket in Sydney, and while he’s lost his moustache in this 1915 photograph, Mr Perera seems to have added pomade to his glossy, wavy hair. He looks more tired and grey than he did only eight years earlier. In 1907, thirty years old, Sinhalese and five-foot-five-and-a-half inches ‘in boots’, Perera planned to sail from Sydney to his birthplace in Ceylon, Colombo.

The immigration form describes William Perera’s eyes as ‘brown’ and his hair as ‘dark’. His complexion is described as ‘dark’ too, a handwritten comment noting that his face is ‘slightly pockmarked’. The scribe stumbles over the spelling of his name, writing Perera but then overwriting the first vowel to make it an ‘a’. He got it right first time, I realised, when I found William Perera’s 1915 dictation test exemption form, under the heading ‘Commonwealth of Australia Immigration Restriction Acts 1901– 1905’: same height, same pockmarked face, and heading back once more to Colombo to visit relatives, this time sailing aboard the Orestes. Finding a letter written by Perera himself, in his own hand, asking for an extension to his exemption, confirmed the spelling of his name and made me feel like Hercule Poirot.

William Perera sent a letter from his place of residence in Falcon Street, North Sydney, where he worked as a butler and domestic servant. I learnt more about him as I read the accompanying character references. After landing in 1895 at the age of eighteen, Perera had been in Australia for twenty years. All six of his referees described him as reliable and trustworthy. One J. R. Hay, who had employed him at a house in Lavender Bay, below where the Sydney Harbour Bridge would be built a decade or so later, referred to him as ‘Willy’ and said that he was ‘smart, steady and obliging’. Another employer, writing from his office in Loftus Street in downtown Sydney, mentioned that he was a teetotaller and that he himself was paying for Mr Perera’s return passage to Ceylon. I discovered that Perera worked as a ‘cook and valet’ in a house only a stone’s throw from my own.

It would have been gratifying to find out if William Perera returned from Colombo after World War I, but the fact that I know anything at all about him is because his skin was, officially, ‘dark’. He was not afforded the same rights as White domestic servants who wanted to visit their relatives in England or Ireland and return to Australia. William Perera had to go through this onerous process at least twice, even though he was resident in this country for six years before the White Australia policy was enacted. Kate Bagnall told me that for Chinese people, the space on the form to describe a person’s complexion was usually left blank. ‘Where something is written in the complexion field it is often “sallow”, although I’ve seen things like “fresh” or “olive” or “copper” or “dark”, too.’

In the late 1960s, when I was born, the White Australia policy (the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 being one of its most well-known manifestations) was on its last legs, the dictation test long gone. Australia was on its way to becoming a great immigrant nation. Yet the social engineering and psychic weight of this explicitly racist policy, as old as the federated nation itself, was not easily erased. ‘White Australia’ was perceived as much as a racially constructed place, an island of exclusion, as it was a bureaucratic policy.³⁷ Perception is everything, from within and without. A blunt tool, with a name that revels in its euphemism-free matter-of-factness, the White Australia policy devoted itself to keeping non-Whites out. It also belied the fact that ‘others’, non-Whites, were already here.

Dispossessed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, first and foremost, whose survivors were subject to regimes of exclusion and control. But Chinese, Indians, Afghans, Malays, Syrians, South Sea Islanders, even the descendants of some freed slaves from the former American colonies, were all here. Australia’s fellow ‘White Dominions’ of the British Empire, each with sovereign indigenous populations, were New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. The Indian National Congress, not surprisingly, voted against seeking Dominion status in 1929 and in favour of complete independence. Apartheid in South Africa, and segregation and Jim Crow laws in the United States, were about controlling – and terrorising – existing populations. The White Australia policy and the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948, perhaps even more than the British Nationality Act introduced in the same year, were about keeping Black and Brown people out.

Change came, finally, with mass migration following World War II, but skin colour remained at the top of mind for policymakers. Australia selected migrants from the millions of Displaced Persons of Europe, preferencing northern Europeans with fair skin, described by the shorthand ‘beautiful Balts’. A description of Australian immigration officials at work in refugee camps paints a dismal picture, its ‘selection’ process sinister and its denial of the Australians who had been on the continent for tens of thousands of years insulting: ‘[they] moved cautiously among the camp inhabitants, picking blue-eyed, blond DPs less likely to offend native-born Australians’.³⁸

Immigration policies that actively discriminated on the basis of race were overturned in the 1970s. But is colourism, the privileging of light skin over dark, still in place in this country, and how would we know? Demographer Dr Liz Allen reinforces Tim Soutphommasane’s frustrations with the gap in data. Her systematic analysis of census questions shows the Australian Bureau of Statistics has opted for simplicity over accuracy, focusing on country of birth and language spoken at home, measures that fail to capture Australia’s true ethnic diversity. If, for example, you were born in Australia and speak English at home, the data may not show that your grandparents were from the Philippines and that you claim that ancestry. And if your partner was born in London to Kenyan parents who still live there, how would you describe the ethnicity of your children? What may seem an inconsequential bureaucratic question has broad ramifications that are far from benign. Allen writes, ‘The justification for avoiding updating the national census to include self-reported ethnic identity embodies a long-enduring fear Australia has had reckoning with its history.’³⁹

We have a multicultural songbook, but no matter how many people sing from it, most of those at the top of the hill are White. They seem to have misplaced their copies of the book and can’t be bothered looking for them. Also, they’re out of tune, though they have the loudest voices. And they refuse to learn new tunes because they love those old-time ones. In fact, they seem to sing them even more, clinging to their racist lyrics and arguing that they are an immutable part of our heritage. They echo tunes often sung in an alt-right key.

One example of performative politics around Whiteness took place in late 2018 when the Australian Senate, with its conservative majority, considered a motion brought forward by Australian White nationalist Senator Pauline Hanson. The motion stated that ‘It is okay to be white’, a slogan that emerged from fetid alt-right corners of the internet before landing in the halls of Parliament House in Canberra. Journalist Jason Wilson, who has covered the far right for years, discussed this omnishambles in The Guardian, writing that ‘“it’s ok to be white”’ is a slogan that ‘neatly encapsulates the imaginary universe of “reverse racism”, wherein critiques of white supremacy and structural racism are turned inside out, and used as evidence of anti-white racism. It captures the mindset that accuses those opposed to racism of being, themselves, racist.’⁴⁰

The motion almost passed. That it came to a vote in the federal parliament at all shows complacency and expediency at best, and malicious, racist, anti-democratic forces at worst. Afterwards, various senators denied they knew what the slogan meant and claimed they didn’t know what they were voting for. Some tried to justify the whole thing as a joke, as if the right using race to taunt the left in just another culture-wars skirmish didn’t, in fact, make it worse. It might once have seemed alarmist to warn that allowing the fringe to slide to the centre risks angry mobs roaming the halls, elected representatives cowering behind barricaded doors. Not anymore, since 6 January 2021 in Washington, DC.

We can’t argue that Australia must return to constitutional first principles, because the nation’s constitution doesn’t recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There is no accompanying bill of rights that loftily declares human rights for all. We rely on laws enacted by the parliament. So, we must double down on making the kind of reforming, multiracial nation many have tried to forge since the late twentieth century. To quote a now-famous inauguration poem, we must keep climbing that hill so that fellow citizens aren’t forced to ask, When will it be okay to be Muslim? When will it be okay to be Aboriginal?

Shakira Hussein was brought up in Nambour, a town in south-east Queensland. She describes herself as ‘the only Scottish Pakistani in the village’ – her father is Pakistani, her mother White Australian. She has written a doctoral thesis and books about the impact of Islamic extremism on Muslim women, particularly those living in multicultural societies in the West who moved from being seen as victims to being seen as suspects. Her visit to Pakistan shortly after 9/11 is one confirmation of her physical and intellectual fearlessness.

Shakira has been writing about the alt-right in Australia for many years, but not always from the safety of her desk at the University of Melbourne. Her reporting on White supremacist ‘Reclaim Australia’ rallies in downtown Melbourne makes me anxious, because I fear her multiple sclerosis could prevent her from being able to get away from those goons quickly enough. She shared a childhood memory that demonstrates the cruelty of the disease. ‘I remember telling my mother after being bullied for my “abhorrent” brown skin that, “it doesn’t matter what colour your skin is – it’s how good your brain is that counts”. I may have internalised the contempt for my skin, but I was pretty confident that my brain was above average. Imagine the blow to my ego at being shown a scan in which my brain was covered in little lesions.’ But MS hasn’t stopped her writing and advocacy.

In the lead paragraph of its 2019–2020 annual report, Australia’s primary security agency presented two sources of probable threats emanating from violent ideologies: Sunni Islamic extremism and violent domestic right-wing extremism.⁴¹ It notes that COVID-19 has energised right-wingers who seek to ‘exploit economic and social dislocation’, but also stated that the agency will from now on refer to threats more generally as ‘religious’ or ‘ideological’ rather than by any specific group or ideology.⁴² The most likely victims of White extremism in Australia are Muslims and, increasingly, Jewish people and the synagogues they worship in. Since the emergence of COVID, as in the United States, Asian Australians have become targets too.

Shakira Hussein wrote in 2020, referring to previous extremist attacks in Utøya, Norway, and Quebec City, Canada, that ‘We have braced ourselves for the moment when someone would put into action the threats we are sent on a regular basis.’⁴³ She is one of countless writers and observers, many but not all of whom are Muslim, who have every right to say after the March 2019 Christchurch attacks, ‘We tried to tell you.’

Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of Aotearoa New Zealand, declared she would not say the name of the terrorist who shot and killed fifty-one men, women and children at the Linwood Islamic Centre and the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch. Thirty-five women, most with young children, are now widows.⁴⁴ The official report of the government inquiry into the attacks, released in December 2020, names the perpetrator once and no more. The man who committed the unthinkable was a White Australian consumed with hatred for non-White immigrants. Shakira Hussein writes, ‘For me, and for many other Muslims living in Australia, the Christchurch attack has always felt like an Australian crime that happened to take place in Aotearoa.’⁴⁵

Many of us were overwhelmed by news late in 2020, thanks to COVID-19 and spurious claims about a stolen election in the United States. All the same, there was far less media coverage in Australia upon the release of the three-volume Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei/Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019 than one might have expected. In the report’s preliminary pages is a simple drawing of two hugging figures captioned, ‘This is your home and you should have been safe here’, a cartoon by artist Ruby Jones that swept across social media in the days after the attack.⁴⁶ The Australian shooter who had lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for only a few years (though he will live there in jail until he dies) was responsible for making that country deadly for Christchurch Muslims. It may be difficult for his fellow Australians to come to terms with that, but there isn’t much evidence they have tried very hard to do so.

One comment leapt out at me on the day the New Zealand commissioners released their report into the attacks. An Australian journalist reading through details of the killer’s childhood commented that he was not surprised to learn that the individual had ‘displayed racist behaviour from a young age’, making anti-Semitic and anti-Aboriginal comments at school. Of course, not every racist child grows up to be a murderous extremist. The murderer was a gamer and a bodybuilder, neither of which is a predictor of sociopathic behaviour either. Not every person who feels powerless or aggrieved stockpiles automatic weapons.

But it seems hypocritical when Muslims are interrogated and surveilled for signs of extremism and their communities blamed for not stopping it. Australia and the United Kingdom have developed official policies for dealing with radicalisation in Muslim communities, under the umbrella of ‘Countering Violent Extremism’.⁴⁷ Labor member of the Australian federal parliament Anne Aly, who is Muslim and an academic expert in counterterrorism, acknowledges from personal experience that ‘It’s hard to turn the mirror on yourself.’ But, she adds, ‘It’s not good enough for our leaders to distance themselves and say, “He’s not one of us.” Unfortunately, he is.’⁴⁸ Where is the scrutiny from the culture in which the perpetrator of this massacre was raised?

He grew up in the town of Grafton in northern New South Wales, where neighbours would later describe him as ‘a bit of a loner’, a common character assessment after a violent act.⁴⁹ Grafton’s Aboriginal population is around 10 per cent – a higher proportion of Indigenous residents than in Sydney – but the Australian-born population is 90 per cent, which is significantly higher than Sydney or Melbourne, where around one-third of people are born overseas. There are, apparently, no ‘declared Muslims’ in Grafton. The perpetrator of the attacks travelled the world for many years with inherited money and was vitriolic about immigration in France.⁵⁰ He watched alt-right YouTube videos and supported extremist groups hosted by Facebook, the same site that livestreamed the murders before taking the video down. When he was interviewed by the New Zealand commissioners, facing life imprisonment for a mass killing of Muslims at prayer, he denied being racist.

These people operate in plain sight, energised in recent years by the emergence of Trumpism on the world stage. Yet, ‘White violence’ remains something many Australians assume is fringe, lunatic, unlikely to happen in this country. Tell that to Leetona Dungay, to William Perera, to Shakira Hussein. But what has been made can be unmade, dismantled, decolonised. As everyone steps up to be the story, White people might find it’s their turn to listen, not speak.

The 7 Stages of Grieving lists these seven phases of Aboriginal history: Dreaming, Invasion, Genocide, Protection, Assimilation, Self-determination and Reconciliation. The playwrights note that we’re now in the eighth phase: Treaty or Sovereignty. Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples have done the work on this, through the Uluru Statement of the Heart. It is time for everyone else to make it happen.⁵¹