Observe the concentration: rolling out the pastry for a 'treat for daddy' - circa 1964. Note the slow combustion stove in the left-hand corner.

My book club is currently reading Brick Lane, which is about Bangladeshi migrants in London. It prompted one of my anglo-Aussie friends (AAs) to comment that she enjoyed reading about the how the food traditions in that culture, and felt that these traditions were lacking in ours. I suspect a lot of AAs feel like that – it’s part of our belief that compared with everyone else we Anglo-celts don’t really have a culture.

Well, I certainly don’t feel that way about food. OK, I do feel a little envious when I see – for example – big extended Italian families cooking together on Italian Food Safari, but I definitely have food traditions that I learned from my mother, and I am actively engaged in passing them on.

These traditions are more to do with baking cakes & biscuits than with meals. I grew up on fairly predictable & plain fare: cold meat & salad for lunch, grilled chops & three veg most nights. This was dictated by time, cost & availability – we were lucky enough to grow our own meat and much of our own veg – as well as inherited English food culture. I admit, it wasn’t hugely interesting, though I was lucky to have a mother who was an excellent cook & didn’t cook the veggies to death. Perhaps that’s why it was over creaming butter & sugar, and learning the tricks for a nice light scone, that we bonded.

My Mum baked cakes, biscuits & slices several times a week to provide morning tea for the various people who visited the experimental farm we lived on, and afternoon tea for her sweet-toothed children. For many years, she did this in a slow combustion wood stove.

My Mum died last August, and it was food that inspired the eulogy I gave at her funeral. This was because I suddenly realised, as I ate a cafe meal of roasted beetroot & pumpkin salad garnished with walnuts, a day or two before the funeral, that I have Mum to thank for my love of fresh fruit & veggies, and for my appreciation of the ‘fresh, seasonal produce’ – that is now a bit of a celebrity chef cliché. My Mum – daughter of a greengrocer and wife of a farmer/green-thumbed gardener – knew all about that decades before celebrity chefs came along.

Just as one example – she instilled in me a love of that strange vegetable beetroot, because she stewed & pickled her own. With that as a benchmark, I can only tolerate canned beetroot when it’s heavily disguised on a hamburger.

So my eulogy became a series of thank-yous to Mum for what I had learned from her, or what I was grateful to her for, culinary and otherwise.

My earliest cooking memory is of making an apple pie as a ‘treat’ for Dad. It had green pastry and I seem to recall that the filling was not very traditional, but Mum had a wonderful tolerance for my culinary experiments. So did Dad, as I’m told he actually ate it. I feel sad when I hear of families were the mother rules the kitchen and won’t let the kids in to learn about food with her. I have countless happy memories of planning, cooking and talking about food with Mum. And of eating it all of course, especially when we had collaborated on Christmas day or other extended family feasts.

I have moved on and honed my skills since then, and one of the activities I particularly enjoy doing with the children in my life is baking. Most recently, some cranberry cupcakes yesterday morning with three of AM’s siblings – Abrantie, G Ketewa & Treasure. It was so much fun & the results were good too.

On other occasions we have cooked ginger biscuits (Mum’s recipe), Anzac biscuits & tried various other classic biscuits from – what else? – the Women’s Weekly Collection of Biscuits and Slices. (Well, I can tell you what else: the Country Women’s Association Cookbook, except that my 1974 edition doesn’t have any pictures to inspire; or my Mum’s own black, food-stained folder full of her collected recipes).

Looks like Abrantie is getting serious about cooking. When I spoke to him on the phone this morning and asked about his plans for the day, they included making ginger biscuits. On another call, his mum, Obaapa, consulted me about buying a mixer as she’djust seen one on special. It could be a good investment; perhaps he’ll end up as a celebrity chef.

But at the very least, Abrantie will grow up with not only his Ghanaian, but also my food traditions. As will my son AM, who at 17 is not hugely interested in cooking, but can still produce (with a little guidance) a mean cheesecake and a succulent rack of lamb. (He tells me – dear little sexist piglet – that he plans to rely on Treasure for his Ghanaian meals when his Dad & Obaapa are no longer able to provide them). Well, given our attempts at cooking Ghanaian food, he may have to.

So yes, I can confidently say that I am a link in the chain of my cultural culinary traditions. Cupcakes rule, ok!

This is what I have noticed over the past couple of years while bonding with AM on the couch watching many, many TV series on DVD. There will often be just one major Black or Asian character in the core group of characters, but rarely more than that.

Spooks, That 70′s Show, Big Bang Theory, Hustle, Torchwood, Angel, NCIS, Burn Notice, Sanctuary, Jericho - the list goes on.

In Spooks, which spanned nine seasons & quite a few cast changes, it was particularly obvious. There was only ever one non-white character in the MI5 team. It was kind of bizarre, as though the director was thinking “Oops, better replace the token Black!”, each time one left the series. But it also looked like the director was also trying to phase them out – as each one died a horrible death, he’d be replaced by one that was slightly less central to the action. The Black/Asian characters became more and more peripheral to the plot as the series went on. There was more equal opportunity for the bad guys, who came in a vast variety of skin tones. No surprises there I guess.

I just find it astonishing  – and depressing – that in the 21st century, tokenism still reigns supreme on television. What it says to me is that studio bosses are allowing racism to rule, whether deliberately or not. Either they don’t want non-whites on their shows because of their own racism, or they are afraid of what it will do to the ratings. Apparently the Australian soap Neighbours drew flack from viewers recently for introducing an Indian family into the regular cast. Channel 10 had to remove “angry” comments from their website when this was announced. Makes me embarassed to be Australian. But at least Channel 10 was moving with the times and recognising that not all Australian neighbours are white.

Maybe it is just a matter of time. The Slap, which recently aired to much acclaim, had a multicultural cast that resembled a bit more closely the neighbourhoods and networks in which people increasingly live, in multicultural Australia. (It even had an intercultural marriage and mixed kids!) Perhaps this is because it was based on a novel by a Greek Australian author, Christos Tsiolkas, who didn’t have the anglo blinkers obscuring his view. So let’s hope that as our multicultural society produces more actors, artists and authors from diverse backgrounds, things will change.

I’m not saying it will be easy. It’s not just tokenism that’s the problem, there’s also the phenomena of race-bending, a term I recently discovered thanks to a bunch of fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender “who were appalled by the casting discrimination that occurred during the production of the The Last Airbender film adaptation.” I haven’t seen this film but apparently characters which in the comic series were ‘dark-skinned’, metamorphosed into white people for the film. As a constructive outlet for their anger and disgust, the fans set up an organisation dedicated to campaigning against this kind of misrepresentation.

It’s an important issue to campaign on. With so few parts for non-white people to start with, to deliberately recast Black or Asian characters as white is outrageous. For example, Racebending campaigned for Asian Americans to be cast in a film based on the Japanese science fiction novel All You Need is Kill. However Tom Cruise was cast in the lead. An opportunity missed.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, Hollywood seems to feel the need to remake everything in its own image (e.g. Life on Mars, Being Human). Do they really think Americans are so self-centred they won’t watch anything that’s not white-Americanised? I suppose with the billions invested in the industry it’s too big a risk to take. Which neatly shows that the long-standing linkage between racism and economics is still strong.

It was greed and financial gain that set Europeans colonising the rest of the world and enslaving Africans hundreds of years ago. The same motivations are still at play in the entertainment industry, which now commands such a powerful influence in shaping our perceptions and values. It’s crucial to challenge this racist and industrial attitude to the cinematic arts, and insist on film and television that’s more truly representative of the wonderful diversity of humanity.

I did a lot of crying in the car too. It was the one of the few places where I could be absolutely uninhibited about how bad I felt about losing him. The route from my home to the hospital while he was dying, and later to his home, when I was packing up his things, was saturated with my tears. Lucky I knew it like the back of my hand. I drove very safely, even when wailing.

As with books, The World’s Best Uncle – TWBU – and I bonded over music. When we had money, we’d buy each other concert tickets for our birthdays, and go together to listen to the likes of Toumani Diabate, Tinariwen, and Salif Keita.

I’m not sure if I introduced him to African music or he just discovered it himself as a natural progression from the Blues, which was, without doubt, his favourite music genre. I know that he introduced me to Billie Holiday while I was still in my teens, although I never shared his excitement about the Blues in general.

Anyway, deciding on music for his funeral wasn’t that hard – I had plenty to choose from – and plenty of driving time in which to do it.

It was obvious that Blues music should play a big part, and as he had more CDs for Lightnin’ Hopkins than for any other artist, I started out by listening to them. I realised pretty quickly that I’d have to listen to a lot of his CDs before I found something that was suitable for your standard funeral three-piece:  “Entrance into chapel”, “Reflection” or “Farewell”. I didn’t know enough about Hopkins to be able to head straight for the ‘perfect’ song, but I thought a compilation CD would be perfect as background music for viewing the body. It was.

Moving on from Lightnin’ Hopkins, I listened to lots and lots of tracks from different albums – most of it Blues but also several African musicians. Usually I could tell from the first few bars whether or not it was what I wanted. And although at first the process felt a bit overwhelming, it actually didn’t take very long for me to find my short-list. I ran the options past AM and DadaK, and here is what we agreed upon:

For the entrance into the chapel

The funeral director said it should be something that would really bring TWBU into people’s minds. This is a style he loved. And the words – well, they’re for a lover not a brother, but they say what I feel.

For reflection

While this played we laid rusty orange and yellow freesias on the coffin. I know he loved this album. When I listen to it I can see him strolling towards me from a distance, his army surplus bag slung over his shoulder, stubbing out a cigarette before he gets up close. It’s laconic, complex, spacious, easy-going, like he was.

It seems appropriate that the album this track is from, Talking Timbuktu, was released in 1994, the year of the birth of AM, my ‘fusion’ baby. For me the fusion music of Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder symbolises TWBU’s enthusiastic embrace of the African culture, history and family that came into his life from the time I met DadaK. I can’t do justice to the depth of his love for and commitment to my extended bicultural family.

He developed his own relationships with them in addition to the times we shared together. He was the World’s Best Uncle not only to my son, but to DadaK’s other children, from the first time he met each of them until the night before he died, when they visited for the last time.  Even then, stuck full of tubes, he was loving, gentle, upbeat, and explaining the medical apparatus to them (typically nurturing their scientific potential!)

For the farewell

The last concert we went to together was Hugh Masekela at the Sydney Opera House in late 2009. The World’s Best Uncle, my precious brother, had just received his cancer diagnosis.  I knew how much he liked Masekela and was determined that we would go to that concert – in case it was the last one we went to together. It was. He loved it. I remember his excitement when he realised Masekela was starting his favourite piece: Coal Train (Stimela), with its percussive build and uncompromising vocals. I remember his enthusiasm before, during and after the concert as he talked to me about Masekela’s music.

Stimela is too long for a funeral. And it doesn’t really have the upbeat, joyous tone that is recommended for the third and final piece of music that plays as people leave the chapel. I haven’t linked to it because I couldn’t find a video link that did it justice. Instead, we chose Uptownship (above). DadaK liked how it starts with drums – identifying it very clearly as African music – and I love the sweet soaring of the trumpet – or is it flugelhorn? TWBU could have told me; he would have looked it up if he didn’t know.

It’s slow to start but Uptownship reaches the powerful, passionate and joyous heights that you need, as you are walking out the door of a funeral, to remind you that you will never lose the love you have for the person you’ve lost.

I’m not sure everyone heard it; the volume was low and the chapel emptied quickly. But AM’s brother Abrantie and I listened until the end, and then walked the coffin out to the hearse. It was a fitting farewell.

Paul Kidby's interpretation of Death from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. http://www.paulkidby.com/

On Sunday I redistributed some more of my brother Mark’s books. I’d taken what I wanted, his beneficiaries (i.e. long time friday night drinks mates) took a car-load of the ones they wanted, and on Sunday a couple of my friends went through what was left and went home happy with assorted histories, whodunnits and the complete works of Shakespeare in one volume.

There’s still several boxes left. This may take a while.

Among those I’d reserved for myself were his collection of the complete works of Terry Pratchett, and the almost complete works of Dianna Wynne Jones and Neil Gaiman. I felt very selfish keeping them back but to my relief it seemed that his mates weren’t into Fantasy anyway.

Mark and I shared a love of the fantasy genre -  if not for him, perhaps Iwould never have discovered it. When I was around 9, he introduced me to The Hobbit and the Narnia books. When I was around 16, it was the Gormenghast trilogy, and so on. He noticed the Harry Potter books before they became cult fiction. I introduced him to Dianna Wynne Jones after I discovered her in a remainders shop.

People dismiss fantasy as escapist rubbish, and plenty of it is; but fantasy can be as refreshing, insightful and moving as any ‘serious’ fiction. And it was mostly fantasy to which I turned after Mark died last November.

By coincidence, this weeks edition of the New Scientist magazine has an article on why human beings are captivated by stories, and how they affect us neurologically and emotionally. Apparently a good yarn can stimulate the release of feel-good hormone oxytocin, and we also use storytelling to “reconcile our conscious and subconscious thoughts”. Perhaps that’s why books have been such an important part of my grieving and recovery process. I get to escape, I get to feel better, and I get to grieve for and reflect on Mark’s death without having to focus too much on what happened – for a change. Whatever the reason, reading has been important to me during this time, and my choice of books has been significant.

The first novel I read after Mark’s death wasn’t actually fantasy, but I had to read it in order to purge myself of the weirdness of my funeral-shopping experience. False sympathy anyone? I think our dearly departed  would quite have enjoyed the humour of meeting a real-live  funeral director who could have stepped straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but decided crying was more in character for the recently bereaved. Mr Funeral Director proffered tissues with exquisite and excrutiating tact. Eeek! Where’s my black veil?

I had to re-read The Loved One just to see if in this case life really did imitate art. It did. But the book was also nastier then I remembered, and more bleak, so I don’t know that it did me much good.

[Spoiler alert]

The other books I felt a compulsion to read in those first few weeks were the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix, which are all about necromancy. Ok, I know that seems morbid, but I wanted to re-read Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen on the basis of just one scene, right at the end of the trilogy, that had stuck in my mind. A powerful necromancer is lured to the final gateway of death and at last has to face the fate he has fought so hard to avoid. And it is transcendent:

… “a night sky so thick with stars that they overlapped and merged to form one vast and uinmaginably luminous cloud … casting a light as bright but softer than the living world’s sun. … [Hedge] saw the stars as he fell, and they called to him, overcoming the weight of the spells and power that had kept him in the living world for more than a hundred years.”

In the end, Hedge cannot resist the call of death – and it is not what he had always feared.

The first time I read these pages – several years ago – I was in tears because of their beauty and hopefulness. Reading them again now, with a loss so fresh, they help me to accept death as a natural end to life. Even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, the image of stars calling still helps me think of death as a last great adventure. I like to imagine that just possibly, death could hold just such a beautiful surprise. And for me this image also symbolises the reality that after death our atoms are merged again with the universe. I find great comfort in that idea, and I suspect that as a scientifically-minded person, Mark may have liked it too.

Another death I am sure he would have been pleased – but very surprised – to meet, is the Death of the Discworld, (pictured above) known and loved by millions of Terry Pratchett fans around the world:

“Death leaned over the saddle and looked down at the kingdoms of  the world.

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY”

- from Mort

Death likes curry and cats, is a great short-order chef and always speaks LIKE THIS. He’s a tad vulnerable and misunderstood. I guess it’s the bones that upset people.

My acquaintance with him has been extensive lately because my son AM has embarked on reading all Mark’s Terry Pratchett books – in order of publication, just as Mark had arranged them in the box under his bed. I’m doing the same, only after him, because AM doesn’t like me reading ahead. In fact he has threatened dire punishments if I do. I had read quite a few of them already, out of order, but starting again from the beginning feels like a form of tribute. Plus of course it’s lots of fun.

“‘I meant’, said Ipslore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?’

Death thought about it.

CATS, he said eventually, CATS ARE NICE.”

- from Sourcery

AM started reading the books just before Mark died, which pleases me because I think they were among Mark’s favourites and he’d been hoping AM would get into them. When AM was around 11 I read him some of the books that were more directly for children, like the Wee Free Men and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. AM enjoyed them, but wasn’t interested in the rest.  Now he’s older he can better appreciate the rest of them – the humour, the philosphy and the science. When we’re driving somewhere he reads me the bits he finds especially funny – this made our last long drive up to Port Macquarie much more fun than usual, and kind of kept Mark with us, as he often was on those journeys.

I think Discworld Death would have got on well with Mark. They shared a liking for curry and cats. Well, you never know, perhaps they have met. In the multiverse, they say, everything happens eventually.

I don’t recall death ever making much of an appearance in Dianna Wynne Jones’s children’s books, but then, her books are an absolute, wonderful escape from all that is tough in life. They are like comfort food for the soul, only far more nourishing. Set in alternate universes where magic is real, they are quirky, warm, original and elegant.

A friend of mine borrowed all of my DWJ’s and several of Mark’s a couple of years ago and reading them over and over helped her to cope with her daughter’s death. Except after a while Mark began to get a bit toey about getting them back. I’m glad she returned them before he died. He immediately re-read several of them. I think reading  was a big help to him in those last months, to get away from the pain and discomfort of stomach cancer.

Since Mark’s death I feel pledged to carry on his somewhat obssessive quest to buy every single one of DWJ’s books. This is not as easy as it sounds because even though her stories are gorgeous, they are either:

a. so unpopular with Australian readers that bookstores rarely stock them; or

b. so popular that they are snapped up as soon as they hit the shelves.

I suspect it’s the former. We have mostly found them in remainder stores, second-hand bookstores, or heavily discounted. I had plans, last year, to buy a few of our missing titles from Amazon as a Christmas present for Mark. I didn’t get to do that. Oh well, perhaps it would have spoiled Mark’s pleasure in tracking them down. Anyway, if I want to read them now, it’s up to me to find them, and I think I’ll do it the way he did. Since he died, I have found three, almost without trying – although the last one was not in the discount bin and I was feeling a bit poor so foolishly I didn’t buy it.

It felt like an omen, though, that the first one I found, Spellcoats, was all about making magic through weaving. Mark was a weaver. For a few years he was the token male member of Sutherland Spinners and Weavers Association (until some other men joined). He learned spinning and weaving as a young man and then dropped it for 10 or 15 years, rediscovering it again after he was retrenched. I have a lovely collection of his scarves & his spun yarn,  waiting to be redistributed as his books were.

The President of SSWA issues an annual challenge to members and in 2009-2010, the challenge was “Spinning the Blues”. I’ll blog about Mark’s entry in the challenge another time – for now I’ll just say he had a whole story about it that eventually expanded to about 15 minutes in the telling. So I think he would have loved Spellcoats, in which powerful magic is woven into coats in the form of stories that record events and create possible futures. It feels very unfair that we didn’t find the book before he died. Damn and blast. !%@$!^&$!@^!

So in my reading voyage these past few months, Evelyn Waugh has enabled me to shudder, Garth Nix to cry, to accept and hope, Terry Pratchett to laugh and to remember, and Dianne Wynne Jones to both escape and to rage. Pretty much the full gamut of grief. What wonderful gifts.

When AM was small, and before the family increased, The World’s Best Uncle & I used to take him to the cicus when we could – Circus Oz, Cirque de Soleil. But it just got too expensive and we couldn’t keep it up. Mother Africa is pricey too, but hey, when are they likely to return to the antipodes? Could be years. So I’m off to TickeTek tonight.

AM learning my cultural culinary traditions with grandma. Now a teenager, he avoids cooking unless the outcome is cheesecake.

Hey, all the other Anglo-Celts out there! What do you like about y/our culture? Don’t tell me you like how you can get sushi for lunch and kebabs for dinner. They way I see it, that’s our society, not our culture.

A few years ago I was at a conference where exactly that question was asked “what do you like about your culture”, and because it was a conference about multiculturalism, Anglo-Celtic Australians (who were, unusually, ina minority) were encouraged to speak out. I was disappointed with the response because people answered along the lines of sushi/kebabs as above.

I guess we were all put on the spot.  And the wonderful diversity of Sydney is certainly something to celebrate and enjoy, so in that sense the comments were fine.  But why is it so hard for us to think of things we like that belong to our own culture?

It’s not unusual to hear people – both anglo-celts & others – lamenting our lack of culture. DadaK has said that to me – although I guess compared to Ashanti culture, the A/Cs really do appear to pale into insignificance.

Is this perception of ‘no culture’ because our culture is increasingly like that of the US? Because people have rejected the stereotypical bush culture of Croc Dundee and the Man from Snowy River, but found nothing to replace it with? Because we don’t have lovely colourful festivals?

But I think it is also a symptom of how the dominant culture, while it really runs everyone’s lives, appears invisible. It’s the ‘norm’, and boring in comparison to other people’s. We have to think up things like Mardi Gras and the Biennale to add a bit of life to it. (Not that there’s anything worng with those events!)

There’s another problem – liking your own culture might feel like it’s steering dangerously close to a reactionary nationalism – parochialism and racism. But does it really make sense to throw the baby out with the bath water. Can we genuinely appreciate people from other cultures if we are busy ignoring or rejecting our own? It could appear kind of shallow and grasping – our culture’s no good, let’s have yours.

As a single parent raising a child of mixed heritage I’ve been very aware of this issue. I’ve felt a bit like I’ve had to over-compensate on the African side because he’s flooded with A/C culture every day. But I like to think I’ve also celebrated my own cultural roots.

So here’s a short list of things I like or even love about my Anglo-Celtic Australian culture:

Food

• The Victoria sponge – light -as-a-feather sponge cake layered with good strawberry jam and real whipped cream, the top dusted with icing sugar.
• Butter
• Hard bitey yellow cheddar cheese
• Sunday roast
• Lemon cordial
• The BBQ – like my Dad used to do it, on a recycled plough disc, charred steaks that are pink in the middle

Music

• Irish and Scottish fiddle – how about  Shooglenifty – celtic rock?)
• Bagpipes
• Ok, I’m struggling to think of contemporary Oz music that I like, I admit it. Well, there’s the Qantas song …

Fun

• The dry, dry humour
• Our love affair with the beach
• How my cousin used to call me Fred
• Board games, especially on rainy afternoons

Wisdom

• I love proverbs and probably use them more than is healthy – don’t put off today what you can do tomorrow – don’t cut off your nose to spite your face – babies and bathwater, as above, etc. etc.  Actually I mostly try not to spit them out  but I think them all the time.
• The story of Tam Lin – stolen by fairies and rescued by his true love, who wouldn’t let go of him even when the fairy Queen turned him into a series of fearsome monsters. Tenacity and faithfulness bring rewards.
• Our incredible curiosity. Ok, that’s had some appalling side-effects over the centuries, like colonialism and nuclear bombs, but people of my ancestry have also made wonderful contributions to the body of human knowledge. I guess – end with another proverb  – that’s a double-edged sword.

50 Cedis’ first action, on arriving at my house, is to look in the fridge in hope of leftover pasta, casserole, or steak. He regularly reminds me that “You haven’t cooked nachos for a long time”. Often he’ll even ask me on the phone, what we’re having for dinner.  Such are the dreams of an 11 year old African-Australian boy.  

Recently I invited the family to come to an African restaurant to celebrate my birthday. They couldn’t come, but 50 Cedis wasn’t too disappointed. He advised me, in that “gotta shake some sense into this silly white woman” tone of voice he has, that “next time, MaameJ, can’t you go somewhere else …? Like Italian?”

Poor darling, he craves non-African food. He’s tried to get his parents to cook things like spaghetti bolognese but, as with my attempts at Ghanaian cuisine, with mixed results. DadaK actually called me up one night because 50 Cedis had been campaigning strongly for broccoli and pumpkin – which of course DadaK didn’t know how to cook. I provided detailed instructions and apparently it was a great success. Such is life in a bicultural family: trading broccoli recipes and take-away jollof rice or peanut soup.  All parties satisfied.

The World's Best Uncle washing up with Abrantie.

In the interests of fairness, I’ll start by saying that AM has seven uncles and I’m sure they’d all be contenders for the nomination of World’s Best Uncle but as six of them live a long way away from us, only one has had a chance to compete for this prestigious title. Not that it’s a competition; it’s just a fact, in my view, that one of my older brothers – dubbed WBU for this blog – has been a fantastic uncle not only to AM but also to his half-siblings.

He has been a major contender for the WBU since the birth of our first niece in 1970; he’s always been popular with his nieces and nephews, although as they’ve all lived in the country he hasn’t had the opportunity to shine, in the way that he has with AM and co.

In our case, it started with AM’s birth – I think he was the first person on the spot after delivery, and from that day on, we have had a regular date every week for playtime, dinner, outings and more recently C++ consultations and discussions on quantum theory. Illness and travel have been the only interruptions to our routine. He has been a fantastic support to me and a constant, positive, loving influence in AM’s life. He’s also had regular, though less frequent visits with DadaK and the rest of the family, with the result that the children have all known and adored him since they were infants. He’s helped me take them on bike-rides and to the beach, visits their place for lunch & cuddles with the little ones, records movies off TV and troubleshoots computer and Wii problems for the older ones. He has tirelessly pushed every one of them on swings.

At the moment, though, the children aren’t seeing so much of him, and the outings have slowed almost to a halt, because he was diagnosed with cancer last year and hasn’t been well. The prognosis is reasonably hopeful but it’s still been a hard six months - chemo, major surgery, and now radiotherapy on the horizon as well. So now it’s our turn to support him, and show him just how much we care.

One of the shows we watch a bit more often is Good News Week, a comic take on some of the more absurd headlines from around the world, live in front of a studio audience. Two celebrity panels ‘compete’ to guess the news behind the assorted skits, props, and  jumbled headlines provided as clues. It veers between outrageous bad taste, wickedly funny satire and hilarious madness … like when a visting British comedian took to the stage with an unlimted supply of shaving cream ….

Well, I’ve started to notice something else about it. A regular guest on the show is Aussie-Egyptian comedian Akmal, and what I’ve noticed is that he ends up being the butt of all the jokes. Well, he’s a comic, so he can cop that – but so are most of the panellists. Why am I getting the feeling they’re ganging up on him? In the funniest possible way of course.  And he parries it well. Did I mention he’s usually the only person of colour on the show? Including, at a glance, the audience. And why am I getting this strong sense of dej vu? Oh, I know … it’s because I’ve noticed exactly the same dynamic happening around AM and his white friends.

AM also parries it fairly well. He is very funny & will often play for laughs, so perhaps he invites & enjoys these friendly attacks. I don’t think it’s malicious – either from AM’s friends or on GNW.  I’ll concede that it’s maybe just a variation on that brand of Aussie humour where ‘good-natured’ picking on people is considered funny, and if the person being picked on doesn’t go along with it, they’re seen as a very poor sport. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that targets Akmal and AM both happen to be be brown-skinned. Maybe I’m over-reacting and it’s all good clean fun. Maybe I mis-interpreted the fleeting look on Akmal’s face that seemed kind of hurt. It’s completely possible he was just struggling to think up a clever riposte. It’s a high pressure job, live comedy.

But I think this particular dynamic probably is a kind of unaware racism. That the white people feel some kind of relief when around a black person who can laugh with them, and at himself. It’s like an affirmation that we’re okay as white people – ‘Look, we’re all friends, no racism here – Phew! Ok, we just happen to be in a majority so it really feels safe to have a go at this guy …. Oh … he’s black?’

I’m all for humour breaking down cultural barriers, but I suspect that a white person would not be quite as comfortable being the butt of friendly ribbing from a group of black people. It might start to feel a bit serious. And actually, is this kind of humour really good for anyone? Especially the bit where you have to suck it up if something hits a nerve.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to take part. Anytime this happens around AM, I vigorously defend him – in a humourous, friendly way. He hasn’t objected to me doing it.