If you're white, you're right

“I pulled the burning mat away from the door and looked for a hose but I couldn’t find one in the dark.”

Mrs. Abui said she and her children had been frightened by the attack and she was mystified as to why her family had been targeted.

“I have no enemies with white people,” she said. “I have no idea why they don’t like us here ... I came here because Australia is a safe place to be.”

Mrs Abui was widowed when her husband was killed in Sudan, and she fled with her children to Egypt where she applied to come to Australia. A police spokesman said it would not be possible to say whether the attack had been racially motivated until suspects were questioned.

This story ran a day after The Toowoomba Chronicle ran a front page article, “Death Threats Force John Out - City Shop Owner Hounded by Racists”. My local paper revealed a poignant story of Sudanese businessman John Yaak who was driven from his home country by murderous militia and now had been driven from Toowoomba. Mr Yaak finally closed his discount shoe store in Margaret Street after six months of death threats and abusive phone calls from faceless racist cowards.

The Toowoomba Chronicle noted a sign in Mr Yaak’s blackened shop window that said it all:

We are now closed as we are unable to conduct our business in peace. Thanks to our valued customers and supporters.

It seems perversely ironic that I have not read any media stories of racial trouble associated with recently settled white South Africans - after all they arrived in Toowoomba at the same time during the past decade, but in greater numbers than the 750 Sudanese people who have taken up residency in this ultra-conservative community.

These stories of racial discrimination and victimisation remind me of my first painful experience with the Cunnamulla Bowling Club in the late 1970s. Sadly, they also remind me of that little sarcastic saying I heard from older Aboriginal men all those years ago and how prophetic it was.