“The ‘ethnic’ group of indigenous Australians is just completely invisible. When the election campaigns are running now, we just don’t rate a mention,” says Hetti Perkins.

Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, Perkins is also daughter of Charlie Perkins, who started the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and led Australia’s freedom rides in the ’60s.

I interviewed her for a story on the way the city affects Koori identity in the arts, and as an aside asked her thoughts on the racist riots and tensions in Sydney.

A friendly woman, her whole demeanour changed within seconds at the mention of the Cronulla race riots. Her blood seemed to boil and a quaver appeared in her otherwise confident voice. Listening back to my tape of the interview it was hard not to be affected by her obvious emotion.

“Well it’s kind of ironic, because these sort of territorial wars, if you want to call them such – territorial as opposed to terrorist,” she laughs. “Apart from absolutely abhorring it and seeing it as a direct result of our government’s aggressive pro-American, bloody, sycophantic, bullshit is….” she growls her way through the word ’sycophantic’. “The thing is you find Aboriginal people now or Aboriginal issues are just not even on the political agenda. It doesn’t even occur to anyone that Aboriginal people may have a greater claim on all of this country than Middle Eastern or the surfies or whoever these different gangs are. The ‘ethnic’ group of indigenous Australians is just completely invisible. When the election campaigns are running now, we just don’t rate a mention.”

“I think our Prime Minister saying he doesn’t accept that there’s underlying racism in Australia is just an absolute nonsense and these conflicts well demonstrate that. In a very insidious way, they’re covertly endorsed by the current government, that it’s okay to be kind of vigilante-like and attack people of other cultural traditions.”

“It’s ironic, because when you go around Australia, when you go into sort of remote areas or traditional communities and you talk to aboriginal artists and their families about the things that have happened to them personally and their lands, they’re very generous. We want to share our culture, we’re all living here now we’ve all got to get along. It’s not about wanting to kick everyone out and have Australia back to themselves, people are not like that, they say there’s good and bad in everyone.”

“Rusty Peters, who’s a fantastic artist, just said ‘You know, there’s good black fellas, there’s good white fellas, there’s bad black fellas, there’s bad white fellas’. If we could see that sort of spirit generate throughout Australia, I think that’d be a wonderful thing and I don’t think we’d see these sorts of terrible conflicts and so on.”