The Campain for a Referendum. Growing up White in a White World

None of this – if you’ll pardon the expression – coloured my opinions of race because I was born into an extremely white world. There simply weren’t any people in my world I could associate, in either a negative or positive way, with what I was reading.
For most of us, these references to race were made in a contextual vacuum.

We did have charity boxes at school with pictures of ‘little black babies’ on them. (Donating pennies to the ‘missions’ meant supporting the efforts of the Catholic Church to spread god’s word, not mission in the sense of Government Policies relating to Aboriginals.)


The first time I consciously remember seeing an Aboriginal - and being aware he was Aboriginal - was at my local pool when, one day, a whole bunch of brown-skinned, blonde-haired kids arrived for a swim. Naturally, every white (or orange speckled) kid at the pool was curious and, naturally, I paddled up to one of these newcomers and asked him if he was a piccaninny: An excellent judge of character, he just looked at me like I was an idiot… so I paddled away again.

I grew up in Victoria, and the state of Queensland was so far away it might have been the moon. A friend of my uncle would sometimes come from Queensland to stay for a week or two and, although I now guess he must have been Aboriginal, at the time I just thought he had a really good tan; I’d been taught at school that Queensland is a very sunny state. Race was never an issue in my world before the 1967 Referendum.

None of the above is to deny the very strong, negative feelings of whitefellas who lived in towns where Aboriginals were fringe-dwellers, or saw customs practised which were, from a white point of view, abhorrent.
Spittle flew from the mouth of a white woman when she raged at me, one day, ‘you didn’t have to grow up with them!’

It was not until non-Anglo Europeans arrived in large numbers after World War II that many of us ever had to question our assumptions about what was 'normal' or 'different', or even how insignificant some of the differences really were. 
Unfortunately, it seems some people [like the 'lady' who spits] don't question their assumptions enough.