Originally posted by beta at 27/7/07 00:59
In my 13 bloody years in Australia I've learnt one lesson in life. That is, as minorities, we'll always be stereotyped and ridiculed in white Australian society for however long we stayed there.
I can't dispute your experience (it is, after all, your own).
But I can point out that in my team in Sydney (I'm in IT), less than half the team is born in Australia, and of the majority overseas-born, most are Indian or Chinese. Whereas, for my team in China, they are all Chinese. Similarly, walking around in downtown Sydney, only around half the people seem "anglo". Walking around a Chinese city, you might see a few foreigners (more so in Shanghai), but away from the tourist areas, I often see no other Western faces. In my daughter's school, most of her class is Indian - and they all seem to get along just fine. She doesn't seem to even notice whether her friends happen to be Indian (or Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi) - it just isn't relevant.
Clearly Australia isn't perfect, but it's genuinely multicultural, and, given the sheer number of 1st and 2nd generation migrants compared with "white Australia", remarkably accepting, I think.