Talk Is Good, Action Is Better

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/australia/race-immigration-art-letter63.html

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Talk is good, action is better.

If there was one theme to emerge from our public discussions this week about race and politics in Australia and the United States, it was the idea that conversation must be a prelude to activity, not an end unto itself.

What might that action look like?

Let me tell you about Mark Nannup.

After our event Sunday at the National Gallery of Victoria, he introduced himself to me and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the investigative reporter (and MacArthur Genius Grant winner) from The New York Times Magazine who flew from Brooklyn for our discussion.

Mark told us he was one of only a few Aboriginal Australians studying at the Victorian College of the Arts and as a result, he was often asked about the darker shades of Australian history: the massacres that defined early settlement, the segregation and discriminatory policies that followed, and the challenges tied to that history that still shape his people today.

He eventually grew tired of playing the educator so often to so many. But rather than retreat, he came up with an innovative solution: He persuaded a cafe called 8 Miles to provide vouchers for free meals to anyone who checked out a book from the university’s Indigenous Arts and Culture department.

“It’s an incentive to see who really cares and wants to learn,” he said. It was just a small thing, he added. An acting student with piercing eyes, he wasn’t looking for attention and was a bit surprised when I asked for his name.

But Nikole and I were both impressed. Here was individual action and creativity, deployed quietly for good.

Mark’s coffee plan was also a reminder that the responsibility for education should fall more heavily on those who need it most. As Nikole put it at our events Sunday in Melbourne and Monday in Sydney, black and brown people consider and discuss race all the time; they’re not the ones who need more education and conversation — it’s the rest of us who could invest more in the subject.

A good place to start would be the “Colony Frontier Wars” exhibit at the NGV. The works from Australia’s contemporary Indigenous artists, in particular, provide an informative, visceral experience of history and its everyday impacts.

The image above, for example, is part of a series shot by Michael Cook, a Bidjara man who has said his work reverses reality and highlights “the lack of Indigenous representation within Parliament, the judicial system and the business world.”

Here are two other images from the series, which is called “Majority Rule.”

This week especially, the need for more education and discussion on race and equality seems striking. In much of the world, compassion and understanding are in retreat.

The United States is in the throes of a debate about the morality of separating immigrant children from their parents. In Germany, Bavarian conservatives threatened to take down the government of Angela Merkel to close the border to immigrants, in violation of European Union rules, while here in Australia, there are signs of a collective retrenchment.

Earlier this week, Australia’s race discrimination commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, sent out an email responding to calls for an end to his position, or at least a renaming to make his replacement a “community relations commissioner.”

Pointing out that 20 percent of Australians said last year that they had experienced discrimination during the previous 12 months, he argued, “You can’t fight racism if you can’t even name it.”

We also learned this week that anti-immigrant sentiment in Australia is on the rise. This year’s Lowy Institute poll, which I wrote about here, found that most Australians (54 percent, up 14 points from last year) think the rate of immigration to Australia is too high.

And it appears to be tied to concerns about culture: A significant minority (41 percent) now say that “if Australia is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.” For comparison’s sake, when Americans were asked the same question, 29 percent agreed that national identity would be threatened by being too open to the world.

What’s interesting, though, is that in both countries, there is a clear generational divide on issues of race and immigration. Young people, those 45 and under, are far more likely to prefer openness and diversity.

They are also increasingly turned off by the way their elders run things; less than half of Australians aged 18 to 44 said they preferred democracy to other forms of government, compared with 76 percent support for democracy among those 45 and over.

Anyone want to share their take on why that might be the case? (I have a few theories.)

In the meantime, here are our stories of the week, happy and sad, serious and silly. As always, join our Facebook group for more discussion and let us know what you think by emailing us at nytaustralia@nytimes.com.

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Not sure I can improve on the lede of this story, so I’ll just quote it:

“It was supposed to be the day when President Emmanuel Macron of France received a long-awaited response from Germany on his big ideas on how to rekindle Europe as a force for liberalism in the world.

And he did, sort of.

But his meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on Tuesday was overshadowed by the urgent issue of how to put out the growing number of populist fires over migration on the Continent — including in Germany itself.”

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I’m not much of a reader about fashion; just not my thing. But I did find this Styles piece about movies with the best clothes remarkably compelling.

It made me realize that many of us do notice style and wardrobe even if we don’t think we do.

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Join our reporters for a drink in Russia at the restaurant La Punto.

It is, by their account, “a Sochi gastro pub recommended to fans on the World Cup website that just so happens to be in the same building that housed the notorious antidoping laboratory at the center of one of the most elaborate cheating schemes in sports history.”

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We sent a reporter to Dark Mofo this year, where she wrote about the controversy over Mike Parr’s performance piece that placed him below the streets of Hobart.

We also published a Q&A with Mr. Parr, which included this memorable exchange:

Q. What do you think of the state of art in Australia?

A. “It’s moribund. A lot of snap, crackle and pop but nothing of any real substance.”

In other Australia news …

• Huawei, the Chinese telecom, is fighting off both American and Australian resistance to skepticism about its products in what looks to some like a global technology Cold War.

• We covered the vigils for Eurydice Dixon, exploring the anger and frustration many women feel at being told they are supposed to be responsible for their own safety rather than demanding that men change their violent behavior.

• Highlights and more details from the Lowy Institute Poll are here with an obvious headline: Australia’s Anxiety About World Affairs.

• Patricia Fox, an Australian nun who has lived in the Philippines for many years, won a reprieve from a move to deport her that had the vocal support of President Rodrigo Duterte.

• In Opinion, George Megalogenis asks: Can Australia rise above xenophobia and forge a path to inclusion?

• Peter Thomson, the Australian who won five British Opens and became the only player in the 20th century to win that major in three consecutive years, died on Wednesday in Melbourne. Here’s his well-deserved New York Times obituary.

• And in this week’s Australia Diary: An Aussie introduces Vegemite to a Texan. Hilarity ensues. Sort of. (Yes we had to do it.)

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The World Cup, obviously. Cheer for the Socceroos, sure, but we’ll also be cheering for Mexico, our former home, with a team that knocked off Germany in its first match.

Few countries with so many wonderful people and such a rich culture have been more abused as of late, by both the American government and their own government, so if you get a chance, give a shout to El Tri, as the team is know. Viva México!