Skin Colours: Many

A couple of weeks ago, I was flicking through the photo album and found this photo taken in December, 2011 of my son and his friends.  It had featured in the local paper, Torres News, at the time with a caption along the lines of:  How many thirteen year olds fit into a bath tub?

It wasn’t until seeing the photo in November, 2012 that reminded me of a bedtime story my mother told me in 1979 about skin colour. I didn’t pay much attention to Mum at the best of times and that may be why the story didn’t make sense to me until thirty-three years later.

In 1977, we moved from ultra-conservative, middle-class, suburban Perth to the University of Technology in Lae, the capital of Morobe province in Papua New Guinea. The uni tech campus was a great plot of land filled with university buildings, staff accommodation, shops, a doctors’ surgery, sports facility, some manicured grounds, football fields and tennis courts.

The staff was comprised of people from all over the world. When there were get-togethers under someone’s house, which was often, there was a delightful array of skin colours. We moved there when I was eight and I knew, somehow, this was a pretty special situation.

Two years later, Mum sat on the bed and started going on about mixed-raced marriages. That’s what they were called back then. PCism hadn’t come into being. These days, they’d be called cross-cultural relationships!

So Mum told me a bedtime story about how wonderful it was to see all these mixed-raced couples and families living in harmony at uni tech. Mum’s stories were always eclectic, and she had a pretty impressive vocabulary which may have been why she didn’t hold my attention for the duration.

I recall there was one about why I was not to write any more gruesome ghost and vampire stories because it was unhealthy for my psyche. One about why we ate lecithin and unprocessed bran for breakfast and not Frosty Fruits like my best friend, Rebecca. One about not making fun of the girl in grade seven because her “bathers” were see-through. And repeat bedtime stories focused about why it was not okay to joke about the “M” family who pissed in a bucket on Sundays so the wee could go on the orchids. But this particular story about mix-raced marriages is etched in my mind, even though it took a while to make sense.

“Catherine, I can tell you that in thirty years, the world will be full of beautiful brown-skinned people, thanks to all these mixed-raced marriages.”

I didn’t see the big deal because in my world, the world of uni tech, that was how things were. Sure there were some PNG, Australian, Taiwanese, Sri Lankan, British, Egyptian, Kenyan, Filipino and American ‘purist’ families, but there were plenty of families where one person was white and the other, well, not-white.

I remember an Australian nurse (six-feet tall and massively obese) who was married to a Nigerian architect (five-seven and slight). They had three nut-brown children. There was a boy, my age, named Tux. He was a pain in the arse but his older sister, Faye was so cool. When a man flashed her, she gazed at his goods and said, “Mmm, I’ve seen better.”

Another best friend was Seff (one of two friends my daughter is named after). She was a Tolai girl, dark-skinned with a blonde afro. She was adopted by a couple: the wife was white, the husband, Chinese. (He worked in accountancy – people were known more by their department than anything else) and they had two daughters, petite and pretty like porcelain dolls, named Mei-ling and Su-yen.

And another best friend (you can never have too many best friends at ten), Rachel Ma had a Chinese father and an English mother, who spoke real posh. At the time, I swore Rachel looked like a regular white girl – pale skin, hazel eyes and long, straight brown hair. I used to say to Mum, “She doesn’t look Chinese at all,” and Mum would just smile. Recently, I saw some slides of Rachel and me together and she is so obviously Chinese. As a nine-year-old, I could only see the similarities between us: long hair, Holly Hobby dresses, nagging parents and annoying little brothers.

If there were fights between the kids at uni tech, they were complex matters with serious causes, never related to racial backgrounds. Amanda lost the lid to my purple Texta, Roderick stabbed me with a lead pencil, I didn’t want to be best friends with Lorelei any more, Kim picked all the ripe guavas without leaving any for me, I took Ahila’s seat in the bus. And being a dickhead. (Well, that was always a good reason to get picked on). Hell, no one even got teased for having a stutter, being a bit slow, having a bad haircut or even having a mum who didn’t wear a bra.

Nope, skin colour – and there were many – meant absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

I forgot about Mum’s bedtime story till 2012 when I looked at the photo of four kids in a bath. Then it hit me.

Following my experiences at uni tech, and somehow unconsciously, as an adult I gravitated towards a multi-cultural community of many skin colours. I ended up in a “cross-cultural” relationship, which resulted in beautiful brown-skinned babies.

Of course, my children’s dark skin means absolutely nothing, except for one saving grace – I don’t have to worry about lathering them with sunscreen each time they step out the door!