Coming from a small country town in New South Wales, the different groups of people you are exposed to can be fairly limited. The simple fact is that it is very rare to encounter anyone other than a Caucasian person, and this is something you can get used to easily, especially if travel to Sydney is infrequent. When I went on a trip to the outback of Australia organised by the high school I attended a story comes to mind of the realisation of how little of other cultures I had been exposed to. After travelling for a week and having travelled some length of the Oodnadatta track (a 620km stretch of unsealed road which is pretty much straight shooting the entire way) we arrived at the town of Oodnadatta. It has a one store, the Pink Road House, and population of 277, 103 of which are Indigenous Australians.
Coming from a small (but not THIS small) country town, this was something completely new to us. We setup tents on a patch of grass opposite a basketball court, got out some balls and started to play on it. We had been playing a few minutes when we started to notice a small group of Indigenous kids a bit younger than us gathering to watch. We kept on playing a little self-consciously, not really what to do, how to act. A couple of minutes later, one of the crowd watching gathered the courage to come and talk to us and shyly asked us if she could play. Of course, we said yes and I think everyone breathed a sigh of relief that someone had broken the ice. A few minutes after that, another came up and joined in, then another, and another. After finding some common ground there was no awkwardness anymore. It was clear that our lives were very different. A group of 60 Caucasian high school kids from New South Wales setting up camp opposite their basketball courts was undoubtedly just as strange to them as it was to us and I am very grateful to the first girl who approached us for creating one of the most simple, yet memorable moments of the trip. Though I do see the encounter for what it was, a simple and fun moment shared among us all, if this indicates one thing about the cause of anti-racism it is that this is surely how easy it could be.
P.F.
racism is not black and white 