Trapped in the gap

The gap between my privileged, middle-class upbringing and the oppressed people of the world drove me to write Amnesty letters on flimsy blue air mail paper in high school and sent me into activist groups as a medical student at the University of Melbourne in the early 1990s. In 1996 at the Canberra protests against the Howard government’s first budget, it dawned on me that, as an Australian, the gap of Aboriginal disadvantage was the one that should trouble me most.