"What happened when I interviewed an Australian white supremacist."

It is not easy to admit to just how racist you were.

There I was, a journalist of Asian background, listening to a man talk openly about how he had planned to kill as many Asians and Arabs as possible. But call me crazy: I found his honesty refreshing, writes Sarah Dingle.

“We were planning to just go into the cities and that, and just wipe out as many Asians and Arabs and that as we could,” Matt said.

“Oh,” I said politely. I took some notes.

This was a difficult interview for me.

No one’s ever said they wanted to kill me before.

As a journalist of Asian background – Malaysian Chinese to be specific – sometimes things happen to me while I’m doing my job which would not happen to most of my colleagues.

They’re usually quite minor, like that time I was in Tasmania for an investigation. I dropped into a tourism information centre full of Tasmanian wooden handicrafts for a map.

“Hi,” I said.

The woman took one look at me, and spoke loudly and carefully.

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“We… sell… lazy… susans, if… you… want… to… look at them,” she said. (You know, lazy susans, those spinning wooden wheels on tables in Chinese restaurants.)

Every now and then, out in the field as a journalist, I get asked “Where do you come from?” (Answer: the ABC. But that’s not what they mean.)

And when I fly for work, airport staff assume on a regular basis that I’m travelling with the other Asian-looking people in the boarding queue. We’re waved through together, or checked together. On one occasion I was actually pulled out of the queue just so I could wait for the rest of my “group”. We Asians: we travel in packs.

These are very small things. They are covert, not overt, assumptions.

Then, at the other end of the scale, you have Matt.

So, back to the interview. There’s me, sitting in Matt’s kitchen, while he talks openly about how he recruited followers to his gang and planned a massacre, during which they would kill as many Asians and Arabs as possible.

Hearing about this kind of violence would be confronting for any journalist. In addition, for me, hearing this kind of stuff also taps into that history of little comments and innuendo – racism in word or intent.

But call me crazy: I find his honesty refreshing. Because Matt is confessing to something which many people will never admit. And I don’t mean the violence.

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“For me, I was against Asians because my whole family had been over in like either Vietnam, or World War II fighting the Japanese,” Matt said. “Just hearing all the stories of just what my grandfather went through in prisoner of war camps and stuff like that. You probably don’t really need to know when you’re a young fella.”

I wonder how many other Australians grew up with those stories.

“I had a pretty strong hatred, and my father had a pretty strong hatred, because he lost his father from the prisoner of war camp,” Matt says.

“So, yeah, I just, I guess I took on that hatred because that’s all I heard at home. And then, at the same time, other kids, you know, when you’re at school you don’t learn about, it was always the Japanese invasion, there was nothing about, you know, the Germans or the Turkish, you know? You never heard anything about that stuff.”

It’s pretty remarkable that a younger Matt could have an impression of World War II in which the Germans didn’t really feature.

And Matt is very honest about what his impression of “Asia” was at that time

“I didn’t even know there were all these different countries in Asia,” he said.

“At the time, especially in Western Sydney, we were just told that, these Asians are trying to take over like they did, you know, the Japanese tried to take over,” he said.

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“So, you know, they’re just trying it again, but this time they’re trying to come in and live here, you know. Buying up all the property and all that sort of stuff. So, just because we have that background anger and the whole community going on about it, that’s why we only targeted Asians.”

When he says “targeted”, Matt means it.

He says he grew up poor in Blacktown, and angry, and fighting. From Year 8 on, he took a crowbar to school with him. And as a young man, he developed a solution for both the anger and the racism:

“I was just so angry, I had too much anger from being beaten my whole life up until then. I just sort of cracked, and then anyone who looked at me I just went and took on. But then I found that I got respect from that. So then guys actually started to keep away from me. And then more guys joined my group, because they kind of wanted to hang out with someone who was so highly respected, I guess, by fear,” he said.

So, as a young man, Matt started to create what would become a group of violent extremists.

He was the leader, and he developed an ideology for that group – a reason for it to exist.

“The whole idea of ‘Let’s get all the Asians’. Let’s just get all, you know, I didn’t say it to them, but let’s get out my anger, really out on the Asians,” Matt said.

This led to two or three years of street violence. And after that, it meant planning a massacre, in Sydney.

Matt and his group had stockpiled weapons, and had worked out target areas and weapons caches.

“I just wanted to go out and get as many Asians or the Lebanese homeboys that we could get. There wasn’t any number. It was just until my ammunition ran out, I guess,” he said.

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“Just kill as many people as possible?” I asked him.

“Yeah. It’s pretty sad to say, but yeah,” he said.

“So, you were basically planning a massacre,” I said.

“Um, yeah. Yep,” he replied.

I hadn’t really planned for what would come after that question. I was a little stunned by his answer. I think we both were. Because oddly enough, Matt hadn’t thought about his actions in those terms before: as planning a massacre.

“Had you thought much about killing people?” I asked.

“No. Not at all,” he said. There was a pause.

“Now, I realize I would be killing people. Back then, I was just filled with anger and I just wanted to take that anger out.”

It sounds shocking. And of course it was. But sitting there in the kitchen, I had respect for Matt. These things are not easy to say, particularly to a journalist. It is not easy to admit to just how racist you were. It is not easy to admit to racist violence, particularly to someone who, let’s face it, you probably would’ve hated back then. And Matt has never told his story to any journalist before.

Matt came back from the hatred. He had a reality check.

One day he was alone at a bus stop, without his followers, and Matt was randomly attacked by some guys who wanted money. A stranger, an Asian man, waded in to help him.

“After that I was just like, oh that’s it. We’re going around beating up all these Asians, and we want to kill them all, but this guy just saved my life pretty much,” Matt said.

Considering that the fight started with Matt’s head being bashed against the wall, he could be right.

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Matt stopped what he was doing. He de-escalated his group. It took about a year. Then Matt went to work on himself. He found a job and a different path. He tried to channel his energies into other things. He tried to get rid of the hate which had ruled his existence since childhood.

“How many years did it take to get over the hate?” I asked him.

“Probably, maybe another ten years? I mean, realistically I could say that I never got over the hate,” he said. (A flash of panic went off in my head.)

“I got over the hate only really recently, you could say. You know, it’ll always be there,” he said.

And that’s pretty much the most honest thing I’ve ever heard about racism. It’s difficult to confront in yourself. It’s hard to undo. And at the end of it you may still have hatred, even though you may not hate a particular group of people any more, even though you know that it’s wrong, even though you despise what you were before.

I respect Matt for that. And so I’m glad that he, in turn, trusted me with his story, and told me about that time when he wanted to kill people like me.

This article originally appeared on ABC News.