In the middle of a dusty nowhere, an elderly Aboriginal man in torn clothes lies on a dirty mattress. About 2 yards away is a humpy which has been thrown together from bits of rusty corrugated iron and a hessian bag. A dog sleeps nearby; and even the flies are listless.

Images of Australia, like this one, are regularly seen around the world in feature films, documentaries and news reports.

At an outback roadhouse, an American tourist asks me if I think the Aboriginals would mind having their photo taken. His voice is low, I believe, because he knows my answer will be of course they would mind. Anyone would mind being treated like a freak. Other tourists shove their cameras in Aboriginal faces while making loud offers to pay.

There is no doubt this would be a great photo-opportunity: Not because Aboriginals are black – for there are black people in other parts of the world; not because these people are Aboriginals – because there are Aboriginals in the cities and suburbs of Australia; but because a personal photograph is the portable graffiti which says ‘I was here”.

Returning from every retired Australian’s mandatory trip around the country, a couple of grey nomads shake their heads in disbelief at what they have seen of Aboriginal Australia. They always knew there was ‘a problem’, but there is something about seeing it up close that is confronting. Is the problem them, or us? We’re good people, aren’t we? What’s going wrong?

Tourists, new Australians, or even some Australians who were born here must wonder why it is that in such a wealthy country, so many Aboriginals live in a way we can only describe as sad.

The UN isn’t impressed with us, Indians hate us, and Bob Geldoff thinks we are not only racists, but racists of the moronic kind.

Non-Aboriginal Australians live longer, are less likely to be jailed, are more likely to finish high school, and are more likely to have jobs. These differences may have been caused by Australia’s racist past, but racism is not the reason these problems persist today.

So how did Australia, one of the last frontiers of Empire and now a rich, developed country, come to be like this? What were we thinking, back then; what are we thinking now; what should we be thinking?

Required to devote one nano-second of his course to Aboriginal Health issues, a student whinges “why don’t they (Aboriginals) just bloody well get over it?”

On hearing of this comment, I was disappointed. I can see that tourists, unfamiliar with Australia’s past and present, might not understand what is happening. I can see that the many Australians who did not go to school here might be unfamiliar with Australia’s past or what makes the present different. As a baby boomer who did go to school in Australia, it took even me some digging to find a few of the pieces missing from this puzzle. But why would someone younger, who presumably had a more enlightened [less censored] education than mine, still not ‘get it’?

A Prime Minister, seeking re-election, accuses asylum-seekers of throwing their own children into the ocean, of trying to blackmail Australia into giving them a visa.

A Prime Minister, again seeking re-election, portrays an entire race as drunken paedophiles, just so he can be seen as a decisive, caring leader when he intervenes.

Two would-be Prime-Ministers compete in a battle to the bottom, painting a picture of asylum-seekers as ‘a problem’ that must be stopped. Both have expressed horror in the past when a naïve but refreshingly honest MP stood up and complained ‘Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians’.

So, exactly what is Australia – a hotbed of racism, or the land of a fair go? What are our nation’s values? If asked, how would we describe the Australian culture?

In December 2005, an anti-Lebanese protest in a Sydney suburb escalates into a full-scale riot, when 5,000 people swarm onto the beach in response to a chain of text-messages.

More recently, the media have been reporting claims by political ‘leaders’ that multi-culturalism doesn’t work. Is multiculturalism really the root cause of many of our social problems?

On late-night city streets, after hours of clubbing, non-Aboriginal youths start and take part in mindless, violent brawls.

Is this a phenomenon unique to Australia? Are the majority of Australians doing anything to (possibly) marginalised groups that we are not already doing to ourselves?

Some men wearing black make-up appear in a send-up of talent quests, prompting an American guest judge to express outrage. He insists this is a blackface routine, offensive to African-Americans and unacceptable.

Oprah Winfrey visits Australia and, for some unexplained reason, a Melbourne retailer removes a golliwog from her window display.

A small handful of crazies clog YouTube with evidence Australians are not only racists at home, but intent on the denigration of African-Americans as well.

Exactly what is “blackface”, where did it originate and what was its function? Why are golliwogs supposed to be thought offensive? Who makes all these rules?

Is this political correctness gone mad?

At what point did political correctness change from a request we rethink questionable values to a crime? 

This blog tries to provide some answers from one Australian’s point of view, allowing for the possibility that readers were not educated in Australia. My aim is not to provide yet another distressing litany of past crimes against Aboriginals, but to provide context: A series of snapshots which might serve to show the world the bigger picture that is Australia.

It’s easy to dismiss problems as racism; too easy. It’s convenient to assume that problems are caused by racists, so there’s nothing 'we who are not racists' can (or therefore have to) do. But dismissing problems as racism doesn’t absolve us of responsibility; dismissing problems as racism is irresponsible if it stops us looking for the real causes of social problems.

It’s hard to care about people we do not understand, and Bob Geldoff understands nothing about Australians, whatever their background. It's equally hard for many Australians to understand what they do not see and what they have not been told. But not making an effort to know people is a rude and rather silly way to go about establishing a workable relationship.

Only by understanding where Aboriginals have really come from, and where the rest of us have really come from, can we hope to locate the crossroads where our two worlds might meet. Only by taking an honest look at where we have come from, can we be aware of ‘where we are coming from’. Australia’s critics should meet that requirement as much as whitefella Australians. Getting a feel for both sides of the Aboriginal picture, we might learn something about ourselves in the process; about disturbing community-wide issues that, originally at least, had nothing to do with race.

I don’t want my country unjustifiably vilified as racist. I certainly don’t want to see my country become racist.

The Gap, Gangs and Golliwogs is full of generalisations and over-simplifications for which I make no apology: This is not a Ph D thesis, simply a collection of facts and guesses about why the gap persists, or why Indians hate us, or why so many voters love Pauline Hanson.

Nothing in this blog is intended to deny that some Australians are racists: Every country has its share of idiots whose only value is making everyone else look good. I’m simply asserting that as a nation Australians are not racists; that as a nation we do care about people regardless of their background.

Placed alongside the realities of Aboriginals, asylum seekers or any marginalised group, the lunatic fringe’s proofs of Australian racism are an affront to the very people they see as victims of racism; their ‘proofs’ are extraordinarily petty compared to the tragically real problems so many people face.

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humpy: a very simple shelter, perhaps with three walls and a roof; a word originally used to describe the temporary shelters some Aboriginals built from branches and leaves. More permanent shelters were not needed by people who moved from place to place according to the seasons or in search of food.

hessian bag: the type of sack used to send produce such as potatoes to market. Hessian is a coarsely woven brown fabric made from natural fibres.

grey nomads: retired people touring Australia. ‘Grey’ because they are old enough to have finished working so their hair is grey (if they still have any), and ‘nomads’ because they don’t stay in one place for long.

baby-boomers: the generation of Westerners born at the end of World War II – usually between 1945 and 1964. This is the generation which is now reaching retirement age.

1927-1945 - Silent Generation or Traditionalists

1946-1964 - Baby Boomers

1965-1983 - Gen X

1984- 2002 - Gen Y

From 2003 onwards - Gen Z (the Digital Generation)