When I was growing up in Chatswood in the '50s, I used to hang from our front gate to talk to a Chinese kid who lived nearby. This infuriated my grandmother. "Come away from those Chinks," she shouted at me once. "They're dirty and they smell."

Like most of her generation, born in the late 19th century, Nana deployed a fierce arsenal of prejudices, totally unabashed. The local Italian greengrocers were Dagoes. Other white non-Anglos were Wogs, Balts or Reffos. Blacks were Abos or Niggers. Asians were Chinks, Chows or Japs. Catholics were Micks and social poison, a view she modified only slightly when her daughter, my mother, made the hideous mistake of marrying one. A woman's place was at home, obediently submitting to her husband's voracious demands for sex. Labor voters were Commos. And gays – if they were mentioned at all – were dirty Homos.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre

I recalled all this as I watched Ian Thorpe come out in his interview with Michael Parkinson. How far we have travelled. The social revolution in my lifetime has been profound and, best of all, irreversible. Never in my grandmother's darkest nightmares could she have imagined an openly gay High Court judge; an ethnic Chinese neurosurgeon; a woman governor-general; or that the Liberal Party of her beloved and admirably Presbyterian Robert Menzies would sport an array of Catholics as prime minister and frontbenchers, including a federal treasurer born to an Armenian-Palestinian father. Her fears and hatreds, once so widely shared, are now mere relics of an ugly Australia we have left far behind. I actually felt uncomfortable, even grubby, just typing the word "nigger" here and seeing it on screen.

For me, the saddest thing about that Thorpe interview was his fear that Australia might not have "wanted its champion to be gay", as he put it. That alone was enough to keep him in denial of his sexuality, and I imagine thousands of Australian sportsmen and women still live with that secret. Maybe Thorpe's candour, belated though it was, will help them through.