After learning about the Stolen Generation, I mentioned to an Aussie that while I had been greeted warmly I was unsure how a black tourist would be treated.

He felt that black Canadians, Americans and Europeans were afforded the same courtesies I had enjoyed. Africans and Jamaicans fared well but were considered inferior. Australian blacks ranked last.

Apparently the kinds of experiences Billy had suffered during his youth were still alive and well Down Under. The young American and I sat silently after hearing him speak. We were concussed by Billy's words, prostrated by this intensely personal confidence, this damning condemnation of a government that had attempted genocide.

His tale was all the more horrifying due to Billy's age. He appeared to be in his early or mid-forties, younger than my father, not so much older than myself. How could this have happened so recently?  I had fled an America I had found increasingly intolerant to find the enduring parallel of our own hatred.