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This article engages with visual media texts to complicate the ways audiences interpret race politics in the light of competing discourses on cultural difference. I adopt a case study approach to examining how value can be ascribed to ethnic cultural knowledge in ways that productively contribute to shaping public engagement with race politics in a contemporary context. How might visual texts work to mediate the invisible dimensions of the socio-political in the teaching of the histories of race? I will offer reflections on this question through two paintings that highlight Aboriginal notions of ‘self’ in relation to the migrant ‘other’ in an Australian museum. My aim is to explore some of the pedagogical implications around cross-cultural learning by disrupting orthodox readings of place and race informed by dominant discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the state of social relations in Australia within the context of the Aboriginal people and her own childhood as an Malaysian immigrant in Brisbane, Australia. The author's first playmates were Aboriginal children with whom she felt a mutual bond because they were, like her, outside of mainstream Australian society. The author reviews literature on the Aboriginal culture, and cites authors including Minoru Hokari, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Joseph Pugliese, and Franz Fanon.