Time and again...

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I have time and again come up against the betrayal of my own people, the White Australians, from the age of six onwards, if perhaps not before.

Their government's and their corporate institutions designed ostensibly to help me have failed again and again.

I have time and again fallen victim to those among my people who I thought would not betray me, yet they have, and no-one came to my aid.

The two relationships I can safely say I had in truth, failed that they were, were both to women of the White Australian race, but the worst betrayal was by the one who persuaded to let me lose my virginity to.

When I speak to others in Australia, I speak with speech that vaguely resembles theirs while remaining unable to fully 'ockerise' my speech without exercising undue effort. Were that I actually emigrate in another nation who would accept such as myself, I would completely forego any pretense of trying to sound Australian merely to survive, and fall back into my speech that sounds most natural and essentially "me" for want of a better term, but which I think would sound very English to Australians (which, given the ancestral yet irrational Australian hatred of the United Kingdom, is not something desirable), and possibly slightly Icelandic to the English themselves - and which only wins me opprobrium from the others of my 'kin' from Australia - especially from the mouths of the wretched breed of white Australians who populate the Gippsland district that I am a resident/prisoner-by-circumstance of.

The quirk of circumstance that this is, is that I am technically I am one of these wretches by virtue of race and genetics alone, but everything of them has been removed from me, that I am everything they are not. Even the very accent I must always speak with, which approximates an Australian accent but is usually too 'cultured-sounding' to be thought of as any kind of to be is an affectation that passes as a high-culture Australian (which does not match the typical Gippslander "bogan" sentiment and is thus despised) that I must make to avoid any kind of unwanted scrutiny or worse, and speaking with a bogan or ocker dialect is not desirable to the world of the distant hope of my being able to work overseas oneday, and is unnatural to me besides.

In any case, does anyone else here have even so much as a small difficulty trying to always at least mimic the standard speech of the people of one's area of residence as I do? Any replies about this are welcome...

I think I can relate to you on this. I grew up on Sydney's North Shore, where speaking like a bogan wasn't tolerated, it was a sign you were uneducated and had no self respect. Now, I live in regional NSW, where most people only speak in complete slang and if you speak properly you are perceived as a snob.

Yet, having had a few overseas guests, I don't think you should worry about Australians being freaks when it comes to the bastardisation of English. I've personally found some regional English accents a lot more difficult to decipher - Brummy from the Birmingham region doesn't seem to have a pattern so can be very confusing. The Australian accent is very Cockney, just slower and with the mouth closed (heat and flies ensured that). Recently I read the Cockney accent is dying, being replaced by something more like Ali G's, to me that's frightening!

I don't think betrayal is something solely of Australians either, reading here it seems we have all faced it in some way. From personal experience, I've dated non-Australians that haven't turned out to be the nicest people, I do believe it's just people in general.

As our fellow countryman, Tony Attwood, says "You don't suffer from Aspergers, you suffer from other people."

Fitting in is never easy for us. At age 41, I don't think I ever have...anywhere!