a bloke said to me the other day
who are you?
a homo sapien, homo erectus, just like you said I
Nah mate, where you from ay?
ah! I'm one of those migrants you might see on the TV
arriving in their tens, even hundreds
some of us even arrived thousands of years ago
we used to be called foreign types like ....
wogs, reffos, chinks, slopes, coons, kanakas, black bastards
in the last century, we used to arrive in thousands
disgorged from great big streamlined ocean liners
or small, grungy, leaky boats with faltering engines
and yes, from the sky we descended to the sunlit plains extended
in squadrons of gleaming, red-tailed marsupial liveried humpbacked 747s
many of us equally desperate, denied, deprived, dehumanised
seeking a land of opportunity
as migrants do today
but you ask ...
what about these illegals, queue-jumpers, asylum-seekers
or 'students' ostensibly granted leave to become hair-dressers or chefs in Oz
or fanatical fundamentalists hirsutely adorned or chador-clad
slyly inviting sympathy from a humanitarian, compassionate, generous majority
aren't they the thin edge-of-the-wedge, a threat to our way of life
mate, was it always like this? the xenophobia? the race thing? black or white?
a reminder to you
the great majority of Australia, Anglo-Saxon or European-born
your birth as Australians is through evolution
we migrants are Australian by choice .... and proud
so I said to this bloke the other day
who are you?
