The Literacy Reading group met on the 15th March. The theme for the month was “Think” and the article read was Charles Teo’s Australia Day address in which he claims that racism is very much alive. The Australia Day address can be found here http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/australia-day-2012-address-full-speech-20120123-1qdh9.html
The article said Australia has a moral obligation to show a lot more kindness to foreigners. The discussion was robust and we offered our opinions on the veracity or truth in Charles Teo’s statement. We all agreed that Australia is a very friendly and tolerant society in many ways, yet racism is definitely an issue. Kindness is an absence of intolerance or racism we agreed. Two of the group members who are of Chinese descent revealed that they had personally always felt welcome and have been treated with kindness by Australian born Aussies.
The discussion also inlcuded looking at the difficult or unusual words and clarifying their meaning.
The group also read some articles from Choice magazine.