Letter from Thailand

A popular Australian TV comedy show called 'Hey Hey, it's Saturday' made headlines recently when it aired a segment featuring a group of people from various ethnic backgrounds tarted up in Minstrel-esque black face paint impersonating the Jackson Five. It prompted columnists, TV and radio show hosts to posture up and begin a finger-wagging national self-analysis: 'Is Australia a racist country?'. It was as ridiculous as it was embarrassing. A individual, a legal stipulation or on occasion an organisation can be racist but a county – a sovereign territory with a nation and government – obviously can't collectively be racist any more than a field or a car park can be an open-minded liberal. Nonetheless, the national conversation went back and forth for a few days generating plenty of heat but very little by way of light.

On one side were the poor damaged souls who out of that nasty, post-colonial inferiority complex we so often see in Ireland, felt the need to write their country and nation off as collection of pillowcase-wearing, cross-burning Nazis. For this crowd, the worst of it wasn't even that the whole country was racist – the really crucial point was that the rest of the world supposedly thought Australia was racist. Copies of English newspapers which mentioned the row in a tiny article on page eight were brandished around studios as if they were proof of the country's failure in the eyes of the world – and in the eyes of the English, in particular.

Standing against the moral outrage were those who thought the segment was sort of funny. They reckoned it should be written off as something done in an attempt to make people laugh rather than to cause offence. It was comedy and cultural sensitivities be damned. Both went into the argument with their views deeply entrenched and, as tends to be the case in debates, came away without having budged an inch; bar maybe radicalising slightly.

It seemed very much like a storm in a tea cup to me. The segment wasn't funny, but then the programme itself is dire so I wouldn't have expected anything else. Of course, the act of dressing up and doing a ham-fisted impersonation of a Jackson Five member isn't racist in-and-of-itself – UK show 'Bo Selecta' regularly featured comedian Leigh Francis ripping off Michael Jackson but to my knowledge he remained free of accusations of racism. This reveals the crux of the issue; the act of putting dark paint on your face to appear black.

So is this racist? When the Minstrels did it it was of course racist because they set out to ridicule black people in general. But was this the intention of our rubbish Australian comedians? I don't think it was. Demonstrating cultural insensitivity out of a lack of knowledge and understanding of how the things you do will come across to others isn't racism – that's just being a bit of an idiot. It's ignorance – a different kettle of fish to the deliberate malice which denotes real racism.

I've heard the argument that someone can inadvertently do something bigoted or racist without there being any intent behind it, but I'm not sure I agree with this. For example, every now and again a word that was common, acceptable parlance is suddenly stricken from the record when somebody somewhere decides that from now on it's going to carry negative connotations. 'Person living with a disability' is the the acceptable, politically correct term at the moment and 'disabled person' is for cavemen. If you're not aware of this change and you use the later, then there are people out there who will take this to mean that you are a bigot. And give it 10 years – it will change again and those who use 'person living with a disability' on the Tuesday after the Monday it gets proscribed will too be branded.

To me, a word is a collection of inanimate sounds we use to portray to our audience a particular meaning. It's the intent – the message the bigot is seeking to project that is the issue, not the words themselves. Without the meaning the speaker chooses to attach they are just noises – the sound of a car going past or light switch being flicked.

I think the same goes for peoples' actions. We all do stupid things from time-to-time and occasionally put our foot in it but if there was no intention to hurt or offend, we shouldn't be condemned for it.

Australia's labour-intensive agricultural sector periodically requires massive numbers of workers to arrive in various parts of the country, to coincide with a harvest or some other annual work-a-thon, and the world duly obliges. Margaret River, a town to the south of Western Australia which has been home for some time now, is nestled in the heart of wine producing country. Every year from March to September it gets flooded with would-be farm workers all set to individually prune every shoot on every vine in every vineyard in the region.

The Irish are up in the top five most well-represented nationalities with many of the other leading contributers hailing from Asia. The rag-tag group, a very large proportion of which will have never set foot on a farm before, join Australia's experienced farmhands who themselves are virtually all internal migrants who follow the harvest trail from one end of the country to the other every year.

Pruning is tough, monotonous work and the knowledge that you're slaving away helping to create something that only priests and wasteful toffs could have use for in these difficult times is all the job satisfaction you're going to get. The fact that Margaret River is hundreds of kilometers south of where I first started pruning means that it is far, far colder and pruning season kicks off in the dead of the Australian winter. Now, I'm trying to add some drama here, to make you all understand how cold, wet and miserable a vineyard is in pruning season but I understand that it is impossible to strike any fear into a person living in Ireland with a term like 'the dead of the Australian winter'. I'm sure most people think Australia gets year-round sunshine – I know I certainly did. That's why I didn't pack any warm clothes. Sadly, Australian winter in Margaret River is genuinely cold. As in, Ireland cold.

Temperatures drop to single digits at night and barely get into double digits during the day. Margaret River is on the coast at a point where the Southern Ocean meets the Indian Ocean which means it is unbelievably windy. Add to that the fact that during winter it will be raining at least every second day and that thunderstorms and hailstones come regularly and you'll get the picture. The rain is so frequent and consistent that it is just not feasible to allow people to run for cover when a down-pour starts so everyone is under orders to keep working – pruning away with the rain gushing through every gap in your rain jacket and filling up your wellingtons.

It gets to some people. I've looked up on a number of occasions, often when the rain is coming down in sheets, to see some poor unfortunate standing motionless over a vine with their head bowed and their hands by their sides. Because everyone works at a different pace it isn't long before workers are spread across the vineyard out of ear-shot of one another. So you're pretty much on your own for the day. My supervisor told me that the isolation, the monotony of the work and the shocking weather conditions are often enough to send people over the edge. He said he has come across guys standing in a vine row crying their eyes out over a years-old family death or a failed marriage. Vineyards are a petri dish for depression.

Happily, the Australian winter has ended and we're now in Spring. Myself and the rest of the foreign hoard that invaded this picturesque, isolated part of Western Australia have worked up the requisite 88 days of agricultural work required for a second year working holiday visa and a return migration is underway. You would want to be an agoraphobic, anti-social outcast to stay in a hostel for months on end and not make a few buddies and it was sad to see various likable characters heading of in various directions never to be seen again.

I worked as a cleaner during my years in college and I think the nastiness of the experience made me determined not to end up in a situation where I had to something like that for a living. That fear-driven hunger was a great motivator career wise but as the sharpness disappeared from the memories of what it is like to scrub a public jacks so too did some of that determination not to go backwards. Then all of a sudden I was doing a ridiculous, poorly-paid menial job in a muddy field in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The plus side was that my hatred for doing crap jobs returned, I started frantically looking around for an alternative and got an interview for a job with a magazine in Sydney.