This article discusses in detail a key moment in redrawing racial lines in the small town of Nambucca Heads on the northern coast of New South Wales: the process of school segregation in 1915. The careful examination of all the random features of this event, particularly the study of the various forms of «Aborigine reactions» aroused by this process, allows us to question the conditions for the emergence of explicit discrimination, hitherto unknown, between blacks and whites.
