Sydney Tribes

Looking back on an edit made in the last post on Cabramatta, far more attention needs to be paid to the reality that most Sydney suburbanites don't truly encounter the hustle and bustle of the city 'til age 17 or 18, let alone the Asians that come en masse in the city these days (never will I forget UTS Debating Day circa 2003, when some really Mosman-esque girls cried and whined about having to walk up from UTS to State Parliament for a debating final, and they all gagged in disgust when they found out they were in Haymarket Chinatown. I recall bitching really loudly about them to my mother afterwards as we picked apples and pomelos like nobody's business in Paddys Markets. I didn't care, no one else around us would've understood English anyway. And if I wasn't class conscious after this, I definitely was by the time a 'Grammar' contingent trekked down south for a friendly debate, only to laugh at the 'quaint' classroom heaters and our poor excuse for a swimming pool). It actually means that, more often than not, uni will be the first time many kids from the North or East encounter tribes from the West.  But for the rest of us, it probably also means that we can't be as offended as any normal person would if the likes of Lufthansa or Alitalia dismiss you because you're a woman of colour or sexually ambiguous being - there's an all too real chance that they've just never encountered one before.
So - suck it up?