Chinese Australians fed up of being labelled foreigners

[Guest The Pom Queen]

They really do have a point, when do you stop being a foreigner?

 

Chinese Australians are sick of being labelled foreigners because of the way they look. Aussie Chinese feel they are treated as outsiders, despite being the biggest non-Anglo migrant group and with many families going back generations in Australia.

 

Victorian Chinese Community Council president Dr Stanley Chiang, who has lived here for decades and feels "like part of the furniture", said he was still questioned about his identity.

"As soon as people see your face, they say, 'Where do you come from?'," he said yesterday. "Unfortunately, in Australia people still tend to think you're not Australian - if you look Asian you can't be Australian, which is not right. "We are very proud of our Chinese heritage and cultural background, but we should not be seen as foreign just because we look Asian or Chinese."

 

[Petals]

I appreciate what they are saying as a lot of Chinese have been here since the gold rush days. However it happens to all, the where do you come from bit, no I mean where do you really come from.

 

With the new influx of asian people it has made it very hard for our long term residents.

[Guest guest17301]

I watched a really disturbing documentary last night on ABC about ethnic minorities having plastic surgery in order to look more westernised and be accepted more.

[starlight7]

I'm a bit surprised at this- most Australians with a Chinese heritage seem to be very well integrated and round here there are many areas where the Anglo Saxon or European heritage people are in the minority. Thinking Box Hill and Glen Waverley and then there are mostly Vietnamese Heritage people in Springvale,not many 'white' Australians.

[Paul1Perth]

The guy in the picture is holding an Aussie flag and is fed up of being labelled foreign, then right at the side of him is the "Top Chinese Suburbs". How are they supposed to integrate and feel Australian when the article and writer of it sees them as still Chinese.

 

It's the same for us pom's. I've recently seen a thread about Mindarie and how many Brits live up there. Along with quite a few negative comments about it. The only good thing is we look Australian until we open our mouths and our kids are usually Aussie from first generation.

[Salma]

age old story if you can blend in visually no one bats an eyelid if you say your are an aussie (mind you they wouldnt ask and just assume that anyway). If you non anglo saxon that question will be constantly asked regardless of how many generations of your family have been born in Australia.

[Paul1Perth]

age old story if you can blend in visually no one bats an eyelid if you say your are an aussie (mind you they wouldnt ask and just assume that anyway). If you non anglo saxon that question will be constantly asked regardless of how many generations of your family have been born in Australia.

 

Same thing for us poms with an accent. No-one says anything until they hear us speak and then the where are you from questions start. Usually though it's from other poms or sometimes Australians who have been on holiday there, or have relations there and are genuinely interested in where you're from.

 

I don't mind it one bit and enjoy talking about the areas I know in the UK. Good and bad.

[jove]

The article headlines says China born so are they Australian? On paper yes if they are citizens - but are they really?

 

If I become an Australian citizen I wont really be Aussie I will be a brit with an aussie passport. Kids born there and brought up there is a different story though.

[Perthbum]

Strange...some of these people are 3rd or 4th generation or more...they are australian as anyone, do some people actually have the ordasity to think they are more australian than these australians.

[Harpodom]

The article headlines says China born so are they Australian? On paper yes if they are citizens - but are they really?

 

If I become an Australian citizen I wont really be Aussie I will be a brit with an aussie passport. Kids born there and brought up there is a different story though.

 

maybe they're all illegal immigrants

[Perthbum]

Thought this Blog by an Australian sums it up.

 

Australia. It's the Lucky Country, the land of the fair go. A fair dinkum place defined by mateship, honour and a masculinity so raw you could chuck it on the barbie and feed your working family for weeks.

We're a country populated by battlers and diggers; honest, hard working folk who just want the opportunity to buy a four-bedroom house to cater to our future children, bask in the sanctity of our heterosexual marriages and enjoy the superior benefits of the kind of peaceful, economically sound democracy that comes with the arbitrary inherited privilege of birth.

Sure, we have to contend with the occasional latte swilling, bleeding heart leftie who's out to destroy our way of life - but no-one said life in the Lucky Country would be all beach cricket and handsome fashion statements constructed out of flags.

From their nefarious outland known as 'Inner City', these cultural terrorists work in cluster cells to erode the very values our great nation was built on. Values like our right to enjoy the occasional joke about the blacks and the bum bandits, or threaten women on national radio, or wear witty and politically insightful t-shirts declaring 'AUSTRALIA – WE GREW HERE, YOU FLEW HERE'.

But we prevail, as all great civilisations staring down the barrel of oppression must. After all, we're Australian. We stormed the shores of Gallipoli. We held the Brisbane Line. We drove trucks into our nation's capital to protest the highway robbery of the 'carbon' 'tax' and to listen to Alan Jones shout a lot. It was just like the intervention, but even more important because of how a carbon tax would drastically affect the lives of real Australians.

You know. Real Australians. Just like you and me.

And therein ends the jest. Because the problem with Real Australia is that everything about it is constructed on a precarious sausage stack of mythology, and we are in the fierce grips of denial about it.

We're in denial about the reality of Australia and exactly how we wrestled the Lucky Country away from its traditional owners and declared dominion over it. We're in denial about how fiercely (and hypocritically) we defend our own rights to exist as a nation of people free from the 'thieving' hands of what we see as 'illegal' entry and occupation. We're in denial of the overwhelming privilege that comes from simply being born white and heterosexual in a peaceful democracy like Australia. And we're in a state of utter and absolute denial about the fact that most of us actually don't feel lucky at all, but entitled - almost as if we've done something to deserve this great fortune and thus have the right to scrutinize outsiders' actions to see if they've earned that slice of the pie they seem perilously close to snatching from us.

The Australia that exists in our mythology is exactly that - a myth. We throw around words like 'mateship', 'fair go' and 'battlers' as if Australia were one giant mining town straight out of the 50s, with a cohort of good ole' boys led by Chips Rafferty and the occasional speaking role for a woman chucked in to advance the romance subplot.

But in reality, the last decade has seen us become a nation of suspicious misers, greedily hoarding privileges we presume to be ours alone and gifted by the divine honour of Being Australian. We who chance upon privilege so easily and so arbitrarily often seem to be the most vehement and duplicitous in protecting it from others.

Asylum seekers are rewritten as 'illegal boat people', jumping the queue instead of waiting patiently as we presumably would do in the same circumstances. Gay people are dystopian rebels, forcing their lifestyle down our throats and undermining the sanctity of marriage as dictated by a God most of us don't believe in. Feminists concerned about the objectification of women should go to the Middle East and thank their stars they only have to endure a bit of light-hearted, red-blooded larrikinism. Climate change is the Greens' way of trying to rob us all blind.

And so forth.

Despite the enormous amount of diversity in Australia - cultural, sexual, racial, political - we still like to perpetuate a very limited construction of our nation's identity. The 'us' of our consciousness is a result of 15 years of conservative governance encouraging an uncivilised human instinct to hoard power.

We have no social vision as a nation, preferring instead to ask of any initiative, "What's in it for me?" We have somehow lost the ability to rationally see our situation as more fortunate than others, reasoning that our deservedness partly comes from the fact WE were careful enough to save our money in order to put down a mortgage on a house while those bloody queue jumpers think they can just get one given to them for free!

We don't stop to think that while we were busy negotiating mortgage repayments with a (mostly) fair and reasonable bank, these objects of our scorn were worrying that their houses might be razed in the middle of the night, the men killed, the women raped and the children rendered orphans.

We don't consider what it must be like to be told that someone else's partnership undermines our own, therefore it's only fair they have less of the pie.

While hand wringing about the inevitable Muslim plot to overrun Australia and destroy our way of life, we don't think about how it actually must feel to have someone steal your land, destroy your culture, disempower your people and then tell them all to get over it because it happened ages ago and they have nothing to apologise for.

We are not, as a rule, particularly benevolent or generous to people different from us. But we are so wedded to our denial of all of this that the myth continues. The Lucky Country. The land of the fair go. A fair dinkum place defined by mateship and honour, Vegemite and white people on the TV.

Australia's the lucky country, yes - lucky for all those who happened to be born here as white, middle class heterosexuals. But if we addressed the politics of our own denial, Australia could be better than a lucky country - it could be a great and bold country.

We are very good at forcefully demanding everyone else to be better… but we never seem to demand it of ourselves. Our answer to any kind of criticism of the culture that occupies the status quo is the obstinate, 'IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, LEAVE'.

And if you get tired of yelling it, fret not. That one comes on a t-shirt too.

Watch Clementine Ford discuss this article on The Drum tonight at 6.0

[jove]

maybe they're all illegal immigrants

 

the yellow menace. LOL

 

When I tell my partner about what the aussies called the chinese she does laugh.

 

Incidentally she is a Chinese Beijinger!

 

LOL

[Guest]

They are chinese biologically and they still speak chinese (most of them) and I dont find this rude a all, its natural to ask - too much political correctness if you ask me

 

Chinese certainly are not aborigional who are the only true ozzies - everyone else is an import whether its a generation or two ago it doesnt matter - they're probably decendants of a POM and why there so quick to jump on a pom to ridicule them- ozzies are abandoned in a land they dont belong to so tend to have no culture. I read somewhere part of this is a reason for all the tatoo's.

[wakeboard1980]

They really do have a point, when do you stop being a foreigner?

 

Chinese Australians are sick of being labelled foreigners because of the way they look. Aussie Chinese feel they are treated as outsiders, despite being the biggest non-Anglo migrant group and with many families going back generations in Australia.

 

Victorian Chinese Community Council president Dr Stanley Chiang, who has lived here for decades and feels "like part of the furniture", said he was still questioned about his identity.

"As soon as people see your face, they say, 'Where do you come from?'," he said yesterday. "Unfortunately, in Australia people still tend to think you're not Australian - if you look Asian you can't be Australian, which is not right. "We are very proud of our Chinese heritage and cultural background, but we should not be seen as foreign just because we look Asian or Chinese."

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]16001[/ATTACH]

 

I know people of chinese origin who are 2nd and 3rd generation Chinese/Aussies, and I could imagine them feeling as if they get a hard time.

 

I think though that the article really hasn't helped their cause as I think they should have quoted someone that was maybe a 2nd or 3rd generation chinese/Aussie. It does say that he has been in Aus for decades, not since birth nor it doesn't mention what generation Aussie he is. If he feels part of the furniture then great for him, he has obviously embraced his new country, but (and im presuming here) if he has only been in Aus for decades and still potentially has a slight accent along with his distinguishing looks then of course someone is going to ask where he is from. Human nature really when someone looks different/sounds different, I get asked it all the time.

 

On a lighter note though, they may have to wait a while to be classed as Aussies, as us who call ourselves Aussies are constantly reminded that we all come from convicts and the only Aussies are the Aboriginies.

 

The seekers song that was posted on another thread the other day sums it up right it think. 'We are one, but we are many, and from all the lands on earth we come, we share a dream and sing with one voice, I am, you are, we are Australian.

 

If you have the passport and feel Australian then who is to say you are not.

[fish.01]

They are chinese biologically and they still speak chinese (most of them) and I dont find this rude a all, its natural to ask - too much political correctness if you ask me

 

Chinese certainly are not aborigional who are the only true ozzies - everyone else is an import whether its a generation or two ago it doesnt matter - they're probably decendants of a POM and why there so quick to jump on a pom to ridicule them- ozzies are abandoned in a land they dont belong to so tend to have no culture. I read somewhere part of this is a reason for all the tatoo's.

 

It's not that Aussies have no culture marty...in comparison to your obvious high standards it must just seem that way to someone as cultured as you :jimlad::biggrin:

[Sir Les Patterson]

They are chinese biologically and they still speak chinese (most of them) and I dont find this rude a all, its natural to ask - too much political correctness if you ask me

 

Chinese certainly are not aborigional (sic) who are the only true ozzies (sic)- everyone else is an import whether its a generation or two ago it doesnt matter - they're probably decendants of a POM and why there so quick to jump on a pom to ridicule them- ozzies are abandoned in a land they dont belong to so tend to have no culture. I read somewhere part of this is a reason for all the tatoo's.

 

The aboriginals are migrants too.....they've just been here a bit longer than everybody else.

[Guest]

Thought this Blog by an Australian sums it up.

 

Australia. It's the Lucky Country, the land of the fair go. A fair dinkum place defined by mateship, honour and a masculinity so raw you could chuck it on the barbie and feed your working family for weeks.

We're a country populated by battlers and diggers; honest, hard working folk who just want the opportunity to buy a four-bedroom house to cater to our future children, bask in the sanctity of our heterosexual marriages and enjoy the superior benefits of the kind of peaceful, economically sound democracy that comes with the arbitrary inherited privilege of birth.

Sure, we have to contend with the occasional latte swilling, bleeding heart leftie who's out to destroy our way of life - but no-one said life in the Lucky Country would be all beach cricket and handsome fashion statements constructed out of flags.

From their nefarious outland known as 'Inner City', these cultural terrorists work in cluster cells to erode the very values our great nation was built on. Values like our right to enjoy the occasional joke about the blacks and the bum bandits, or threaten women on national radio, or wear witty and politically insightful t-shirts declaring 'AUSTRALIA – WE GREW HERE, YOU FLEW HERE'.

But we prevail, as all great civilisations staring down the barrel of oppression must. After all, we're Australian. We stormed the shores of Gallipoli. We held the Brisbane Line. We drove trucks into our nation's capital to protest the highway robbery of the 'carbon' 'tax' and to listen to Alan Jones shout a lot. It was just like the intervention, but even more important because of how a carbon tax would drastically affect the lives of real Australians.

You know. Real Australians. Just like you and me.

And therein ends the jest. Because the problem with Real Australia is that everything about it is constructed on a precarious sausage stack of mythology, and we are in the fierce grips of denial about it.

We're in denial about the reality of Australia and exactly how we wrestled the Lucky Country away from its traditional owners and declared dominion over it. We're in denial about how fiercely (and hypocritically) we defend our own rights to exist as a nation of people free from the 'thieving' hands of what we see as 'illegal' entry and occupation. We're in denial of the overwhelming privilege that comes from simply being born white and heterosexual in a peaceful democracy like Australia. And we're in a state of utter and absolute denial about the fact that most of us actually don't feel lucky at all, but entitled - almost as if we've done something to deserve this great fortune and thus have the right to scrutinize outsiders' actions to see if they've earned that slice of the pie they seem perilously close to snatching from us.

The Australia that exists in our mythology is exactly that - a myth. We throw around words like 'mateship', 'fair go' and 'battlers' as if Australia were one giant mining town straight out of the 50s, with a cohort of good ole' boys led by Chips Rafferty and the occasional speaking role for a woman chucked in to advance the romance subplot.

But in reality, the last decade has seen us become a nation of suspicious misers, greedily hoarding privileges we presume to be ours alone and gifted by the divine honour of Being Australian. We who chance upon privilege so easily and so arbitrarily often seem to be the most vehement and duplicitous in protecting it from others.

Asylum seekers are rewritten as 'illegal boat people', jumping the queue instead of waiting patiently as we presumably would do in the same circumstances. Gay people are dystopian rebels, forcing their lifestyle down our throats and undermining the sanctity of marriage as dictated by a God most of us don't believe in. Feminists concerned about the objectification of women should go to the Middle East and thank their stars they only have to endure a bit of light-hearted, red-blooded larrikinism. Climate change is the Greens' way of trying to rob us all blind.

And so forth.

Despite the enormous amount of diversity in Australia - cultural, sexual, racial, political - we still like to perpetuate a very limited construction of our nation's identity. The 'us' of our consciousness is a result of 15 years of conservative governance encouraging an uncivilised human instinct to hoard power.

We have no social vision as a nation, preferring instead to ask of any initiative, "What's in it for me?" We have somehow lost the ability to rationally see our situation as more fortunate than others, reasoning that our deservedness partly comes from the fact WE were careful enough to save our money in order to put down a mortgage on a house while those bloody queue jumpers think they can just get one given to them for free!

We don't stop to think that while we were busy negotiating mortgage repayments with a (mostly) fair and reasonable bank, these objects of our scorn were worrying that their houses might be razed in the middle of the night, the men killed, the women raped and the children rendered orphans.

We don't consider what it must be like to be told that someone else's partnership undermines our own, therefore it's only fair they have less of the pie.

While hand wringing about the inevitable Muslim plot to overrun Australia and destroy our way of life, we don't think about how it actually must feel to have someone steal your land, destroy your culture, disempower your people and then tell them all to get over it because it happened ages ago and they have nothing to apologise for.

We are not, as a rule, particularly benevolent or generous to people different from us. But we are so wedded to our denial of all of this that the myth continues. The Lucky Country. The land of the fair go. A fair dinkum place defined by mateship and honour, Vegemite and white people on the TV.

Australia's the lucky country, yes - lucky for all those who happened to be born here as white, middle class heterosexuals. But if we addressed the politics of our own denial, Australia could be better than a lucky country - it could be a great and bold country.

We are very good at forcefully demanding everyone else to be better… but we never seem to demand it of ourselves. Our answer to any kind of criticism of the culture that occupies the status quo is the obstinate, 'IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, LEAVE'.

And if you get tired of yelling it, fret not. That one comes on a t-shirt too.

Watch Clementine Ford discuss this article on The Drum tonight at 6.0

 

 

Powerful stuff. It's good to know that there are some Australians out there who don't buy into the post-Howard orthodoxy of hate-filled prejudice dressed up as popular patriotism. Of fear of change, of outsiders, of being Un-Australian. It's an article which lines up the myths, the conceits and the double-standards of modern Australia and pulls them down from their plinths. John Pilger or the late Donald Horne couldn't have put it better. Whether you ultimately agree with the writer's sentiments or not, everyone should read this.

[pinkk8]

I appreciate what they are saying as a lot of Chinese have been here since the gold rush days. However it happens to all, the where do you come from bit, no I mean where do you really come from.

 

With the new influx of asian people it has made it very hard for our long term residents.

 

They are not long term residents, they are Australians.

[fish.01]

[/b]Powerful stuff. It's good to know that there are some Australians out there who don't buy into the post-Howard orthodoxy of hate-filled prejudice dressed up as popular patriotism. Of fear of change, of outsiders, of being Un-Australian. It's an article which lines up the myths, the conceits and the double-standards of modern Australia and pulls them down from their plinths. John Pilger or the late Donald Horne couldn't have put it better. Whether you ultimately agree with the writer's sentiments or not, everyone should read this.

 

Even as a leftie I found the piece a bit of a stereotypical depiction of the "opposition"...as if written by a new leftie who just freshly discovered the discussion and then stopped thinking so they could regale all with their simplistic diatribe...

[Guest guest17301]

A lot of that piece could have been written about English people struggling with the influx of other cultures and creeds into the UK.

[Guest]

Even as a leftie I found the piece a bit of a stereotypical depiction of the "opposition"...as if written by a new leftie who just freshly discovered the discussion and then stopped thinking so they could regale all with their simplistic diatribe...

 

I get that Fish, I really do. As an Englishman, and a 'leftie' myself, I grew up deeply uncomfortable with the way in which 'The Right,' particularly the Thatcher Governments and the BNP wrapped themselves in the Union Jack and patriotism became solely their province. For me, too many atrocities were carried out beneath that flag for me to ever embrace it fully - the arrogance of empire and the delusion that followed it's break-up, just for starters. So as someone who would never subscribe to the mantra 'my country, right or wrong' I was really freaked out by what I perceived as the one-eyed nationalism of Australia when I first came here.

 

Maybe it's the newspapers I've read in my time here, or my exposure to media generally, but I often feel like I'm surrounded by non-questioning flag-wavers. That's possibly an unfair view that I've drawn, so to read a polemic like this one cheers me. Not because it savages Australia, but because it punctures some of the more bombastic myths about Australia and hopefully paves the way for a more considered discussion about both Australia's virtues and it's faults.

[fish.01]

I get that Fish, I really do. As an Englishman, and a 'leftie' myself, I grew up deeply uncomfortable with the way in which 'The Right,' particularly the Thatcher Governments and the BNP wrapped themselves in the Union Jack and patriotism became solely their province. For me, too many atrocities were carried out beneath that flag for me to ever embrace it fully - the arrogance of empire and the delusion that followed it's break-up, just for starters. So as someone who would never subscribe to the mantra 'my country, right or wrong' I was really freaked out by what I perceived as the one-eyed nationalism of Australia when I first came here.

 

Maybe it's the newspapers I've read in my time here, or my exposure to media generally, but I often feel like I'm surrounded by non-questioning flag-wavers. That's possibly an unfair view that I've drawn, so to read a polemic like this one cheers me. Not because it savages Australia, but because it punctures some of the more bombastic myths about Australia and hopefully paves the way for a more considered discussion about both Australia's virtues and it's faults.

 

I think possibly when you are new to a place the type of people you don't like at home stand out even more abroad because you can't read them as well as the people you grew up with. They become all pervasive, more representative, more depressing in your head perhaps...and your limited knowledge of both sides can skew your perception.

 

I think a lot of immigrants broaden the demographic of the people they meet when they travel without always realising it. For example when I first moved to the UK I met far more people obsessed with race, immigration etc than I had ever met in Australia. I was fortunate that my friends/family etc in Australia were mostly well travelled and broad minded so it was an eye opener for me to be surrounded by so many narrow minded people in some places I ventured (don't want to imply that every discussion about race is narrow mindedness). Of course I eventually realised that the UK also had many people who were not like this, but I must say I see on here many Brits going through the same thing I did but in reverse running into narrow minded Australians that I know are out there somewhere.

 

Some assume this "is" Australia where other recognise that, just like back home, demographics play a large part in your experiences wherever you go. If you were on the Australian forums I am on you would see the same complexity of opinion that you see anywhere and the article above would be seen as a broad brush opening gambit that you could write about left/right arguments the world over.

 

The media you're exposed to you say? ..... if you haven't already maybe you should continue your Australian journey by turning off the tabloid fake "national" nine/seven/ten news....and watch the real national news and current affairs on abc and sbs instead...if only to make yourself feel better :biggrin:

 

Australia wouldn't have been as successful long term as it has been if it really was as nationalist as it appears to you. We all know allowing politicians that are too nationalist or too socialist a free reign leads to disaster eventually. Australia has a strong tradition on both sides of politics and it is the product squeezed out in the middle that has allowed Australia (and other western democracies) to prosper. I can understand that if all you have seen are the Howard years why you would be concerned

[Guest]

I think possibly when you are new to a place the type of people you don't like at home stand out even more abroad because you can't read them as well as the people you grew up with. They become all pervasive, more representative, more depressing in your head perhaps...and your limited knowledge of both sides can skew your perception.

 

I think a lot of immigrants broaden the demographic of the people they meet when they travel without always realising it. For example when I first moved to the UK I met far more people obsessed with race, immigration etc than I had ever met in Australia. I was fortunate that my friends/family etc in Australia were mostly well travelled and broad minded so it was an eye opener for me to be surrounded by so many narrow minded people in some places I ventured (don't want to imply that every discussion about race is narrow mindedness). Of course I eventually realised that the UK also had many people who were not like this, but I must say I see on here many Brits going through the same thing I did but in reverse running into narrow minded Australians that I know are out there somewhere.

 

Some assume this "is" Australia where other recognise that, just like back home, demographics play a large part in your experiences wherever you go. If you were on the Australian forums I am on you would see the same complexity of opinion that you see anywhere and the article above would be seen as a broad brush opening gambit that you could write about left/right arguments the world over.

 

The media you're exposed to you say? ..... if you haven't already maybe you should continue your Australian journey by turning off the tabloid fake "national" nine/seven/ten news....and watch the real national news and current affairs on abc and sbs instead...if only to make yourself feel better :biggrin:

 

Australia wouldn't have been as successful long term as it has been if it really was as nationalist as it appears to you. We all know allowing politicians that are too nationalist or too socialist a free reign leads to disaster eventually. Australia has a strong tradition on both sides of politics and it is the product squeezed out in the middle that has allowed Australia (and other western democracies) to prosper. I can understand that if all you have seen are the Howard years why you would be concerned

 

Interesting stuff. You're absolutely right about avoiding some of the more pernicious elements of the Murdoch and Fairfax media - I've learned the hard way there to my cost. Sadly, I fear that as a reluctant resident of Australia, the damage was really done in the early years of my time here when I felt I couldn't avoid them and they had a lasting impact upon how I viewed the country. I wasn't in Australia during the Howard years, but by the time I did come to Australia the Neo-Con party was in full swing and he'd left his legacy as much as Thatcher or Bush (jnr) ever did in their respective countries. I'm really interested in the Australian forums that you were referring to, as a means of countering the lazy populism of the mainstream press here, so please shoot me a pm with some links so we don't take this thread any further off subject!

 

Thanks in advance

 

E.W.

[Harpodom]

Good posts fish and EW, I echo what both of you say, in that I too have encountered/struggled with narrow minded nationalism here. To be fair though, the majority of that is on the commercial TV channels, and after sunday I can go back to the safety of ABC/SBS.

 

I have also met with some fairly eye wateringly narrow minded Australians, not least my FIL. But hes old school. The most narrow minded Australians I've come across have been on PIO TBH, likewise for the Brits.

 

On the other side of the coin, my wife (daughter of said narrow minded old bloke) is possibly the most PC, least jingoistic person I know, and she's Aussie, bless her. I've met loads of Aussies IRL who are very broad minded. I think a lot of that comes down to the extent of their education and travel, whether they've lived elsewhere etc. In other words, much the same as in Uk.

[Paul1Perth]

There is an Australian comedian Ahn Doh. I think he is Vietnamese Australian who seems more Aussie than I'll ever be. Really funny guy too. Told a story about his Dad getting some relations out of a prisoner of war camp or something with false papers. The upshot of the story was that even Asians think all Asians look alike.

 

That's what it takes for acceptance sometimes, an ability to laugh at yourself. Irish comedians have managed to do it for years.