Black or White?

I got Benny to recommended me some recent books. I've loved Julius Winsome (by Gerard Donovan) and David Malouf's The Great World, been ho-hum about Robert Drewe (The Drowner), and really disliked The Lost Life (Steven Carroll). Benny assured me that the last book, Journey to the Stone Country (Alex Miller), would be a "like" and he was emphatically right about that.

The book's set in country Queensland. One thing I've noticed is that when introducing the various characters the author doesn't mention their race. This is what he writes when we first meet David Orlando and Bo Rennie:

The two men talking by the mine vehicle turned and watched the Pajero drive up.
One was wearing a white hardhat with an empty lampclip, a site ID clipped to the
pocket of his shirt. As he turned to watch them come up the plastic site ID
caught the sun. The other man wore a pale cowboy hat set back on his head, a
stripy shirt and blue jeans, his pointy-toed riding boots turned over at the
heels. Annabelle recognised in him the style of man who had worked for her
father; the itinerant stockmen who stayed a season, mustering the scrubs then
rode out with a polite goodbye and were not seen again, or who maybe reappeared
a year to two later to muster the scrubs again, greeting you as if they had not
been away and no time had passed. (Journey [Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002], 17-18.)

Turns out David, the first man, is White and Bo, the second, is Aboriginal. I think most books would mention this straight-off, but it's not important here. Makes me wonder if we too often define people by their most striking physical characteristics and fail to notice other, perhaps more important, things.