We try to portray ourselves as a very egalitarian society, the land of the fair go…But I think that we are quite segregated. And class exists in Australia – it’s much more slippery and hard to get your hands on than in other places where it’s more structured and stratified. But it’s there.
I’ve always grown up as an in-betweener…Malaysian hyphen Australian, between really a working-class town, ‘struggle town’, and a really privileged private school, between secular and religious – even Queanbeyan is known as part city, part country.
I think Australia’s sense of itself is very insecure, very shaky. And what I see around us is constant simmering tension and some kind of violence beneath the surface of this country.