1/ Today is 32 years to the day since my parents moved to Australia and brought little infant me along with them. I spent my childhood riding my bike in my favourite gum boots, wearing my Australia sweater and Stack Hat helmet. 
2/ In 2020 Australia, people who look like me rarely, if ever, get elected to positions of power and decision-making. We’re rarely, if ever, in positions where our differences are celebrated and not criticised.
3/ In 2020 Australia, as we live with the fear and threat of #COVID19, and the treatment of those seeking a safe haven in Australia is an indelible mark against our nation, I’ve been thinking about what skin colour means in today’s Australia.
4/ My parents moved to Australia from New Delhi. We weren’t asylum seekers, or the awfully pejorative “boat people”. We were, as my mum joked to me about how ridiculous such an expression even is, “plane people”. We weren’t escaping persecution.
5/ Life in India would have been a decent one for me, albeit a different kind of life.
My Uncle was the first to settle in Australia. He fell in love with the “Lucky Country” instantly and wanted to share his new home. He called my dad over the old Telecom ISD service on a…
My Uncle was the first to settle in Australia. He fell in love with the “Lucky Country” instantly and wanted to share his new home. He called my dad over the old Telecom ISD service on a…
6/ …rotary phone, dialling India at the economical rate of $3/minute with money he didn’t yet have, to tell him about how beautiful this country was – the open spaces, the kind people, and the clean air – with all the clarity of calling someone over the copper network.
7/ Dad was intrigued and mum wanted a different kind of life from what India would offer her new family. They’d married less than three years prior, an arranged marriage after dad’s parents placed a matrimonial ad in the Times of India broadsheet.
8/ Dad is the middle of three brothers, and mum the youngest of three. Their marriage came with the requisite pomp and fanfare of a North Indian wedding and I was born shortly after.
9/ Two years later, I was wearing bibs emblazoned with Australia while still living in Delhi, already part of an imagined community while cheering on a country I knew nothing about as the Olympic Games kicked off in Seoul.
10/ As athletes competed for small pieces of metal, their dreams and the hopes of a nation resting on their physical performance, my parents packed their bags and moved to Australia for a new life.
11/ The first stop was Port Lincoln but mum and dad couldn’t see themselves raising a family there. So we settled in Melbourne. I write “we”, but as an infant I can’t imagine having much say in the matter.
12/ I developed asthma in the cold weather and mum would go to the Prahran Mission on Chapel Street to buy second-hand blankets to keep me warm so I would sleep through the night.
3/ My dad, a marine engineer, took the first job offered to him – stacking shelves at the local Coles on nightshift while he looked for something else. Mum stayed home to nurse me - an ill child.
14/ When mum joined the workforce, I went to childcare where I was terrified of my babysitter. Riding my bike was the only thing that got me through. Even months later, I would still cry when we were driving in the vicinity of her home.
15/ She adored me but I was scared of her for no reason other than because she wasn’t what I was used to – she was “different”. It appears that infant me was scared of white people because I hadn’t seen too many of them.
16/ Australia had a growing migrant population with many Indians migrating at the same time. Waves of Greek, Vietnamese and Chinese migrants had already come and called various parts of Australia “home”.
Today, Australia is one of the world’s most multicultural nations.
Today, Australia is one of the world’s most multicultural nations.
17/ And we have genuine refugees fleeing genuine human rights abuses to call Australia home, and in turn they’re being abused under our government’s care. The way we treat our First Nations People, disabled people and our most marginalised needs to be looked at. It’s not OK.
18/ It’s well past time that we embrace and accept difference, rather than use it to to discriminate and put others down.
Multiculturalism is our nation’s strength. In the India I came from, you can’t eat Spanish food that tastes even half as good as they have in Spain.
Multiculturalism is our nation’s strength. In the India I came from, you can’t eat Spanish food that tastes even half as good as they have in Spain.
19/ The best pizza restaurant is apparently here in Australia, far away from its spiritual home in Napoli. They don't have wine from Burgundy or olives from the Mediterranean. It’s not about food, though.
20/ Diversity of ethnicity, class and gender brings with it a richness of ideas, of culture, of efficiency. It opens us up to the world and all the beauty and wonder of other cultures.
21/ I think back to the little brown kid I was, terrified of a doting and adoring fair-skinned face, confused by something different, yet I had nothing to be afraid of.
22/ 32 years later, as I reflect on the best decision of my life, one my parents made on my behalf, I’m left wondering: Why are some grown Australians so afraid of a brown face today?
