Ah Christmas!

I've always been a big fan of Christmas. I know it's commercial and only thinly connected to any real spiritual experience, but hey, when the hell else do you take any time at all to think about your fellow man, woman or child? Ever?

It's a testing time for brotherly love here in Sydney, as the whole world has now seen Sydney's soft underbelly of racial disharmony exposed on the TV news. What happened at Cronulla beach happens in microcosm around this city every day. People don't like people from other ethnic backgrounds. They don't like them because they don't understand them. They might even fear them a little, because they don't understand them. It's a nasty vicious circle.

I've had a young, white Australian male I worked with tell me once "we like Kiwis because you look like us". Geez. It's not even true. I don't look Maori. And this was not a guy you would call racist. He never made casual comments about other people and race, or used words like "wog" in a sentence. But on a quiet afternoon having a chat with me about sports and the myth about Kiwis at Bondi ... He drilled down to the guts of it. Racial discrimination is based on appearance, because that's how we can identify each other quickly. It's even faster than waiting to hear someone speak. Such a solid foundation for judging someone's character@!

It was a fascinating thing to be in Northern Ireland a few years ago and have everyone look at me twice once I'd spoken - they don't hear too many Australasian accents in Belfast. But more than that, that's how they tell who you are and where you are from. Your accent. Particularly if you are southern Irish. Or British. And judgments are made accordingly. It's absolutely crucial information to gather about a person in Northern Ireland, where people look mostly the same, but carry enormous baggage about religious differences.

Like me hearing a South African or Afrikaans accent. I'm going to assume there is a fair chance that person will be racially intolerant. That's ridiculous, but I know I do it.

Just to really force home the brotherly love "at Christmas" thing, the Sydney Morning Herald this morning has printed a story about a "racial tension map" devised by two Sydney academics. They have produced a map of Sydney which colour codes the racial tolerance around the city. I've written in earlier blogs about the uber-suburbia we have shifted to here in the inner-west. Now I find this area is also a red-necked pocket of racial intolerance. It shows up as a "red zone" on this map. So does the entire southern area of the city.

This map, of a city of 4 million people, covering a couple of hundred square kilometres, is based on interviews with .. wait for it ... 1800 people.

What a vast cross-section of the community they must have been. Our little pocket of Sydney could be tagged as a red zone based purely on the comments of one or two people. How useful. This is crazy science. I don't see what purpose it serves except to alienate parts of the city and its people further. And here's the local paper printing this junk on the day after Christmas!!!

It's no wonder people here hate each other and fight over beaches. The media is prodding them along and the community laps it up. And I don't play "the media" blame game often.

As for my Christmas day yesterday, we spent it very quietly here in the red zone. The first bottle of specially bought NZ bubbly I opened was flat, the flowers my grandma sent me didn't arrive and the meat pack we sent her didn't make it either. Just to really engrave the day in my memory - the barbeque caught fire. Very exciting. The thick clouds of smoke did not alert any neighbours or the fire department so I cleaned myself and the BBQ off and managed to produce a pretty good roast lamb out of it anyway. Quite pleased with self.

I don't think I did anything to improve Sydney's racial tolerance and brotherly love all day, but I didn't do anything to make it worse either. And that's something in this town.