In their racist hate, xenophobes reveal their worst selves

I’ve never encountered a more toxic racism than the bile he spewed casually and incessantly. It was a pathological hatred that gestated inside him since childhood in Geraldton, a small coastal city north of Perth where Indigenous Australians – Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders – account for about 10 per cent of the population.

They occupied Australia for up to 60,000 years before the white man came and launched a war of extermination. They arrived there as the direct descendants of the planet’s original migrants, who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago, and they now wander its vast expanse largely invisible to white Australia and in a state of cultural despair – alcohol, drug and crime-ravaged, in a fugue, crudely severed from what they were: Proud peoples who, as the world’s oldest continuous cultures, had a rich and diverse existence marked by religion, politics, art, music, dance, lore. 

 

Woes of the indigenous

They die on average 10 years younger than the other Australians. Alcohol is the leading cause of disease and injury for young males, and No 2 for women after domestic violence. Thirty per cent of the prison population is Indigenous, yet they make up 2 per cent of the general population. Fifty per cent of juvenile offenders are Indigenous. They’re more likely to be imprisoned than finish high school and, consequently, Indigenous literacy and numeracy rates are the lowest in Australia. Last century their children were taken from families en masse and placed with whites to be raised – the Stolen Generation. And the list of horrors goes on, a seemingly irreversible slide that has left them a marginalised wretchedness in a land of plenty. They’re Australia’s shame, and its treatment of them is a source of national soul-searching and denial. 

Carl cared not a whit about that. He would have preferred an Australia where the pogrom had resulted in extinction. I suspect he would have stomped the last one to death if bequeathed the gross fantasy, a twisted, ugly face that would have mirrored the expressions last seen by countless murdered first Australians.

It was in Geraldton at high school that some of his personal traits led his best friend to question him. He confirmed that Carl was part Aboriginal. The friend revealed that to me, under strict instruction I tell no one. Carl despised what he was so much he turned on his people. He thought he could bleach his blackness through vile rants. But with every lash of his poisoned tongue he flogged himself, the self-flagellating hate child of cultural rape. 

Rural Western Australia, like the rest of rural Australia, is not a place where the wind carries a whiff of racism – more a pungent odour. I grew up in a small coastal city north of Brisbane. Born in 1969, I’m the product of that racism. I’m acutely aware that a malignant thought is in unholy consanguinity with a malignant utterance, the fight against it never ending, like an addict’s recovery. 

 

Self-serving demagogues

Also never ending is the fight against those who stand at lecterns of influence seeking to mobilise the masses who view life through a narrow prism and are easily aroused by self-serving, thorny tongues. Donald Trump’s tongue, for instance. He appeals to the demographic that jolted John McCain with its rabid reproach of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s the demographic Republican presidential candidates feel they need to propitiate or face an electoral abyss; the more debased the sales pitch, the more support it garners, it seems.

These people turned against the desperate chasing a country’s promise, many of whom are flotsam in the American dream like Indigenous Australians in the Australian dream, and deserving of understanding and help, not hate. Their oppressors represent the warped mentality that shaped the Carls of this world. 

Trump and his ilk are the foot on the throat of the oppressed, the faces beneath the hoods. They’re the purveyors of past sins, the metastasis of humanity’s most lethal cancer. And when the centrepiece of a general election campaign, especially, involves soliciting this baying throng, it may prove successful but it should condemn its proponents to history’s most savage account. 

Australia Day was celebrated on Tuesday. It marked the date of the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788. The Indigenous call it Invasion Day. Fireworks lit Sydney Harbour, and the occasion again lit Australia’s shame through national discourse. 

Every time a US voter froths at the mouth at a Trump rally, a European marches clench-fisted to the beat of far-right rhetoric, or a Muslim persecutes a “non-believer”, they perpetuate a strain of the devastating intolerance unleashed on Indigenous Australians following those initial steps on an annexed land, where millennia of Dreamtime became a nightmare two centuries long and counting.