IT'S QUITE refreshing to wake up in London to Australia making headlines on BBC News. But if the country is coming under attack for being racist, for not one but three separate incidents in a matter of a week, it's quite something else.

First it was the "chk-chk-boom" girl, Clare Werbeloff, whose fake account to Channel Nine of witnessing a shooting in Sydney became an international sensation. Promptly uploaded on Youtube, the video at last count has had more than 700,000 viewings. Three things stay in your mind long after you've watched the video and had your laugh. First, Clare's pretty. Second, Clare's funny. Third, Clare's racist.

"Wog" may be a socially acceptable way of addressing members of a certain community in Australia (as one of my Sydney-based Italian friends tells me, "It's OK, I would often tell my Italian mate at uni, 'Don't be such a wog' "), but on this side of the pond, where words like "Paki", "Paddy" and "wop" are almost defunct, the utterance of "wog" in public, let alone on national television, is seen as a racist slur.

Next up was Sol Trujillo's parting swipe, describing living in Australia as "stepping back in time". Being an Indian national, I wouldn't particularly take offence, let alone racist offence, to Kevin Rudd greeting me with his hands folded into a namaste, but Trujillo chose to cite Rudd's "adios" as inappropriately racist.

The final nail was, of course, the Indian student being bashed on a Melbourne train. Word spreads and at quite a pace when it includes "Australia" and "racist" mentioned in the same sentence. Even before I could discover the news for myself as part of my ritual virtual news surfing, I had an email from a friend in London. All it contained were links to two news websites reporting the incident and two words: "Be careful."