Frances Letters

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ARAR (Armidale Rural Australians for Refugees)

Now I've written Razorwire Round My Heart: Truth-telling at last: a 'truth and reconciliation' story about prejudice, especially racism. Bigotry is emerging more and more fiercely from the primitive reptilian parts of our communal brain. It is a true danger to us all.

Drawings by Frances Letters from The Surprising Asians and People of Shiva.

All conflict needs a trigger:

a spark to flash and ignite it.

But first it needs kindling....

So what makes the perfect kindling?

It's everywhere—outside us, and in. We only have to look with narrowed eyes at any group and decide they're "other". "Different from us". Alien.

After that, any hell is possible...

I grew up in a country town in old 1950s White Australia. Life was conservative and comfortable. But just down the road, in shacks cobbled from bits of flattened tin and nailed-up potato sacks, there lived a community of Aboriginal people.

At the town dump.

This seemed normal to me. To be white Anglo-Saxon meant everything in those days. Looking down our noses at anyone 'not like us' was commonplace.

It was years spent travelling in South- East Asia and India that first prised open my eyes and heart. I wrote and illustrated two books about my experiences: The Surprising Asians and People of Shiva.

My path out of that narrow, closed world was very rocky and painful at times—but overall, full of adventure and exhilaration.

My 'true confession' comes from sheer warts-and-all experience. It tells how the events of my life coaxed and hammered me out of that ignorant old world, and into a wider, far more hopeful one for all of us.