Until then, that's what a passport with a Northern Irish birthplace had got me - it happened often enough anywhere in the world, and was almost inevitable at airports in the UK. I'd be taken away to a side room, physically searched, swabbed for explosives and asked to unpack my suitcase entirely.

Sometimes I even had to unball my balled-up socks. I'd adjusted to it being the price of travel for someone with a birthplace like mine.

These days if you're Irish, racial stereotyping skews pretty positively regardless of which side of the island you're from - we're affable, aren't we? - but it wasn't always that way.

I arrived in Australia in 1972 at the age of eight in the middle of an apparent Irish joke boom, and spent much of my lunchtimes over the next couple of years being dragged aside and read pages of Irish jokes. As fun goes, it had its limits.

But it wasn't as bad as being the kid from the Italian family who had his "wog" lunch thrown in the bin most days, only to watch the perpetrators spend $10 in cafes 20 years later for the exact same food - focaccia and prosciutto - with no recollection of what they'd done.

And I certainly can't say to my Muslim neighbours that I know what it feels like to be them this week.

It's halal food that's now beyond a lot of comfort zones. Halal tax? There is no halal tax. Halal certification creates export markets and jobs; it can even drive down the price of food through increasing production volumes.

Saying halal food costs us more is merely a way to dress up our discomfort about difference this century. It might seem slightly more subtle than the way we used to do it, but the effect is the same. Continue reading

• Nick Earls is an award-winning novelist from Brisbane.

Critics say commentators are not pronouncing Pasifika names correctly.

"To me it qualifies as a racist act because racism is when one particular culture or race feels that they can dominate the other and through Te Reo, language," said New Zealand's Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA) chair Will 'Ilolahia.

Ilolahia says he sent off a letter to Foxtel over the calling of a weekend rugby double-header involving Fiji versus Papua New Guinea and Tonga against Samoa.

He said there was a huge response on social media against the way names were mangled, with some viewers saying they had to switch off the sound because they felt so insulted.

"They were just butchering the names and even laughing at some of it as they were saying it, and that's not just on."

"It's just another method of perpetuating that racism so that's why we have actually said it's racist."

'Ilolahia said although commentators have struggled with names for years, with the increasing presence of Pasifika at the elite level, it was time for broadcasters to step up.

"Willie Ofahengaue is a well known Wallaby icon in Australia for more than a decade and his son plays for Tonga, and yet they were still calling him 'Off-a-hen-gah-way. Pangai was called Pan-guy."

"I mean how would these guys like to have their names basically mistrued," he says.

Veteran New Zealand broadcaster John McBeth said he was not surprised by the complaints.

He said New Zealand commentators were not perfect but the Australians were much worse.

"Australian commentators really give the impression that they couldn't care less."

"That they look at a word, a name, and say it probably sounds something like this, let's go with that, without any endeavour to check."

McBeth said broadcasters needed to be professional.

"It's part of a commentator's brief, is to pronounce all names as correctly as possible. Whether it's Pacific island, African or Asian, you've got to spend a lot of time, it's part of being a commentator."

Illolahia says Foxtel sent an apology, but there needs to be a programme of training its announcers in pronunciation of names from Aotearoa and te Moananui a Kiwa.

The Pacific Islands Media Association said it had offered to train broadcasters on Pacific pronunciation.

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• www.waateanews.com
• Image: i.ytimg.com

There are things that can tear us apart. There are people who are more interested in turning us on each other.

It is so easy to distort words to take something that is meant with sincerity and fill it with hate.

My people - Indigenous people - are especially vulnerable, because we are so few and often so fragile.

Yet, there are things that need to be said and we need to find a way to have hard discussions.

Here goes. I am not an Australian or more precisely I don't feel Australian. I am not alone among my people in feeling this way.

There is nothing in Australia's myths that include us. Our stories don't form this country's folklore. Clancy of the Overflow wasn't black. Thejolly swagman wasn't black.

Bush poet Ted Egan got it right: we were "poor bugger me Gurindji".

The sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges of Dorothea Mackellar's imagination were also places of death for our people. We were stricken by disease on those plains. We were herded over those mountains.

After the coming of the settlers: this was the "wide brown land" for us.

For most of this country's history we were not citizens.

Some of our people - my grandfather included - enlisted to fight in Australia's wars but returned to a segregated country where they could not enter a pub to share a drink with the diggers they fought alongside.

We find our peoplehood in the ancient nations of this land. For me it is Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi, for others Bandjalang or Luritja or Arrernte or Ardnyamathanha or Yorta Yorta.

There were many hundreds of nations here when Europeans came. Yet, we were conveniently bundled together as Aborigines - our identities extinguished along with our rights to our land. Continue reading

• Award-winning journalist Stan Grant is from the Wiradjuri tribe of Australia and began working for SBS's NITV in 2012 as the host of the channel's flagship current affairs program Awaken.