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A Malaysian student at the University of Newcastle yesterday said racism was so rife in Jesmond and Birmingham Gardens, in the NSW Hunter, that he had become to numb to abuse and taunts.
After three years at the university, Vish Vigneswaran said he had seen or heard it all during visits to the nearby suburbs: from ‘‘get back to where you came from’’ taunts and eggs being thrown from passing cars to much more serious offences. These included Muslim women having their hijabs ripped off their heads and international students bashed and robbed.
Mr Vigneswaran was speaking in the wake of two attacks on students with Asian backgrounds – one an Australian, the other an international – on Saturday.
‘‘Racial abuse is so common,’’ Mr Vigneswaran said. ‘‘If you actually just sat down on Blue Gum Road at Jesmond and actually watched everything that’s happening, you’d see racial abuse, every day, every single day it’s happening.’’
A student, 19, was hit on the back of the head with what was believed to have been a dumbbell bar.
He was left with a six-centimetre gash and had to be taken to hospital. Later, an attacker robbed a female international student of her handbag after momentarily blinding her by shining a torch in her eyes.
Mr Vigneswaran spoke about the hundreds more racially motivated incidents students had been subjected to.
‘‘I think Newcastle University itself is a great place, I’ve had a very good experience studying here but I have heard from lots of students about incidents that they have experienced,’’ said Mr Vigneswaran, who was the president of the university’s Malaysian Youth Society.
‘‘This commonly happens around the Jesmond and Birmingham Gardens areas.
‘‘We’ve been trying to resolve this problem for the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to talk to the university, the police, we’ve been working with NUSA and trying to solve it but you know some things you can’t help, some things you can’t get rid of altogether.
‘‘As we know, international students provide billions of dollars to Australia and most of these students who come here are government-sponsored students and they don’t want to live here they just come here for a quality education.
‘‘When we come here and spend a lot of money, we expect to get a quality experience, that’s all we expect but then we come here and these sorts of things happen.’’
Mr Vigneswaran, who was a welfare officer for the Council of International Students Australia, said he avoided the majority of problems because he drove a car and wasn’t forced to walk.
‘‘It is quite shocking but I’ve seen and heard of many cases and have become quite immune to it,’’ he said. ‘‘Students who are new would go, ‘What the hell is happening, I came here because I thought this was a nice place’.
‘‘I believe one factor in the significant drop in the number of students coming to Australia is the racial abuse, news travels fast.’’