Some of the episodes came to public attention because commuters had used their smartphones to record them.
It's first-hand accounts like this and the accompanying video footage which has some asking whether racism is on the rise in Australia.
"(Witness on a Sydney bus) Our attempts to ask him to get off the bus didn't work, I decided to take out my camera and film the incident (Beep) (Reporter narration) This scene inside a Transperth bus, the video taken by a passenger on their smartphone. What started as a racial slanging match between two women ended in a vicious brawl. Watch as the first punch is thrown."
Anthony Morton is the President of the Public Transports Users' Association in Victoria.
"Virtually everyone now can take photos or take video of these things actually happening, means that you can take these things further as we've seen in news clips of a certain instance actually occurring. It's quite possible they did occur in the past and maybe even with a similar frequency than they occur now but, of course, without being documented they don't really go any further."
Both Public Transport Victoria and its New South Wales equivalent, State Transit, didn't want to be interviewed.
State Transit did provide a written statement saying it expects all passengers to behave in a respectful manner and if passengers are being harrassed by another on Sydney's buses they can approach the bus driver.
It says if the driver's certain anti-social behaviour has occurred, they can ask the offending passenger to leave and, if needed, they can contact a supervisor by radio to organise for police to meet the bus.
Anthony Morton from the Public Transports Users' Association in Victoria says while it's hard to quantify, concerns about safety on public transport rank pretty highly among commuters.
"So apart from just general complaints about the ticketing system and complaints about service levels really peoples safety on the system is probably at least number two or number three in our hierarchy of complaints about the system, I suppose."
Anna Musson runs a business advising companies about etiquette.
She says it's hard to know whether racism is actually on the rise or whether it just seems that way because some the the incidents have been caught on video.
But what she says she is certain of is that technology itself is contributing to less respectful behaviour in Australia.
"I think society has become a much more of a me generation than we ever were simply because at the moment we can. If a young person or any age wants to shut out the world completely by using their mobile device they're able to, they're able to completely disengage from their surroundings which means that we're not being thoughtful, we're not being courteous, we're not being helpful, we're not actually speaking to one another and that really has a negative impact on society so I think yes we are in worse shape than ever and I think a lot of Australians are reaching their limit when it comes to that and saying, alright, enough of the me generation."
Victoria's Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission has just released the findings of a survey on racism which was conducted online with 227 participants.
123 or 54 per cent reported they'd been victims of racism, 102 people had witnessed racism and 40 people had actually received racist materials.
15 per cent of those surveyed identified public transport as common place for either either experiencing or witnessing racism.
The Commission's overall conclusion is racism is a daily event in the lives or too many Victorians.
The Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria was part of a reference group that oversaw the study.
Its chair Pino Migliorino says he suspects there hasn't been an increase in racist attacks on public transport and that the extent of racism in Australia is quite static over time.
"Any person from a non English speaking background, especially if you're visually different will be able to tell stories. The issue is what is the capacity to both report on these and have action taken. What they smartphones are doing is actually providing an opportunity for these things to actually get a lot more air. There is one situation that happened a few years back in Victoria which was a series of attacks on Indian students. Now, some would argue oh that's new racism in Australia, what I argued at the time was that's not the case. The difference with the experience of those students is that they could actually not just record them but respond to them. Identify them as issues and have them broadcast to the point where they got picked up internationally from the India media."
While overt racism caught on video is there for all to see, researchers from the University of Queensland have uncovered more subtle examples of racism during a study using people from various races who boarded buses with defective travel cards.
The experiment was to see what percentages were allowed to ride on a bus free of charge.
The study recorded more than 1500 encounters between bus drivers and four different groups of students.
The groups comprised fair-skinned students, fair-skinned Asians, Indians and a group made up of Indigenous-Australians, African-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Africans.
Professor Paul Fritjers says the bus drivers overwhelmingly discriminated against the dark-skinned students and Indians.
"Caucasians and white Asians were treated almost similiarly by the bus drivers in that they were let on about 72/73 per cent of the time which is an awful lot but black subjects were only let on 36 per cent of the time whereas Indians subject were let on about 50 per cent of the time."
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