Another time, someone threw a rock through our front window. Instead of having the glass replaced, my mother just drew the curtains and lowered the canvas awning outside, permanently darkening that area of our living room. My father would not repair the window, hoping to avoid provoking more hostility.

“Most Australians are good,” he told us. “Those are the bad ones. Just ignore them.”

My best friend’s father mowed the lawns at our school. Her mother worked for the juvenile justice department. They were white Australians who lived in a concrete house like ours. The mother would tell us about poor children she encountered who felt hopeless; one kid was so desperate he injected Vegemite in his veins in search of a high.

Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, these working-class white kids could no longer leave school at 15 and easily find jobs that would set them up for life. Now they were lost, on the streets causing trouble, tormenting the newcomers. The immigrants were also scrabbling at the bottom of the barrel, yet we were seen as the main threat to the Australian working-class way of life.

It had long been this way for migrants in Australia. In drafting the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, Alfred Deakin, who later became prime minister, specifically went after Asian immigrants. “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us,” he said. “It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.”

In the mid-1990s, Pauline Hanson was elected to Parliament and formed her new political party One Nation, claiming that Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians.” It was an easy claim to make: In 1971, the Asian population of Footscray made up a mere 1 percent of the population, but by 1996, it had risen to 17 percent.

At the same time that Dad was telling us to ignore the Bad White Australians, Bad Asians were beginning to appear everywhere. Vietnamese heroin dealers on the 7 o’clock news, Filipino welfare cheats on the radio, Chinese slumlords in the papers. Ms. Hanson declared that Asians had “their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.” People started wearing printed yellow T-shirts, the word “full” emblazoned across a map of Australia.