I used to have several Australian coworkers who were generally quite pleasant and easy to work with, but several of them had an attitude and their interaction with dark skinned individuals was shocking. Having overheard them arguing with another Australian coworker about the case of the "abo gal fucked to death", I'm not surprised by your description using the terms "overt racism on one side, and super-duper-liberal-moral-high-grounder on the other". Their conversation was peppered with racist stereotypes, going as far as to blame the victim as being an "abo whore". I found out later that the victim was Lynette Daley, a young aboriginal woman who had been drugged and then, shockingly, literally, raped to death "blunt force genital tract trauma". There was little to no coverage of this here, but it does seem to have attracted at least a little attention in Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/nsw-dpp-under-scrutiny...