Day 5 - A City's Conscience Awakes

Having only slept fitfully due to my mind being preoccupied with conscious and unconscious excitment, I rose before six. At seven I walked round the block. It was still dark, yet people were already waiting at bus stops, on their way to work.

I bought The Independent. The cover story, and at least ten other pages, told of the belated conviction of two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence, a teenager who had been murdered at a bus stop in a racially motivated stabbing 18 years ago. The pair convicted were from South East London and part of a working class gang that had included compulsory stabbing in its initiation ritual. They had been acquitted in 1998, but fresh forensic techniques put an end to the 800 year old principle of double jeopardy.

The conviction prompted much soul searching of an unacknowledged racism seeping through London's capillaries. You would never find the same self-reflection in Australia's media, despite Australia having similar, and arguably more intense, undercurrents of ill feeling towards immigrants.

The Australian media relentlessly dredges up the "refugee problem" - every second day it is front page news. The prominence of this issue is really a gauze thinly veiling a mistrust of anything that does not conform to the Australian fair dinkum digger.

When I mentioned Australia's obsession with border security to an Englishman, he laughed and said, "you don't have borders!"

The closure of the Lawrence case exposed endemic problems in the London Metropolitan Police. Racial vilification was rife in the form of stop and searches of black people; authorities were indifferent to race-related crimes.

Why were the killers of Lawrence not brought to justice earlier? None of the papers mentioned the fact that the father of one of the gang members was a major drug baron and could have been in cahoots with the cops.

Such searching self analysis will not be found in Australia for another 50 years. When accusations of discrimination are raised in the Australian media most commentators immediately go on the defensive. Some even go on the offensive, claiming aboriginals receive better treatment than mainstream Australians! One Australian broadsheet opinion writer has a particular obsession with middle-eastern immigrants.