Thursday Island, Queensland, Australia
One of the things that we love about Australia is that it is, as Greg describes it, “like looking at a imperfect mirror at ourselves.”
Or, yes ok it has been a while since we made a nautical reference so yes, like a reflection in a pool of water. The point is that reflection is not perfect and there are many differences between our countries but of all the places we have visited Australia is the most like home:
- We both started off as colonies founded by the same country
- We are both a country of immigrants
- We’re both, as countries go, large. Really large. As in “Europeans don’t get it” large.
- We both managed to butcher the same source language – granted each with our own special flair
- We both have to deal with issues revolving around lethal weapons
We could go on and we assume you get the point: As countries go, our two have a lot in common. This is what makes Australia so very interesting: how they took a set of similar circumstances and ended up in a different place. The choices we both made, as a people, and the results those different decisions had on where we both are now.
We didn’t want to bring this up until now because we really didn’t want it to taint our overall reporting, or our memories, of our experiences working in Australia.
At the same time it has happened at almost every place we worked and is especially prevalent at our most recent place of employment so it’s important we document it. It’s not our best video; we recorded it for the audio so we could get our thoughts in the moment.
This article is about our experiences with sexism and racism in Australia.
Continue reading “The imperfect mirror”
