I REMEMBER the first time I noticed someone staring at me. I was 7, standing with my parents on the side of a road waiting for the traffic to clear in Lidcombe, the Sydney suburb where I grew up.

When I finished looking to my left and right, just like my parents had taught me, I locked eyes with a woman. She was middle-aged and had light skin, just like my father. She stared at me as I held hands with two people of different colour, one Caucasian and the other not. The other was my mother, who is Filipino.

That look told me all I needed to know: In the eyes of some, I am different.

That same year, at my school’s end-of-year concert, I discovered that my classmate with a Filipino father and white Australian mother didn’t receive the same looks. Her mother was plump, and light-skinned like my father, and her father was short, and melanin-rich like my mother. My friend looked just like me – a perfect blend of the two – yet because the genders of the Asian partner were reversed, her parents’ relationship wasn’t judged.

As I grew older, I became even more aware of people’s reactions. I heard judgment in the inflection of the “oh” someone muttered when I let them know of my mixed race. It was in the confident prediction of “I bet your mum’s the Filipino one”. And it was in the sting of the taunts of, “Well, at least my mother isn’t a gold-digger.”

People don’t seem to be aware they’re doing it. It’s the kind of reaction that Australians make without thinking – if your mother is Filipino and is married to an Australian, their marriage is a sham. It comes as naturally as learning to walk and talk.

When you’re the product of two people, one from a prosperous country and the other from a developing country, you’re often labelled as different in the playground and beyond. If your mum is from the Philippines that label pretty much screams child of a loveless marriage.