On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Berry, Maria wrote:

> here is the offending line:
>
> > (about 45% of the 270,000 population were
> > from first or second generation immigrant families from around 80
>         countries of origin in all five continents)
>
> "all five continents"??  how many continents?  there are either six or seven
> (depending whether antarctica gets a mention).  so, which continent has
> patrick willfully omitted? asian and european festivals are mentioned so
> it's not them.  surely no-one would forget north america.  colonialism has
> reared its ugly head!! obviously australia or south america or africa has
> been neglected.
>
> i demand that patrick own up and admit his prejudices!!  which continent
> have you rejected as unworthy or irrelevant?  speak up and be flamed!

======================

Maria:

Of course - and I first did so over well 20 years ago.  The County Council
hired in racism awareness trainers for its Chief Officers who seemed to
have been trained by Alcoholics Anonymous.  Certainly they wouldn't let
any of the participants out for the first coffee'n'comfort break
until we had each confessed in turn to the (white, but thoroughly
politically correct) trainers and our colleagues to being life-long
and (probably unredeemable) racists.

When I read geography at University we were taught that it was now OK to
admit a fifth continent (Antarctica) to the classic Renaissance four
(Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas), but that Australia (one of my
final year special subjects) was merely the world's largest island -
though I admit that some of the quiz books give that honour to Greenland
these days. Having confessed this, is my visa for the ICOM meeting in
Melbourne going to be cancelled?

Actually, the census didn't turn up any Australian families (classified by
place of birth of the "head of the household").  However, no doubt there
were loads of whinging Poms who had been given their entitlement of a
quarter or half page in the local newspaper in the 1950s to say why they
were running out on the hopeless and collapsing old country and emigrating
to Aus. ("will the last one to leave please turn out the lights" jibes
etc.) but who couldn't hack in in your upside down world and had sneaked
back home with their tails between their legs.

I do remember that we were similarly short of long-term resident (as
opposed to University etc.) North Americans but did however have at least
two Tibetan families and some Indonesians in addition to around 30,000
families from the Indian Subconitnent eithger direct or via East Africa.


Patrick Boylan