As the first task of term three, I and my peers were asked to discuss what it meant to us to be ‘Australian’. It was clear that the majority of us struggled to answer the question in other words rather than just saying something about being born or living here. Personally, I had never thought of an answer to this question. For me, being ‘Australian’ was something I just was, no other questions asked. I hadn’t thought as my nationality as something that defined who I was. In other words, the term had little meaning to me.
Our main class text, Deadly Unna? by Phillip Gwynne, was a novel narrated by a caucasian male who slowly realises the latent racism lurking in his coastal town of South Australia. Through his friendship with a fellow Indigenous football player, he sees first hand how even though they were the first protectors and inhabitants of the country, they are treated inhumanely and without empathy because of the colour of their skin.
Though I wouldn’t have picked up the novel on my own, its subtle literary techniques created through metaphors, setting and characterisation pointed out the unmistakeable racism that existed in Australia in the past and in present day. The main character, Blacky, finds out who he is and what his country means to him through the loss…show more content… The extracts displayed blatant, violent racism towards Indigenous Australians during the European Invasion of Australia. It was a challenging because the Indigenous characters didn’t have a voice or way to communicate with the Europeans and couldn’t match them on a verbal level. Though this has changed since colonisation, Indigenous Australians don’t have as strong a ‘voice’ as non-Indigenous people. They are too often overlooked. Social acceptance and equality for minority races, genders and sexual orientations has increased, their representation on the larger scale has
