There's something about being here in Australia which makes me very protective of the environment. Maybe it's because I can see just how pristine it is compared with England - I don't know - but we were at Phillip Island, visiting the penguins and the beaches down at the Nobbies. There are loads of notices about not spoiling the environment and not disturbing the birds or shellfish. We were just leaving one of the surf beaches and I saw a family of somewhere-in-Europe-foreign tourists come tearing down looking for penguins chicks shouting at top voice when they found one and picking up the shells. I watched them and felt like I should say something. I was angry coz I know that Australians are unlikely to behave that way. That have been more or less brought up on the ethos of respecting the environment, especially around there anyway...
I left the beach without saying anything but I was annoyed at myself. Later we were eating down on Cowes beach and a group of tourists were feeding the seagulls. I didn't realise they were a group but I just saw a few Asian (Oriental) tourists feeding bread to the birds. I said to them that they shouldn't. It's bad. I didn't really go into the complex reasons for not feeding wild animals - even birds - because they didn't speak english. They ignored me. I walked further up and saw more people feeding the seagulls. Eventully we found the group leader and tried to explain to her about not encouraging her group to feed the birds.
She wasn't having a bar of it. She pretended not to speak english, not to understand but even the people in her group we spoke to seemed to have a grasp of what we were trying to say...
I was v angry with her. I thought - this does nothing for race relations in Australia. There's enough hatred of Orientals without you being a stupid bitch and just not caring.
I realised that I was really thinking about myself and not the 'impression' she might make on other more racist Australians. I felt like she didn't give a shit because it wasn't her country, that she'd come from a country where they'd already fucked up the environment so she didn't care about what she did in Australia. I realised it was about her foreigness and her particualr foreigness as well...