You know your town is dead when ...

... when there's an Asian guy selling cheap tracksuits in the dead-centre of your shopping mall.

Kellyville is a newish suburb in outer north-west Sydney, Australia. It is mostly white, albeit with encroaching diversity. The trains don't go there, so it's a suburb for car owners. Young families built new homes there twenty-odd years ago to get away from diversity and raise their kids in a friendly neighbourhood.

A visit to the shopping centre is usually a pleasant experience because it is still majority white and there is a sense of community. The shopping mall is small with only two supermarkets and a dozen small shops.

But alas, that pleasant feeling was replaced by nausea this weekend when I found right smack in the middle of the shopping mall there is now an Asian man sitting among four tables piled high with cheap tracksuits. His head is buried in his iPhone and he is barely visible over the pile of tracksuits. The guy looks like he doesn't want to be there, and doesn't acknowledge anyone around him.

I'm sure this is the exact ambience imagined by the architects as you walk into the building and at the very heart is now a flea market. Yeah, right. The pleasant aesthetics and sense of community have been killed stone-dead in the interests of adding another source of rent revenue.

I'm sure there are Asians quite capable of being pleasant shop tenants but too often their presence just kills the community and aesthetics. It's that sick-to-the-stomach feeling that made Kellyville residents leave diversity in the first place, and will now have them wanting to pack up and move again.

File under: flee market.