ons of Australian society, gives rise to very sharp and quite human conflicts of interest. In some country towns a heavy concentration of mainly unemployed youth, a fair percentage of them black or brown, is a prominent feature of life. In some towns it is difficult to run a small business because of the desperate behaviour of unemployed youth. Such problems don't lend themselves to easy or short-term solutions, and it is not useful or intelligent to treat the sometimes racist responses of poorer white Australians to these circumstances as racism of the same sort that Pauline Hanson expresses. Such conflicts of interest are to some extent conflicts among the people, and should be treated as such and approached as realistically and humanely as possible, trying to take account of the real interests of all concerned.
Such conflicts aren't so acute in major urban centres such as Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, but they exist there, too. In some areas of Sydney, for instance, quite a lot of house burglaries are committed by unemployed indigenous youth, and a fair percentage of the current wave of minor hold-ups in newsagencies and convenience stores, with knives or syringes, are committed by brown or black youth, often driven by narcotics habits, as are their fellow white armed robbers. While the human tendency to urban myth often exagerates the proportion of burglaries and hold-ups performed by Aboriginals or Pacific Islanders, nevertheless, in my patch, the inner west of Sydney, these conflicts of interest between ordinary Australians are quite real. I have been a retailer, with a large, late-opening, seven-day-a-week shop in King Street, Newtown, for the past 12 years.
We have been burgled three times, and we have been robbed or held up half a dozen times in those 10 years. One of the burglars was caught, and he was white. Four of the hold-up men or robbers were brown or black. Luckily no one was ever injured, and we never lost too much, because, as a matter of routine, we don't keep much money in the till. Many other small businesses in the inner west have had similar experiences, as have many householders. There is no doubt that these experiences inflame a certain amount of racism directed at indigenous people, who are perceived by many to be the main perpetrators. It's a mistake to put this response of ordinary Australians to real problems in the same category as the Pauline Hanson response.
In my experience, this kind of problem comes in waves, to do with the constantly changing demographics of the inner-city. In my 10 years on King Street, I have seen several generations of very young Aboriginal kids "working the strip", so to speak, and finding outlets for their frustrations in thieving and vandalism. Like any other shopkeeper, when a new bunch of young kids, white or black, starts appearing full of the obvious unemployed adolescent testosterone, I go on a bit of a war footing until they pass on to other things. I've outlasted quite a few groups like this. On one occasion, seeing the telltale signs, with a couple of young kids causing a disturbance, while another one tried to get behind the till, I confronted the group, and told them to leave because I knew what they were up to. One of them said to me, "Oh, are you a racist?" To which my response was, "This is my bit of turf. I don't give a fuck whether you're a Koori or an Eskimo, I know what you are up to, so piss off. "On that occasion they all burst out laughing, and did leave and never came back.
On another occasion, a few years ago, I was sitting outside the shop on the bus seat for 10 minutes, on a muggy Saturday afternoon in spring, drinking a Coke before I went back inside to get on with my work, watching the world go by, when I saw the following fascinating tableau. A very well-built, gleaming, tough-looking young black bloke about 17, stripped to the waist, wandered along the other side of the street, rather out of it, high on something, talking to himself in a loud voice, carrying a short iron bar, which he was banging on the walls and doors as he passed, much to the consternation of the people, for instance, inside the cafe opposite.
When he reached the houses opposite, after the cafe, which are inhabited by students from Moore Theological College, he disappeared down the path of one of them, with what appeared to me malicious intent. As the Moore College students are my neighbours, I quickly adopted a kind of Neighbourhood Watch approach, crossed the road, and gingerly followed him down the path, where he had already commenced trying to make entry through a door with his iron bar. I yelled out to him: "Stop that mate!" until he stopped. Then I hastily retreated, as he groggily came back down the path and wandered further off down the street.
He then stopped, turned around and started throwing stones at me, one of which hit me hard, from ...
