"Want to see Australia up close? A New Australian TV show gives you the once in a lifetime chance to travel to the heart of Aboriginal Australia," an April 2013 post from one of the show's producers said. The cast of First Contact. The criteria: Participants had to be interested in being on TV and in dealing with the challenges of being in a documentary. After going through over 1000 applicants by October 2013, the show's producers secured a cross section of Australian society, despite struggling to get enough males on board.

The final result was a variety of characters, including 41-year-old mother-of-five Sandy, who said, "God gave black people rhythm and soul but white people have better brains" on Tuesday night, right through to 31-year-old student Alice, "whose views really align with indigenous beliefs". Host Ray Martin said he wanted to become involved with the show because racist opinions were far too common. "I think every Australian realises that the Aboriginal problem, quote unquote, is our festering sore, that we need to understand it": Ray Martin. Credit:Ray Martin He said the people who went on the month-long journey were a reflection of what Australians think.

"Everybody it seems has an opinion, formed from newspaper stories, talkback radio or the ignorance of latter-day Pauline Hansons," he said. Yet social media feeds still erupted in shock and condemnation on Tuesday night after Sandy's comments. And it wasn't long before news broke of her departure from the show, which went to air on Wednesday night. Decades of research underline that the views expressed by participants such as Sandy are not satire, but statistically significant, present in disturbingly high numbers across the country.

A survey conducted by Beyond Blue earlier this year showed that one in five young Australians would move if an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander sat next to them and nearly 50 per cent of young Australians wouldn't consider that a discriminatory act. The study revealed that 42 per cent of participants believed that Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are given an unfair advantage by the government, while 37 per cent believed they were lazy. It is a statistic vebalised in First Contact by 25-year-old supermarket worker Bo-dene Stieler who believes indigenous Australians are "wasters," that rely too much on the government to provide for them.

The comments come as no surprise to Martin. "They are very Aussie. They are very ordinary, like all of us, in a sense," he said. "I think every Australian realises that the Aboriginal problem, quote unquote, is our festering sore, that we need to understand it." First Contact airs on Thursday at 8.30pm on SBS and NITV. With Nick Galvin and Rose Powell