My three chooks are ageing and their eggs are getting fewer, so I bought a pair of new-season pullets to rejuvenate my egg supply. You have to buy hens in pairs because newcomers cop such a hard time from the old chooks. Next morning I found the beaten corpse of one of my pullets lying stiff on the henhouse floor.
As cute as they are, hens are little dinosaurs and have really primitive instincts. Any newcomer is seen as a threat to territory and food supply. Not so different from ourselves really.
We are witnessing Trump using the spectre of unwanted migrants as his ‘trump card’ in the coming US election, and watching Dutton wheeling out the same old anti-migrant fear campaign that has won conservatives elections in Australia since Federation in 1901 (the White Australia policy).
Trump is going in so hard he paints all migrants as illegal, rapists, drug-dealers, criminals, and pet-eaters. The tragedy is that it works. But it’s not true.
Migration has been the life-blood of the Americas and Australia since the last Ice-age.
The miseries of the privileged world like overwork, predatory capitalism, opioid and cell-phone addiction, obesity, diabetes, mass shootings, mental disease, broken health care – are all subsumed – and migrants are wheeled out as the scapegoat for all that is wrong with the world.
In Australia we are among the most privileged people on Earth, yet we grew up with ethnic slurs like refos, chinks, coons, whingeing poms, dagos, wogs, darkies, spics, slopes, kikes, towel-heads and boat people. We are all boat people for Christ’s sake!
Migrants are still being vilified, much as Hitler demonized the Jews. I feel ashamed for Australia when every election cycle half our nation still falls for this sad old story.
Anyway… I rescued the surviving pullet and built her a henhouse of her own. My ‘offshore solution’. Now when I let them out, my new and old chooks mingle together in the yard each day .
Hopefully, over time they will forget who is new and who is old and get on together.
And of course, that’s exactly what has been happening in Australia.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
