Shemsiya Wako Waritu is no stranger to receiving racist remarks.
A Muslim woman of Ethiopian descent, Ms Waritu has lived in Australia for about 10 years, and has become a mentor for others who share her faith.
But when a group of strangers told her and her daughter to “go back to where you came from”, she decided against reporting it.
“To me the best thing to do was to be quiet and leave, so we did,” she told SBS News. “We just left. And then I just keep telling her about my own country experience and how much this country gave me.”
Last modified on Wed 30 Dec 2020 01.21 EST
Sitting inside the Hoppers Crossing brick-veneer he bought in 1980, back when cows were over the fence and beyond them paddocks stretching towards the city, Dale Waghorne noticed something wrong with his sandwich.
It was the strasburg, he told his wife Barbara. It didn’t taste right.
A week later, he was in hospital. A day after that, Barbara was admitted too.
The Waghornes are two of the 2,267 cases of Covid-19 recorded in Wyndham, a council in Melbourne’s outer west. It has had more Covid-19 infections than any other council area in Australia.
“We ate a bit of lunch, and I said, ‘I think this meat’s off’. And that was the first thing, we started having the taste problems,” Dale says.