Sunil, 24, precarious.

I don’t think it is necessarily a process of “unlearning” what you learn when you are growing up, I think that background is crucial and it is impossible anyway to unlearn everything that impacts upon you when you are a kid. For me, growing up in Australia, learning was definitely to do with race. The racism wasn’t overtly malicious, although there were moments were it was, but it was more the way it impacted on your psyche, how it shaped what was normal and acceptable and how people who weren’t white, who weren’t Anglo were pressured to assimilate. I was born in Malaysia and came here when I was five, you learn about racism through experience and then you can decide to learn that it doesn’t fit with what you want to be doing. I didn’t want to be whatever stereotype is given out…

In terms of formal learning processes, I used to think school was a fairly conservative place, but looking back, compared to what I have experienced now, I have realised it is far more progressive than what is acceptable in broader society.

I got involved in activism at S11, my sister was an anarchist and she said I should come down to Melbourne. Also the week after I finished high school Seattle happened and I guess lots of little things made me get involved… when I got on the bus to go to S11 I didn’t know any of the other university activists, I was just going to go down and hang out with my sister, but after the bus trip down I choose to hang out with them, and for a while that was pretty exciting, meeting a group of people with similar ideas to myself and also feeling more at ease socially with these people was definitely a big factor.

I don’t think the formal bit of going to classes was particularly important to me I finished my degree as quick as possible, and didn’t do anything extra. But then I did go back to do honours in cultural studies which is really promoted as an opportunity to learn more and write about a topic of your choice. I choose to write a paper on racism in the anarchist movement. But I don’t think that it played out that well, I became absolutely critical of doing any study beyond honours because although I was studying in a very “progressive” department, and my supervisor specialised in whiteness studies, which sounded great for what I wanted to do, it was just so disengaged, so unbelievably irrelevant.

…Learning outside of university happens through interactions with people who express how they came to be challenging capitalism, who have come to it from different positions. I have been trying to learn more about Indigenous stuff in Australia, I think that this is the crucial issue of race here. But it is also so different from the questions of race around migration. I have been trying to learn about that by going down to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Redfern.

In the Mutiny collective we focused a lot of our activism on the war. One shift that I have made is that I think that I have become more forgiving on people who hold a religious belief but less forgiving of the religions themselves if that makes sense.

…I am constantly thinking about what social change I want and how I would expect it to happen. A combination of things made me recently change my perspective and they haven’t left me with the most optimistic outlook. But the perspective I have now is probably better then where I was before. A lot of recent riots and uprisings, from the Redfern riots [when the court whitewashed the cops of responsibility for the killing of TJ] and the riots in the suburbs of Paris, made me more certain that revolution is not going to be nice and unified event. I want to be able to embrace this and accept that we never going to be perfectly in sync, anarchists in Newtown are never going to perfectly in sync with the Indigenous resistance in Redfern, but that doesn’t have to be bad, it can still be a useful collaboration, we can still be helpful to each other. I think many anarchist groups, despite what anarchist theory says, feel that everyone will eventually come around to anarchism and become cohered through some overarching ideology. I don’t feel that this will happen anymore.

…Last year I was arrested and charged with aiding a refugee who had escaped Villawood detention centre escape Australia to New Zealand. My court case made me realise that if my revolutionary aims and beliefs are as serious as I think they are jail is a possibility at some point in my lifetime. I was looking at maximum five years but they didn’t sentence me in the end as they didn’t have enough evidence. But I did have to think about going to jail and it was scary...