To both Ythanside and Stigweard: Your experiences are all too common unfortunately. Like the US, Oz covers a lot of landscape and there are many in the Top End or elsewhere back o' Bourke who seek to justify their baser behaviour by implying "You're a southerner/visitor/ etc (read "ignorant") so go away and let us do what we've always done!" And some of the things you can be esposed to make you weep with frustration at the complexity of working through it all. The causes and examples of racism are blatant when there is a large and visible ethnic minority and a large group of disaffected whites only one rung further up the ladder and wanting to ensure there is someone below them.

The causes and examples of racism are more covert amongst the genteel and better off, especially if they don't see many people from the ethnic minority in their daily routines. Publicly they'll denounce racism but, among friends, truth will out. Pauline Hanson was originally a Queensland candidate for the Liberal Party but was disowned by John Howard when her (genteel?) racism became too public to ignore. He then thought to disarm her by implementing (perhaps more subtly) the gist of her policies. At one stage an interviewer suggested she was xenophobic (Asians copped almost as much flack from Pauline Hanson as Aborigines) and her ony response was, famously, "Please explain!" She went further to the right and gained a huge following to her "One Notion" Party from the disaffected National Party members. She's now history but her followers are back in the National Party, in Coalition with the Liberal Party.

Cheers, Rowan