Race is not black and white

Discussing or debating racial, ethnic and gender identity in Australia can be a political and legal minefield for journalists, as witnessed by the Andrew Bolt case. But there remains some inconsistency.

Without rehashing the whole story, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a number of articles questioning the motives of activists who identified as Australian aborigines. He was sued by those activists in 2011 and found to have contravened the Racial Discrimination Act.

Rival Melbourne newspaper The Age has been active in holding Bolt accountable over his views on race and identity. A recent headline from a story by Saffron Howden, "Bolt link to racist reviews of book", will give you an idea.

One of the litigants, Anita Heiss, has in response to Bolt, written a book titled "Am I Black enough for you?"

Bolt, under the Federal Court ruling, cannot respond to Heiss or anything to do with the court case, and so a war of words has began between Heiss and her supporters on one side and Bolt supporters minus Bolt on the other.

The purpose here is not to take sides in this vital controversy but to point out that a glaring inconsistency on how The Age, a supporter of Heiss, applies the descriptions of ethnicity.

A recent article by The Age's veteran crime reporter John "Sly" Silvester about the late brave Victoria Police detective John Kapetanovski could be construed as deeply offensive and insulting to Australia's Macedonian community.

Silvester wrote that: "The (Kaptenovski) family arrived from the then Republic of Yugoslavia in 1957 when he was six. Unable to speak English, he was taken to his first school in Fitzroy by local migrant kids who asked him his name."

Kapetanovski was an ethnic Macedonian who hailed from the communist Republic of Macedonia, then a part of Federal Communist Yugoslavia. Silvester's article, for some inexplicable reason does not apply the Age's nitpicking on ethnic identity,does not tell us if Kapetanovski is a Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Muslim Bosnian or ethnic Albanian. Furthermore, there has never been a "Yugoslav" language.

There has never been a "Republic of Yugoslavia." There was a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918-23), A Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-43), A Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFY, 1943 – 1946), a Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY, 1946 – 1963) and a Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY 1963-91) and finally a Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. There are now independent Republics of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia etc. since 1991, which emerged from the collapse of SFR Yugoslavia.

A simple check of Wikipedia would have been sufficient:

Silvester, the son of a high ranking Victoria Police officer, is the co-author with Andrew Rule of the best selling true crime books franchise Underbelly, which has been adapted in a successful television series for the Nine Network. Silvester has no excuse for sloppy research.

In contrast, The Age newspaper has over the decades differentiated between English and Scottish people coming from the United Kingdom, even though there has never been an independent Scottish state or kingdom in over 200 years. In fact, one Age writer in particular Alan Atwood built a whole shtick in The Age regaling us with his stories of his Scottishness.

I even tried to build my own Alan Atwood shtick or genre: a journalist who went out of his way to differentiate those who came from the United Kingdom but in the same breath as a tennis reporter refused to apply the same principle to 'Yugoslav' tennis players such the ethnic Hungarian Monika Seles (Szeles).

You can read the OLO story here.

More recently The Age's chic looking art critic Gabriella Coslovich, herself of diverse Northern Italian/Slav background, ran a story about the cosmopolitan northern Italian city of Trieste, and the controversies surrounding the various ethnic identities tied to that city.

In the Bolt controversy and Atwood and Coslovich cases, The Age has gone to extraordinary detail over identity but not in Kapetanovski's case.

Why the inconsistency? Why the lack of research? Another response is who cares? We should care.

I wish to point out that "ethnic inaccuracy" brought Kapetanovski and a Melbourne Macedonian Community leader, Aco Talevski, together in 1985-86.

Kapetanovski, as described by Herald Sun crime reporter and author Paul Anderson in his book Dirty Dozen: Reloaded, was a Victoria Police Sergeant who spoke Macedonian as well as Serbian.

A gun nut and attempted cop killer, Pavel Marinoff (Marinov) also known as Mad Max Clarke or the Noble Park Gunman was on the loose in Melbourne.

Initially it was believed, mistakenly aas it turned out, that Marinoff was a Macedonian and was being protected by the local community. The Macedonian community at the time felt it was a slur.

Kapetanovski contacted Talevski, President of the Saint Dimitrija Macedonian Orthodox Church in the nearby Springvale. Kapetanovski revealed to Talevski that he was himself of Macedonian background.

Eventually, it was discovered that Marinoff was not a Macedonian but a Bulgarian.

Talevski had to go on television to clear the good name of his community but in the process built a friendship with Kapetanovski.

"I visited John when he was in hospital after he was wounded by Marinoff," Talevski said.