All we knew about this new job on the remote cattle station we were heading to was that there was a general store, a few living quarters (for staff and stockmen), and two Indigenous communities just ten kilometres away. My friend’s comment was naïve, possibly – ‘Surely they won’t be racist,’ she said cheerfully, ‘not if they’re all living together so closely.’

What, if anything, does McCarthyism have to do with racism? Consider what happened to the Council on African Affairs, founded in 1937 with a slightly different name, and renamed in 1941. The CAA was a volunteer organisation which published a journal called New Africa. It campaigned against colonialism and apartheid, and publicised the activities of the South African ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela.

I’ve just come back from doing a writers’ workshop in Iowa City. In gardens in rich white neighbourhoods, I repeatedly saw signs proclaiming: Women’s Rights are Human Rights; Black Lives Matter; and so on. Another writer, a white guy, was trying to write against racism. His African-American character was the nicest guy you’d ever meet. These things made me mad – though I wasn’t really sure why, or at whom.

On Friday, Canadian alt-right YouTuber and activist Lauren Southern will host the Melbourne leg of her national speaking tour, alongside fellow alt-right YouTuber and compatriot Stefan Molyneux. Southern’s video announcing her tour really tries to bring the drama: ‘You guys are at a crossroads. Do you want to retain your culture … your borders, family, identity? Or will the boats keep coming, the no-go zones keep growing and will you become another victim of multiculturalism?’

‘Multiculturalism should not just mean majority group assistance for minority cultural groups,’ the Council wrote, ‘but rather should be a way of perceiving Australian society as a whole.’ And for a brief moment, ‘multiculturalism’ meant something in Australia. It meant structural pluralism, wherein institutions in all parts of society are expanded and changed to accommodate a society made up of people from many different backgrounds.

Promise is a company that aims to reduce the population of people detained while awaiting trial because they cannot post bail (what Australians call being on remand). There are currently 450,000 people in the US in this category. Through a variety of technical tools, from tracking devices to intelligent calendars, Promise would allow the state to keep tabs on these people, but without the need to keep them in jail.

It takes years for me to notice myself doing it whenever I’m with her – the scanning of crowds, the haughty expression on my face, the way I shadow her every step, putting myself between her and other people as often as possible. It’s not just me, either – my sisters and brother are similarly protective of my mother. Where does this defensive stance come from? My mother is not a well-known public figure, nor is she a person given to triggering controversy.

New official statistics confirm that the alleged Victorian crime wave – an outbreak of criminality supposedly so intense that, at one stage, Liberal MP Craig Kelly wanted road signs on the border warning travellers from New South Wales about the danger they faced – never existed. On the contrary, Victoria’s safer than at any time in the past ten years, in line with a general decline in crime across the nation.

When Lorde responded – to them and countless others who contacted her – by cancelling, there was a predictably uproarious response from some quarters. It’s difficult to be reminded that you stand outside the human rights mainstream, which almost universally condemns Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. It’s difficult to be reminded that, as a Zionist, the society you support is one that is fundamentally based on the violent appropriation of Palestinian land and life.

My father is from southern Louisiana and my mother is from Invercargill (on the southern tip of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island). I have never met another person with this combination of cultural groups in their immediate background and I think it unlikely I ever will. I had a DNA test done because I thought it would be interesting and my mother said she’d pay for it as a Christmas present.

There is no doubt that the formation of racist street patrols is newsworthy, however we may never know why Channel Seven felt the need to woo these neo-Fascists with such soft balls. Possibly it was in the interests of keeping them sweet to guarantee that next exclusive interview, maybe it was to keep things interesting for their next awful Underbelly knock-off.

This brings us back to the question posed whenever a production of The Merchant of Venice is mounted: is this an antisemitic play, or a play about antisemitism? Indeed, if we need Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew’ speech to remind us that Jews are, in fact, human too, then we are dealing with a much larger cultural problem that productions of The Merchant of Venice play into.

Under the authoritative and seemingly benign objectivity of ‘demographics’, the survey results are selectively interpreted to demonstrate that one of these groups is more traditionalist, more conservative, more intolerant – in other words, less assimilable to dominant ‘Aussie values’. However, because ‘they’ are homophobic, ‘we’ are not being racist in making these claims.

On 30 September, The Australian ran a cover story titled ‘One island, eight grand finals and the Rioli legend’. It focused on Richmond Tigers player Daniel Rioli and his family of famous football-playing uncles and cousins who come from Pirlangimpi on Melville Island. Written by Chip Le Grand, it singled out one young player and made him highly visible on the game’s most important day of the year.

A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry. Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corps again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.

‘We will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ I remember hearing this soundbite from John Howard’s speech in 2001. I was thirteen at the time, but was already acutely aware of the subtext of the statement.