Some people would have been quick to excuse the white supremacist guy and say, "Oh, but it was the era in which he was born and grew up," but I say that's not so. I mean, if we take the Second World War as an example, some people who served in the Pacific Theatre never forgave the Japanese and even 50 years after the war, never owned anything that was made in Japan or had anything to do with Japanese people, while some men who served in the war exchanged the Pacific Islands or New Guinea for Japan as part of the Occupation Forces and returned to the USA or Australia, which had an extremely racist immigration policy, with Japanese wives. I know that a person can have a partner of a different ethnicity as themselves and still be racist.

I remember when I was seven, the area where I lived was predominantly Anglo-Saxon and we were doing a unit in Social Studies about Hot, Wet Lands, and it showed people in New Guinea and I wondered what made people white and what made people black. We had a relief teacher one day, and she answered it and if I had been the adult hearing the question from a child, I would have said, "Okay, we need to break this down a bit. If you're wondering why a person is black, a simple answer can be because that's the colour of their skin, if you're asking why people you see in a film are black and people you see elsewhere are white, well, yes, you have that answer and it's just from where they live. But if you want to know why a person is black and why another is white, it's because we all have a hormone in our skin called melanin and some tribes and groupings of people have more melanin in their skin which is why their skin is darker."

To give one instance that was sort of funny, though, my father grew up in an area with a lot of black people and my grandparents got on well with them. When my uncle was about three, my grandparents, my father and his siblings were in an area with more white people visiting family when my uncle saw an elderly black man and went across and took him by the hand. My grandfather found him and explained, "Sorry, but we're from the Northern Territory and he thought you were one of the people from up there." The black man laughed and said, "It's all right. I was wondering who he was."

I remember, when I was nine, I was reading a book that was published by Puffin Books and in the back there was a page that invited us to join the book club and I asked my mother if I could, and she said, "That's in England." Okay, I didn't know where Middlesex was and it didn't say that it was only for British readers.

I always felt as though I was born in the wrong country, from when I was about four and we started learning Christmas songs, and most of the songs were from the Northern Hemisphere and I wondered why we didn't have snow at Christmas time and in Australia it was summer at Christmas.

As I started to learn about the genocide of the Australian Aborigines, I came to see just how wrong he white settlers in Australia had been, and the same with the British in America. I always HATED cowboys and Indians and as I learnt more, I came to understand why.

I remember the Ethiopian Famine of 1984 and the tragic scenes of children with bloated stomachs and skinny legs who could barely stand and flies buzzing around their eyes. Another thing that I was aware of before you mentioned it was that in every society, there has been a class system. In England there were the feudal lords, right down to the serfs, and in Japan, there was feudalism, in African countries, there was tribal warfare and there were different classes. In fact, I was to learn that some of my ancestors were slave traders (a fact I'm NOT proud of), but what they used to do was act as the overseers of the Bristol Triangle. They grew fine cotton in St Vincent's and the Grenadines, which they exported to Bristol, where it was made into fine items and they sold it to West African chieftains in exchange for slaves to go and grow the cotton. My great-great-great-grandfather was from Bristol but my great-great-great-grandmother was from St Vincent's and the Grenadines and so was her mother. At the time my great-great-great-great-grandmother was born, there were only sixteen white men on the island, so I realised that I had been lied to and that some of my ancestors were actually Black. Another great-great-great-great-grandmother was known as Susannah of St Vincent's and I thought, "Okay, I know that many West Indians have European surnames because they took the names of their slave holders, and many had only first names. So, she was Susannah of St Vincent's and then became a Buchan."

I always feel guilty if an Asian or Black person lets me go ahead of them in a line.