RICHARD Borthwick had to wait four years for his toast. "My wife and I have a strict buy Australian policy", the 48 year old export executive said. "So when our old toaster packed up, we had to wait until we found an Australian made replacement. It took ages - everything was from China or Hong Kong. But we feel very strongly about foreign ownership."
Mr Borthwick, who lives in an outer suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, represents a strong theme in the economic/social scene in today's Australia suspicion that "the farm" is being sold off all over again. Britain is still a large outside investor, but US and Japanese ownership of companies and investment are reaching new highs, and people are unhappy about it.
During the recent federal election campaign, a big issue was an "agreement" which the federal Labour government had signed with IBM and Lend Lease, the US owned property and financial services group, for the handling of technological services previously provided by Telstra, formerly Telecom Australia.
This move, rightly or wrongly, was portrayed as the thin end of the wedge, with the former government's critics seeing the rest of the national telecommunications provider being swallowed up by overseas interests in the longer term.
This distrust of foreign financial colonisation is just one part of the complex jigsaw that is emerging in a multi racial society moving ever further away from its Anglo Celtic origins.
Although there are hardline groups in both the pro and anti republican movements, most Australians are fairly relaxed about the issue, feeling that it is inevitable a complete break with an increasingly irrelevant British establishment will happen in the early years of the 21st century.
It is amusing to them to see the fervour with which the British media report the story. The recent Conservative coalition victory in the general election, for example, was regarded as Australia's "escape" from an early transformation into a republic by the former Labour government.
To millions of Australians, the English queen and all the formal trappings of British social order mean nothing. In roughly chronological order, the island continent, since the second World War, has seen waves of immigration from Poles, Hungarians and other eastern Europeans, Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Turks, Croats, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, South Africans and Hong Kong Chinese.
Some estimates say two thirds of the country's 18 million population are descended from national groups other than the Anglo Saxon and Celtic. There is by no means an open door policy now - it is as hard to get into Australia as into Britain - but special circumstances, such as the plight of Vietnamese refugees following the disastrous war in the 1960s and 1970s, have made the mix ever richer.
At a branch of the state's bank, the Commonwealth, in Melbourne, the Mauritian woman behind the counter said she was one of a large local community from the semitropical island in the Indian Ocean. Toast loving Mr Borthwick is an Anglo Indian, his wife Maltese. Although his ethnic group is rare in Melbourne, on the other side of the continent, Perth, the West Australian capital, boasts a community of several thousand.
Here is a melting pot, but keen to reach its own level unstirred from outside. Any Australian diplomatic mission will proudly give you the line that Australia is a multi racial, multi ethnic society, tolerating all, and more in that vein. But in this relaxed, informal land, there are disturbing subterranean tensions which occasionally bubble to the surface, as became apparent during the election campaign.
It was in the deep north that racism of a high degree of political incorrectness displayed itself, and, ironically enough, from former migrants.
Standing in one of North, Queensland's vast rural electorates, Mr Bob Burgess, who emigrated from Britain when he was a lad, set the pot boiling when he referred to naturalisation ceremonies as "dewoggings".
Now the ancient acronym for Wily Oriental Gentlemen might have been acceptable in impolite company during the 1960s, but it was a bit of a shock to right thinking members of a multi ethnic society to, hear it bandied around in the 1990s.
Although Mr Burgess faintly protested that he himself has been through a "de wogging", his defence was drowned out by the chatter of reproof.
To his aid came a fellow member of the rural based National Party, Mr Bob Katter (of Afghani descent). The people criticising Bob Burgess, he opined, were nothing but "little slanty eyed ideologues", "with some help from the "feminazis".
NEXT scene, predictably, showed Mr Katter on the evening news, earnestly explaining that he meant no offence to any fellow Australian. Perhaps the recollection by veteran political reporters that Mr Katter's father, Reg, who had also served as a federal MP, was once told to "go back to camel driving" (an allusion to his descent) by no less a person than the recently defeated prime minister, Mr Paul Keating, helped Mr Katter's case. In any event, he was reelected.
Also elected for Queensland in the March 2nd election was a woman who immediately brought into the open another simmering racial tension. But this one is with Australia's original inhabitants, the aborigines.
Mrs Pauline Hansen, a 41 year old mother of four, was highly critical of the privileges and perks she thought aborigines were getting, at the expense of people such as herself.
Mrs Hansen represents Ipswich, the centre of which is only a half hour drive from Queensland's biggest city, Brisbane. A local newspaper took her to task with a special supplement rebutting the misapprehensions people held about aborigines - such as that they enjoy interest free hone loans and free taxis.
There have been some affirmative action programmes in recent years, aiming to correct some of the vast deprivation aborigines have suffered as a result of white settlement 200 years ago, but the scope of these has been blown out of all proportion by disaffected whites.
There is hardly blood on the streets yet, but some of the signs are disturbing. In Melbourne, my home town, it was worrying how openly resentful of the strong, numerous and active Italian community many Anglo Celt Australians are. The Anglo Australians have hit back in more ways than one. After decades of being termed "Eyeties" or "wogs", they now refer with asperity to AngloCelt Australians as "Skips" (for Skippy, after the bush kangaroo in the TV series).
So it could be with irony, at Mr Burgess's "de woggings", that the second verse of the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, is sung:
"For those who've come across the sea, we've boundless plains to share/With courage let us all combine, To advance Australia fair."