Fighting Against Racism in Rural Communities
I’ve always seen myself as just another face in the crowd of high-vis gear, indistinguishable in a sea of workers who blend into the dusty backdrop of Cloncurry’s mining landscape. As a FIFO diesel mechanic, I’ve dealt with my share of unexpected breakdowns and urgent repairs, but nothing quite prepared me for the breakdown in human decency I witnessed recently.
It started as an ordinary day, the kind where the coffee tastes unusually good and the radio in the workshop is playing the right mix of classic hits. I was elbow-deep in an engine, amidst the familiar smell of diesel fuel.
But that afternoon, as I wiped the grease off my hands and stepped out of the workshop, the chatter wasn’t about stubborn bolts or leaky hoses: a group of my colleagues were gathered around, their voices a blend of anger and mockery. “These bloody natives,” I heard one sneer, a phrase that cut through the air sharply. I paused, my heart pounding in my ears. The conversation spiraled quickly — a mix of stereotypes, harsh judgments, and laughter that felt like a slap across the face.
The term “bloody natives” hung heavily over us, spoken so flippantly yet loaded with centuries of oppression and racism. As a woman in a predominantly male industry, I’ve faced my fair share of challenges and discrimination, but this was different. This was about a history I’ve come to hold close, a history of Australia’s indigenous peoples whose stories I’ve spent countless evenings poring over, whose struggles and injustices bleed through the pages of dusty history books and into the reality of today.
I wanted to shout, to tell them they were wrong, to educate them on the history they were trampling on with their steel-capped boots. But I stood silent, the words catching in my throat. There words are part of a larger issue embedded deep within some rural communities in Australia — unyielding, hidden, often ignored — that I’ve seen many times now. But would my words actually help anything?
Their anger apparently stemmed from a raft of break ins and car thefts, with some young aboriginal kids blamed. And as the discussion faded, I retreated back to the sanctuary of my tools and engines, my mind replaying the scene. The young Aboriginal kids blamed for the thefts and vandalism weren’t just faceless troublemakers to me. Over my years working in these remote areas, I’d had a chance to meet some of these kids and see a glimpse of their world — one that is often starkly different from what my colleagues might imagine.
Life for many Indigenous children in remote Australian communities is a collection of challenges that those outside these communities rarely understand. They grow up in places where educational and employment opportunities are as scarce as rain. Many face systemic disadvantages that begin before they were born, in the shape of intergenerational traumas passed down, and in economically deprived settings, where healthcare, nutritious food, and stable housing are far from givens.
The pressures on these young people, I can only imagine, is immense. In many cases, their actions that lead to trouble with the law are not born out of malice but from a mixture of social rebellion and the harsh necessity of survival. Their acts, although obviously a misguided grasp for autonomy or attention in a society where they feel invisible or marginalized, are nonetheless cries for help that go unnoticed until they manifest as what others quickly label as delinquency. And of course things only ever escalate from there. Once in the system, it can be hard to get out, with such traumas then passed down to the next generation — and so on, and so forth.
This context does not excuse their actions but it does shed some light on the complexity of their situation, demonstrating that what might be dismissed as simple criminal behavior is often rooted in a deeper narrative of exclusion and need. Not that I can imagine getting many, if any of my colleagues to even attempt understanding as such, but these are simple factual realities that too many people seem determined to ignore.
The language my colleagues used that day, laden with contempt and dismissive stereotypes, does nothing to remedy the situation. Such words only serve to widen the divide, reinforcing barriers that keep us from reaching out and understanding the realities these kids face. And by dehumanizing them with terms like “bloody natives,” we strip away the chance to see them as what they are — children, who with the right support and opportunities, might not have to resort to theft or vandalism.
But there, amidst the cacophony of a mining site and the grime of diesel engines, I felt the weight of an unspoken truth: that changing such deep-seated attitudes is a task far bigger than any mechanical repair I could undertake. It would require not just confronting these incidents of racism head-on but also creating an environment where empathy and understanding are part of our everyday tools too.
Later, I sat in my temporary home, a small, dimly-lit room that felt even smaller with the weight of what I had heard. Outside, the endless expanse of the outback stretched under a twilight sky, indifferent to the smallness of human prejudices, and I reflected on the irony of how such a vast land can narrow so sharply in the minds of its inhabitants.
