Comparing The White Girl By Tony Birch And Shame By Kevin Gilbert

Imagine this. When you walk down the street, you are constantly feeling the stares of passers-by. When you walk in a store, people’s worried glances become impossible to ignore. It isn’t your clothes, or your messy hair that have you worried about people’s stares. It’s the colour of your skin. In Australia, this, the unthinkable to many Australians, is and has been the reality for millions of Indigenous Australians across the nation. And there is a simple name for it. Prejudice. ‘The White Girl’ by Tony Birch and ‘Shame’ by Kevin Gilbert both offer a harrowing insight into what prejudice looked before a modern-day Australia, and both are vital to look at then, now and moving forward. Racial prejudice is embedded in the tapestry of Australia's

From that very first step that Captain Cook took on Botany Bay, it set a precedent of racism against our First nation's peoples, who have called Australia home far longer than any Englishmen who came along on the First Fleet. Throughout history and all the way up to the present, this precedent of racism has been made evident. We see this prejudice and oppression in 1910 and all the way through to 1969, where Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their homes and all is left is a child, wondering why the colour of their skin is reason enough to be stolen by people claiming to help them, and a family thinking they may never see their child ever again. We see this racism just over a month ago, when up and coming AFL star Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, was slung many racist and abhorrent slurs, people going as far as saying “Hang yourself, you A**

In the poem, ‘Shame’ by Kevin Gilbert, it exemplifies stereotypes and the prejudice surrounding Aboriginal Australians in a more modern-day Australia. Lines like ““Shame” when we live on the riverbanks, while collectin’ our welfare cheques”, shows White Australia’s many existing prejudices around Aboriginal peoples’ ways of life. The way that our country has treated our first nation’s peoples has embedded a sense of shame within Indigenous Australians for living their lives differently. The repetition of the word ‘shame’ reinforces this idea of the shame felt by Aboriginal Australians and illustrates the constant reminder that Indigenous Australians should be ashamed of their ways of life, despite white Australia’s major role in perpetuating dangerous stereotypes around our First nations people. However the ending line “But I reckon the worstest shame is yours, you deny us human rights” (line 11 and 12) confronts readers with the startling reality of modern Australia. That even now, in 2023, our country is still one plagued by racial prejudice. It is vital to our country’s growth that we acknowledge and fix this issue, so that in the future, our country is one where the colour of your skin does not dictate the way people treat