FLESH -Many Tones
Lifting his pant leg, as part of an Occupational Therapy ADL assessment (Activities of Daily Living) of this black skinned lower leg amputee, I was SHOCKED to see his prosthesis was black too. I was expecting pink or “flesh color”!
WHITE Australia Policy was not to be dismantled until 1973, thus, for me leaving Australia in 1966, except for some British Commonwealth (mostly Indian and some African) university students, I had known only 1 black person: an itinerant, flamboyant Nigerian gentleman, who married a friend of mine. Aboriginal people were not yet considered Australian citizens and were not included in the census. Furthermore they were absent from any educational institutions I attended. I had never met one. One of the first pieces of legislation enacted by the parliament of the newly federated Australian nation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. This Act, known as the White Australia policy, aimed to not only restrict numbers of non-white migrants to Australia, but also to deport ‘undesirable’ migrants who were already in the country. The policy was openly racist, and was designed to support the ideal of Australia as a ‘purely’ white nation, untroubled by the threats non-white populations were thought to pose to a country’s social, political and moral standards.
The Australian Government actively enforced the White Australia policy. British migration was favoured and encouraged, and a dictation test – in any language a potential migrant was unable to speak – was administered as a way of stopping migrants from outside the United Kingdom from entering Australia.
Fables, Facts and Froth with Jill Lowe