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Australia: Snatch at Sydney

2 minute read
TIME

A six-year-old Indian girl named Nancy Prasad was grabbed last week from her sister’s arms at Sydney airport, bundled into a car and driven away. It was no ordinary kidnaping, for within 15 minutes the sister, Shasti Powditch, got word that Nancy was safe and would be returned as soon as the plane she was to board had taken off.

The kidnaper turned out to be Charles Perkins, an aboriginal student at Sydney University who early this year led “freedom riders” through New South Wales to protest discrimination against Australia’s dark-skinned aborigines, who number nearly 80,000. Perkins saw in Nancy Prasad an even more dramatic way to argue his case. In 1962 the child had come to Australia from Fiji with her father on visitors’ visas. The father returned to Fiji when his visa expired, but Nancy was allowed to remain for medical treatment. The courts turned down an appeal that the child be allowed to stay on permanently after she recovered, and she was ordered deported last week as an illegal immigrant.

Perkins and his supporters argue that Nancy could have stayed in Australia if she were white. Though the Australian government insists there is no discriminatory racial policy in immigration, European immigrants are welcomed at a rate of 150,000 a year, while Asians are limited to a few hundred annually. At week’s end, the police tracked down little Nancy, put her aboard the next plane to Fiji.

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