Racial Discrimination in Australia Theme Analysis

This is my country, that much I am sure. I was born here, the child of Black British parents, in 1979, in a maternity ward of Syndey’s Ryde Hospital, on the stolen land of the Dharug people. My early ancestors were part of the Atlantic slave trade. They were dragged screaming from her homes in West Africa and chained by their necks and ankles, deep in the mouldy hulls of slave ships, destined to become free labour for the New World. If slaves were lucky, they died in transit to the Caribbean—bodies thrown overboard, washed clean of the blood, sweat and faeces in which they’d spend most of the harrowing journey. If they survived, they found themselves in a nightmare: put to work on the harshest plantations on earth, overseen by some of the cruellest masters in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. I am the descendant of those unbroken.

Despite these racial tensions, migrants of colour and their British-born children had truly made London their home. In Tottenham, a few island grocery shops had sprung up: aisles stacked with jerk seasoning, tinned ackee, smoked salt fish and bruised plantains. The occasional black hair salon could be seen, with racks of multi-coloured hair-weave pieces, giant tubs of sticky dreadlock wax and netted sleeping caps spilling onto the footpaths. After twenty or so years, a strong black community was being forged.

Cleopatra reached instinctively for one of the few coloured packets in the cheese section of the refrigerator. Bordeaux caught his young wife’s hand mid-air, recoiling in shock. In giant blue lettering, the word coon leered at them.

Again, those beasts of doubt, waking and turning, deep in my mother’s gut. What have we done? What have we done?!

Carlita Allen leaned towards me. ‘You,’ she whispered loudly, ‘are brown.’

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t realized this very obvious difference between our family and almost all of the other people we knew. My skin colour was simply a concrete matter of fact, much like the sky was blue. Carlita was right: I was brown. But until that very moment, holding my mother’s hand under the mulberry tree’s enormous fan-like leaves, it never occurred to me that being brown, rather than the pale pinkish of most of my friends and neighbors, was in any way relevant to anything.

My hand grew sweaty in Carlita’s as we walked side by side up the path towards the preschool buildings. I felt like I would burst with the unfairness of it—as if the air around me was pushing hard into my skin, bearing down. When we reached the classroom door, I dropped Carlita’s hand and looked back at her mother. Mrs Allen was still standing halfway up the front path, staring in our direction.

Inside the empty girl’s toilet block, I re-read my Student of the Week album then tore a jagged line between Jennifer’s words and the other comments. I read Jennifer’s words out loud to myself once, then twice, then four more times. I had never had anything written about me before, except for my kindergarten school reports and things the doctor wrote down in her folder when I was sick. The things Jennifer wrote were solid things now. She had grabbed them from the air when I spoke to the class, and listened to them. She had made them real.

There was something different, something protruding and sticky-outty and not-quite-right about my behind. I was sure that, in time, everybody would look at my body and realise that I was some kind of circus freak: the only little girl on earth whose bottom did not align neatly with her thighs when standing in first position. When news of my enormous bottom went public, I would probably need some kind of painful, humiliating bottom-trimming operation.

‘How could Captain Cook discover Australia if there were already people here?’ I asked Mrs Hird dubiously.

‘He discovered it, because nobody knew it existed,’ Mrs Hird explained patiently. ‘Nobody had been to Australia before he arrived here as an explorer.’ She returned to writing on the blackboard, as if what she said had made perfect sense.

‘But, Mrs Hird, if the Aborigines were already here—’

‘They’re…they’re different. Only they knew they were here.’

I stared at my teacher, perplexed, as she continued writing the Explorers’ Timeline.

Slavery felt like a shameful thing to be descended from. As if it somehow made me less of a person. These people, chained, beaten, stolen, made to work for no money. These people, who had their babies sold away from them. These people, worked to death in the fields like I saw in American movies. I was them. I was these people, and they were me. I felt like I’d discovered an awful secret, something I should never speak of. I wondered if all of the people who called me and my family names and treated us badly did it because they knew. Because they knew we weren’t actual people, knew what we had once been.

As I read on, I became more and more uncomfortable. The Aboriginal characters in the book I’d been given were cheerful and simple-minded. Sarah, the matriarch of the Cleveland family, treated her son’s Indigenous wife with contempt, declaring the marriage was not real and referring to her grandchildren as blackmoor half-breeds. The tight-chested feeling started to creep in. The walls of my bedroom felt like they were slowly caving in on me. I felt the anger, throbbing again.

‘I’m not a runner, sir. I mean, I don’t like running that much.’

Spencer looked at me, perplexed.

‘Your sister,’ he said, ‘she’s going to be a champion, Clarkey. Runs like the wind. It’s in the blood. You folks are built for it!’

‘I like your hand. The way the brown on the back of your hand meets the white of your palm, on the edge there. It looks…cute. Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw.’

It was there, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Walking home with my boyfriend, when I least expected it. The dry tongue. The nakedness. The can’t-think freeze.

[…]

I was Patch again. Seven years old, standing in the line for tunnel ball. You look like my dog. He’s got white and brown patches all over him too. Fetch, Patch! Go fetch, doggy!