I’ve been called a lot of things.  When I was little, adults would look down at me, the nervous, pint-sized ‘ginger’… as they would titter.  The fiery mess of auburn ringlets clumsily planted upon my head, calling out to the world ‘I’m here’ often gave the impression I was a million times as bold and self-assured as my three-year old self actually was. Upon being discovered, I would shift my shy but curious eyes to the ground, accidently allowing the curls which hung over my forehead to bounce around like miniature springs, once again drawing unwanted attention – well, at least I hid my freckles that way.

It wasn’t just the giggling sixteen-sixties, conventional mothers with their blonde bob-cut daughters dressed in Mary-janes and frilly polka-dot dresses constantly walking just two steps in front of me each day who helped draw a dark and omitting line between their seemingly perfect, straight, rosy world and I. It was certainly obvious to me early on that I was different from the looks of awe from tourists who begged for a photo with the ‘red’ three year old who stood timidly, arms clawing her mother’s leg, preparing herself for the familiar, unsettling flash of panic which shot out of those black boxes people held out within an inch of their prey – never mind the Australian wildlife surrounding them or the koalas patiently perched in that eucalyptus tree over there!

The one thing that constantly challenged the strength of my back-bone, my tenacity and my innocent, childish and completely non-judgemental view of the world, were the epithets given to my appearance, ‘oi ranga, oi!’  A nick-name introduced to our wonderfully technological, however, sometimes computer-hearted society by a television show that created a cruel name to attach to yet another minority in society.  The famous, hilarious one-liners which hissed off countless lips for just months before they went viral… or rather… the rest of the world caught on that ‘ranga’ was a completely appropriate and politically correct term for a person with red hair.  After all, who told off antagonists of Prime Minister Julia Gillard for calling her a ‘ranga’ and indirectly likening her to an orang-utan?  Despite living in a place which professed ‘all-cultures-in-one’, growing up I somehow permanently felt a quarrelling in my heart between the responsible colloquy of my family with the senseless, offensive chatter of my school peers, politicians and strangers.

My mother would always tell me how lucky I was; that I was incredibly different – that people were just jealous of my hair colour.
‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you, darling’.  A mockery of hypocrisy, as she had been blessed with normal blonde hair and so had not experienced such ridicule as I had.  After years of copping the brunt of every derogatory name in the book, and then the internet, I came to accept things the way they were.  I realised as I grew up the power of difference.  The fact that I could be noticed amongst the sea of murky blonde and brown, despite my relentless attempts to blend into it naturally.  It was only every now and then that I would be reminded that I shared the same hair colour as the devil, and that I was not only different, but, not accepted by the community that I had been born into.  A community that stood still and flagrantly silent when one of their own would be casually bullied by others for not conforming to a normality dictated by the boring; called ‘ugly’ or mocked by the aphorism of being the school ‘camp-fire’ whilst people gathered to warm up from cold Melbourne winters.

But, who was the real hypocrite here?  Was I building a court-case for public ostracism based on a few not-so-well-thought-out and childish comments and name-calling?  Maybe it was because I was always used to being different that I always felt compelled to draw attention to that.  I was convinced I was
growing up Red in Beige – that I had to die my hair in order to hide who I truly was for a month at maximum until the re-growth shot aggressively through my scalp reminding me I could never escape the fiery, titian card I had been dealt.  But, really, I was just growing up red.  It didn’t matter what or who surrounded me.  The fact was that I had red hair and after realising that no matter what I did it was with me for life, I accepted it.  Furthermore, once I stopped rebelling against myself, I realised that having red hair can have its benefits – I was now rebelling against the world, and I didn’t blend in, but, nor was I supposed to.