O, and while i'm on my high horse, it must really irritate developers and real estate agents throughout the trendy, professional inner city suburbs that the public housing programs of the sixties and seventies have left huge commission flats dotting the profitable landscape, keeping house prices down. then again, perhaps the new wealth flooding into bohemia and poverty-land like the touch of colour - prostitutes on gertrude st, african immigrants, cheap vietnamese food, the thrill of occasionally stepping over needles - as long as it's suitably distant from their refurbished warehouses and cleverly wrought apartments.

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And for good measure, how's this: while I've just argued for the existence of class in 'classless' Australia, I'll supplement this by arguing that race is also class, effectively, in our nation. Convicts arrive, classless, criminals all, but then the 'squattocracy' arises and class divisions begin to ferment - until a thousand million potatoes die in Ireland and the poor Irish flood over here and shunt all of the classes up a notch so they can take the bottom rung and start climbing. Around the same time, the Chinese scent gold and rush over to hunt for it, generating the 'yellow peril' fear along the way. Post WW2, the southern Europeans - Italians and Greeks - provide cheap labour for our nation building projects before settling into the big cities and becoming aspirational. Then Asian immigration; Vietnamese, Hong Kongese and many others. So a new ethnicity floods into terra nullius, becomes immediately scorned and hated by the upper classes, who have been here longer, and begin working their way up. Many third generation Italians now live in Templestowe, distant both physically and mentally from the time when Carlton was poor and Brunswick was Italian.

(I've left Aborigines out, because for most of the time Europeans have been here, they've been effectively outside the class system altogether, in a similar way to the Indian dalits (untouchables).)