The man from the pay TV company was adamant: he wasn't selling anything. But too often I've opened my front door to strangers and found myself tempted by some sales pitch. So I'd answered the bell warily, spoke through the screen door and tried to keep the encounter brief.
'I'm sorry but we're not interested.'
But he knew better. 'It's because of the colour of my skin,' he said as he turned to leave.
It was to be a parting shot. But I called him back, stepping out onto the veranda. Surely he could not assume that everyone not interested in hearing what he had to say was a bigot.
I had no idea, he replied, how often he was called a 'brown bastard' by people he approached.
Later, I wondered if I was not all the more defensive because I grew up in segregated, apartheid-era South Africa. In Australia, where I've spent well over half my life, it seems at times that as long as you have a fairish complexion, you can be lulled into assuming tolerance and goodwill.
Last 26 January I sat with a small crowd near Belgrave, east of Melbourne. I had come there to hear filmmaker and musician, Richard Frankland, and his band, the Charcoal Club. We hadn't seen each other in a few years and I thought I'd stop by.
Elsewhere this was Australia Day, the national flag unfurled in celebration. But here in Belgrave's Borthwick Park it was Survival Day. A whispy-haired toddler in striped shirt waddled in front of the stage holding a small Aboriginal flag. A sign tied to tree trunks declared 'The country needs a treaty'.
Frankland, a big man in broad-brimmed hat, leaned over a tiny mandolin. He'd been to Canberra in February 2008 to film the impact of Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations. Rudd's apology, Frankland once told me, was 'an incredibly wonderful step forwards'. 'I felt more Australian,' he said. 'I felt more a part of the nation; that I was seen as a contributor.'
I like to think we can rise to the challenge of increasing diversity. I didn't want to believe the assertions of that pay TV man at my front door. Then I read about objections to the presence of Australians of Indian background on the TV serial Neighbours.
I thought the man might be exaggerating. Then I read about increasing complaints to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission by those alleging they had been excluded from pubs and clubs because of their race. The commission reported a 55 per cent increase in 'total race complaints across all sectors' in a year.
'I naïvely believed this kind of inexcusable discrimination did not happen in our multicultural society,' a woman wrote to The Age in late November after an incident at a Toorak nightclub. She'd been with fellow medical students of Sri Lankan and Indian background who were turned away, ostensibly because the venue was full, while others in the group were admitted.
The Monash University-Scanlon Foundation annual Mapping Social Cohesion survey recently found that the number of people reporting discrimination due to skin colour, ethnic origin or religion had increased from 9 per cent to 14 per cent in four years.
Are we becoming less tolerant, as we become more diverse? Pino Migliorino, chair of the Federal Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia (FECCA), said at a conference in Adelaide a few months ago that racism was now often more subtle and had shifted to the targeting of religion rather than race.
It's almost 40 years since Whitlam Government Immigration Minister Al Grassby confirmed that the White Australia Policy was dead. 'Give me a shovel,' he declared in 1973, 'and I'll bury it.'
Attitudes were not so easily buried. 'We have amassed more than our share of xenophobia on these shores and seem willing to accord equality only to those who promise not to be different,' Lorna Lippmann, a Monash researcher on Aboriginal Affairs, wrote in a book released the year Grassby called for that shovel (Words or Blows: Racial Attitudes in Australia, Penguin Books 1973).
La Trobe University academic Gwenda Tavan, recalling Grassby's assurance in her book, The Long Slow Death of White Australia (Scribe Publications 2005), concluded that he may have been essentially correct, but underestimated White Australia's power to haunt future generations. 'In Australia's case,' she wrote, 'race remains the proverbial skeleton in the closet.'
'We'd fundamentally debunk the White Australia Policy and white Australia mentality if we get this up,' Patrick Dodson said recently as co-chair of the Federal Government-appointed panel that has recommended changes to the constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and languages, prohibit racial discrimination and remove the last traces of racism.
The encounter at my front door ended amicably. Next time I'll be sure to open the screen door at least and take time to welcome a stranger even if only to say, no thanks.
Larry Schwartz is a Melbourne writer, PhD student at Swinburne University and author of an apartheid-era memoir, The Wild Almond Line.