I grew up in a very white Australian suburb and there's never been any racial issues around there but obviously being in a big city you're only ever a short train ride away from extremely multicultural suburbs where there is that. Some friends of myself & my sister got bashed & robbed by a Lebanese gang a couple of years ago... Also, although my suburbs I grew up in (East Bentleigh, Murrumbeena and Black Rock) are very white Australian, Bentleigh & Murrumbeena are only 1 suburb from Oakleigh which has a huge "wog" population and they actually have a gang there called the "Oakleigh Wogs" who put a big OW logo on every wall in the suburb and cause a bit of trouble (I remember being chased through a park by a bunch of them one night), and when I went to high school in Chadstone which is the first suburb north of Oakleigh, there were a few racial squabbles at a couple of stages, particularly between the "wog" group (many of whom had brothers or cousins in the Oakleigh Wogs, which they loved bragging about) and the Aussie footy players, most of which were from my primary school in East Bentleigh. I remember alot of tension at one stage following a huge brawl on one of the ovals about who's oval it was, the footy players' or the wogs, and all the year levels were involved and the couple of weeks after that were pretty tense between people of different nationalities and the school had to have all these anti-racism themes at the masses and assemblies. Then of course the next few suburbs past Oakleigh on the Dandenong line have alot of Asian gangs (Clayton, Springvale, Noble Park) and it can be quite scary in Noble Park at night time if you're white, it reminds me of the cold feeling of South Central LA that comes across in Boyz N The Hood, its very isolated there and you feel like you're trespassing on someone else's territory.
Let's not even go into the western suburbs, lol. That entire side of the city is suburb after suburb of Noble Parks. I can't stand it! I remember waiting alone at Albion station one night, with an abandoned warehouse on one side of me and a carpark on the other where a bunch of dudes stole a car right in front of my eyes, I was only there for a few minutes!
I think the problem isn't so much race, as much as it is crime. There is just too much crime that is too easy to get away with, and people know they can walk over the law and police can't do much (and aren't willing to do much) about it. And that lack of authority that the law seems to have is what allows suburbs to get overrun by minorities of thugs who want to claim that suburb as their own race's territory, and the reason they want to do that goes back to what I said in the first post about their parents not making an effort to bring them up to fit in to Australian society so I guess they don't feel like the belong anywhere. If only their parents encouraged them to speak English at home, socialise outside of their own ethnic circle, and not drill blind patriotism of their "homeland" into them which often makes them resent or disrespect the country they are living in and were probably born in anyway most of the time, they would probably not feel a need to have to claim certain areas as their own and terrorize those who come into their zones who aren't of their race (which is probably how they feel about being in Australia some of the time, I think less because of how they are treated by Australians and more because of how their parents bring them up at home).
