Indian students in Melbourne

Manmohan raises attacks on students with Rudd . Some tipsTips: How not to be attacked in Australia.
I am not surprised and had similar but less severe experiences when we arrived in 1988. After wandering around several countries, I was eager to own a house and do some gardening. Melbourne has wide tree lined streets, houses with large yards and lots of parks and open spaces. We found a house on a plot of over 900 square metres, on a bus route between two universities. I enquired about the suitability with a few in our dept. and there were no comments. After we moved to the house, we found that many in the neighbourhood were on dole and lots of the houses were the so called 'commision housing' owned by the government and rented to those on dole or low income. There were many youngsters idle and some not going to school and they would wander around in groups having fun harassing whomever they could. Our children were easy targers and epithets like 'black dogs', 'blackies' and 'abos' were common. There were even graffiti like 'black c...s' in front of the house. And thefts. Once I got into a shoving match with one of the kids but it got worse when he came in a group. The police said that there was not much point complaining since the kids would at the most get a rap on their wrists. Colleagues did not want to seem hear unpleasant things about their country. Finally, we sold the house at a considerable loss and moved to another area. Ther was very little trouble later on and there seemed to be some general improvement due to news paper campaign against racial sledging of aborinal athletes. It did not seem to have a lasting effect on the children who grew up here and most of them did well in school and college and usually got jobs before the locals.
Now with many foreign students visible in poor areas, there is an increase in this mindless fun by local youngsters. Some of the advice given in the Rediff piece seems sensible.

P.S. One of the results of my Australian experiance is to try to help with some of the 'dalit' organizations in India working in microfinance and education. There also seem to be many muslim groups isolated and virtually untouched by prosperity. A friend in Hyderabad tells me of a muslim area and a family in which only the mother or the daughter can go out since they have only good set of clothes to wear.

P.P.S. From Trujillo remarks may have legs: ex-Westpac boss:

"This week's accusation from the former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo that Australia is "backward and racist" has provoked a defensive reaction from many Australians.

But there are some who believe that rather than sour grapes, Sol Trujillo might have a point."